Sinners All The Queer World of Paul Cadmus’s Seven Deadly Sins

Paul Cadmus’s small and lurid series The Seven Deadly Sins (1945–49, Metropolitan Museum of Art) seems an odd choice for an artist who had repudiated his Roman Catholic upbringing and whose sexuality fell outside the norms of institutionalized morality. An episode within Cadmus’s broader vacillations between satire and idealization, this article argues for their interdependence. Reading the reception of the series by his own network, I analyze their tangled responses to his visualization of sin. By mixing high and low references, stretching the boundaries of genre, and bending gender alignments, Cadmus “camps” his subject, and his satirical treatment disrupts its moral content. Framing the series in relation to What I Believe (1947–48), the artist’s projection of an idealized queer world, the essay explores the work in terms of an unresolved tension between a “homosexual Zion” and a vision of shared and universal values of tolerance and acceptance.