[5] His sister, Fidelma Cadmus, married Lincoln Kirstein, a philanthropist, arts patron, and co-founder of the New York City Ballet,[6] in 1941.

In 1933, they headed back to the United States after running out of money, where Cadmus was one of the first artists to be employed by The New Deal art programs, painting murals at post offices.

[11] Cadmus worked in commercial illustration as well, but French, also a tempera artist, convinced him to devote himself completely to fine art.

[2][16][17] This painting, which featured carousing sailors and women, included a stereotypical homosexual solicitation and erotic exaggeration of clinging pants seats and bulging crotches.

It was the subject of a public outcry led by Admiral Hugh Rodman, who protested to Secretary of the Navy Claude A. Swanson, saying, "It represents a most disgraceful, sordid, disreputable, drunken brawl.

"[11] The painting, which after Roosevelt's death hung over a mantel at the Alibi Club in Washington for more than half a century, was kept from public view until 1981,[6] temporarily displayed at the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami,[18] and eventually found a home at the Naval Historical Center.

He found the grotesque everywhere from Greenwich Village cafes, subway stations, the beach at Coney Island to American tourists in an Italian piazza.

His art is a form of satire and caricature of his subjects that has been compared to fellow artists George Grosz and Otto Dix.

[22] During vacations in Saltaire, New York, Fire Island and later Provincetown, Massachusetts and Nantucket, the trio photographed each other on the beach and indoors, donning makeshift costumes and using found objects as props to create scenes of Magic Realism.

[22] Among those photographed were Tennessee Williams, Glenway Wescott, Monroe Wheeler, Donald Windham, Todd Bolender, Bernard Perlin, Chuck Howard, Ted Starkowski,[25] Christopher Isherwood, and Paul Cadmus's sister Fidelma and her husband Lincoln Kirstein.

[14] Cadmus was also close friends with many illustrious artists, authors, and dancers including Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, George Balanchine, George Platt Lynes, Lincoln Kirstein (his brother-in-law), and E. M. Forster,[2] who was said to have read his novel Maurice aloud while Cadmus painted his portrait,[18] which was printed in 1200 copies of a pamphlet The New Disorder[32] in 1949.