Sailors and Floozies (1938) by Paul Cadmus

Paul Cadmus was an American painter who lived from 1904 to 1999. His works combined elements of eroticism and social critique to produce a style referred to as magic realism.

The 1938 painting Sailors and Floozies depicts sailors in Riverside Park, near a monument called the Sailors and Soldiers Memorial. Three sailors are meeting their girlfriends (floozies) and there is garbage and litter all around them. The painting was very controversial in its day. Many critics considered it “tawdry, repulsive, and unpatriotic” because it depicted drunk sailors at the dawn of the Second World War.