FOR ABOUT 20 years, beginning in the late 1930s, the New York-based artist Paul Cadmus, a satirist whose egg tempera paintings included scenes of drunken carousing and other lustful behavior, spent summers by the sea with his lover Jared French and French’s wife, Margaret Hoening French, both also painters. The trio — who called themselves PaJaMa, a combination of the first syllables of their names — were all in their 30s when they started taking highly choreographed, often nude photographs of one another and their circle of friends, family and various romantic partners on the beaches of Nantucket; Provincetown, Mass.; and Fire Island. Although the work has an almost Surrealist quality, it also reflects what the American art historian Angela Miller describes in her 2023 book, “Body Language,” which she co-wrote with the multidisciplinary artist Nick Mauss, as the “delicate negotiations among three people, driven by a complex alchemy of love, desire, longing, resentment and envy.” She observes that the “formal grammar of many PaJaMa photographs turns upon triangles and triangulations,” noting that Jared — the protagonist at the center of the triangle who took issue with Cadmus’s other romantic ties — rarely appears with the other two.
But PaJaMa wasn’t just a rebuttal to the traditional family; it also offered a fresh perspective on collaborative art making. Of the thousands of photos they took, which weren’t meant to be sold or exhibited — they were mostly given away as gifts — few were attributed to any one of them. And although there’s a clear connection between the pictures and some of their more considered solo work (Cadmus’s 1943 painting “The Shower,” for example, in which a man and woman hang around languidly while another man rinses off), these shared snapshots are more like hazy expressions of youthful experimentation than anything to be taken too seriously. “Their photographic play helped bind together this self-cloistered group at a time of great historical urgency,” Miller writes. In retrospect, the found objects in some of the images — driftwood, rope, nets — seem to anticipate the intrusion of the outside world. And like all good fantasies, this one eventually came to an end: The Frenches moved to Italy in the early 1960s, around the time Cadmus fell in love with Jon Anderson, a former cabaret star who would become his partner and muse.
Yet well over a half-century after PaJaMa disbanded, the group continues to influence new generations of queer artists, like TM Davy, a painter known for his luminous pastel renderings of friends and mythical forest creatures. As a high school student growing up on Long Island, Davy, now 44, spent a few transformative summers working with his father at an art conservation and restoration firm in Midtown Manhattan. When he wasn’t repainting murals, he’d sneak over to Eighth Avenue “just to kind of touch what it felt like to be gay and out,” he says. In books, he discovered the underseen — and, in their day, largely illegal — homoerotic portraits of George Platt Lynes, an American fashion photographer of the 1930s and ’40s, and the PaJaMa pictures. While Lynes’s dramatically lit male nudes telegraphed gay desire and sex, PaJaMa’s work, Davy recalls thinking, had the freer quality of “a game that’s been played with bodies on a beach for as long as we’ve been bodies on a beach.”
During an artists’ residency on Fire Island some years ago, Davy decided to channel what he calls PaJaMa’s “lucid, fluid dance.” With his husband, the gardener Liam O’Malley Davy, as his model — along with fellow artists Paul Mpagi Sepuya, a Los Angeles-based photographer, and AA Bronson, a founding member of the Canadian art collective General Idea — Davy took his own offhandedly erotic pictures by the water and in the dunes, layering some of them with illustrations of flying penises. In one photo, Liam, 44, charges naked through the woods like Davy’s painted satyrs. In another, Bronson, 78, stands by the shore wearing nothing but a celestial crown. “There’s this feeling that the greats, because they touched on something so deeply personal and transcendent, are there with you,” says Davy about PaJaMa. “You’re not doing it because of them … but [you’re reminded] that creativity is a current rolling through communities.”
Like PaJaMa, Sepuya, 42, built his practice around the creative potential of co-authorship. His intimate studio photographs largely feature artist friends, usually with traces of his own body in the frame: a floating hand on the shutter button, a bare torso or backside reflected in a mirror. “I’m a firm believer that no one’s really doing anything for the first time,” says the artist, who took photos of beachgoers for another PaJaMa-related project with Solomon Chase and David Toro, members of the DIS art collective. “We’re just producing and sharing it in new ways.”
Other pioneers of gay art — Tom of Finland, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol — had also recognized the defiance of Cadmus and his peers. The Pictures Generation, an unofficial group of New York artists, straight and gay, who emerged in the late 1970s and early ’80s — and whose work engaged with cinema and the characters people play in their daily lives — likely wouldn’t have existed without PaJaMa, whose lighting and sense of performance, which often verged on camp, were partly inspired by 1940s film noir. In the 1990s, Cadmus was an influence on both the commercial photographer Bruce Weber, who shot him, and the photorealist painter Chuck Close, who did his portrait. “Paul was particularly supportive of younger artists who were using the figure to communicate something important — an idea, a situation, a moment,” says Edward De Luca, a director of DC Moore Gallery in New York who worked with Cadmus from the late 1980s until his death in 1999 and then represented his estate. “I think he’d be very pleased to discover that artists are still looking at his work for inspiration.” Oscar yi Hou, 26, a New York-based British artist known for his series of queer-coded cowboy paintings, even credits Cadmus for the naked selfie. “It’s nice to think that when you send a nude on Grindr, you’re actually participating in an entire lineage of erotic exchange, coterminous with the whole history of human desire,” he said in a 2024 interview.
PROGRESSIVE ART MOVEMENTS, especially the most radical ones, often emerge during turbulent times, and PaJaMa was no exception. “It’s ironic that their images are so free,” says the British Turkish women’s wear designer and photographer Erdem Moralioglu, 47, who shot a PaJaMa-inspired fashion story for a 2023 issue of Acne Paper magazine. “Let’s remember, some of [their pictures] were taken at a time when you could be persecuted or fired for such things.” The U.S. Navy banned Cadmus’s most controversial painting, 1934’s “The Fleet’s In!,” which shows a group of boisterous servicemen soliciting prostitutes — and at least one eager sailor enjoying the company of a male civilian with pursed lips and wavy blond hair — from an exhibition that year at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Lynes, who posed for PaJaMa and photographed them, bequeathed his entire body of work to the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University to spare it from being destroyed after his death in 1955. In the catalog for last year’s Hauser & Wirth show “Paul Cadmus: 49 Drawings,” the curator Graham Steele writes that the artist “demonstrated in painstaking detail and elaborate frieze-like compositions what America didn’t want to see about itself.”
All these paintings and pictures are evidence of lives that others wanted to repress, and that managed to be lived so fully and creatively anyway — by merely existing, they make the transgressive and utopian feel almost habitual. (They also speak to that fragile mix of innocence and self-assuredness that young artists possess; it’s partly why people are forever captivated by the Bloomsbury Group, the early 20th-century circle that included the painter Duncan Grant and the writers E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, whose cultural output was as entangled as their personal lives.) The art director and filmmaker Sam Shahid, 84, who spent a decade working on the 2023 documentary “Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes,” says that the lasting appeal of PaJaMa and their network — the painters Bernard Perlin and George Tooker (Cadmus’s lover for a few years in the 1940s); the writer Glenway Wescott and his partner, the publisher Monroe Wheeler (who were in their own triangular relationship with Lynes); and Cadmus’s sister, the artist Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein, and her husband, Lincoln Kirstein, a co-founder of the New York City Ballet — is a result of their uninhibited approach to sex. “It’s the intimacy [of the work],” he says. “You can tell from the poses how much they loved making them.” Davy is drawn, particularly “in an era of climate catastrophe and culture wars,” as he calls it, to the group’s almost childlike reverence for nature and embrace of polyamory. For them, he says, Fire Island is a “fantasy that can play out as wonderfully as you want. That’s what PaJaMa was signaling: ‘We’re wearing our towels, and that driftwood is just what’s here. But don’t you feel the dream?’”
When Jared died in 1988, Margaret moved back to New York. Cadmus would regularly visit her at her apartment in the Gramercy Park Hotel, where she lived to be 92. On occasion, she’d stop by his gallery or attend a book signing. “These photographs never really saw a wider audience until the late 1980s,” says De Luca, who believes that PaJaMa’s rising popularity had something to do with an increasing respect for photography. “I think people can relate to the casualness of them,” he adds. “If there were scratches on them, that’s the way they were. They weren’t precious.” Which made them ever more so. It is because of their very ordinariness that they feel so universal. In a letter to Lynes from 1946, Cadmus included a few pictures from the group’s recent trip to Nantucket. “They tell,” wrote the artist, “so much better than I could, something about our summer.”
Nick Haramis is the editor at large of T Magazine.
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