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A precocious American youth who entered the orbit of American and British expatriates populating Paris and the South of France in the 1920s, George Platt Lynes went on to become a supremely assured portrait photographer documenting the great figures of literature, painting, opera, and dance of mid-twentieth century. This new biography tells his story in full.
List of contents
- Part One: The Precocious Pup
- Chapter 1: Past is Prologue-1955
- Chapter 2: Imperial Fantasies
- Chapter 3: The Great Barrington Boy
- Chapter 4: "Baby George" at the Stein Salon
- Chapter 5: Missing Miss Stein and Hating Yale
- Part Two: Three-Cornered Hats
- Chapter 6: The Triangle Takes Shape
- Chapter 7: The Hotel Welcome, Jean Cocteau, and the Return to Paris
- Chapter 8: A New Career
- Chapter 9: Camera Work
- Chapter 10: You've Got to Have Friends
- Chapter 11: Gertrude in Clover Amiably
- Chapter 12: Twice a Debutante
- Part Three: Three-Cornered Hats Times Two
- Chapter 13: The Mural Show and a Threat of Marriage
- Chapter 14: A Death in the Family
- Chapter 15: Four Saints and a ménage-à-trois
- Chapter 16: 50 Photographs and a Family Wedding without Pictures
- Chapter 17: A Country House; Cocteau in Coney Island; The Sleepwalker
- Chapter 18: A Return to Paris; Bachelor and PaJaMa Parties
- Part Four: The Height of Fashion
- Chapter 19: Models, Myths, 640 Madison Avenue
- Chapter 20: The Affair Beaton and a Conversation Piece
- Chapter 21: An Anthology of Faces at Pierre Matisse
- Part Five: Battles on the Homefront
- Chapter 22: The War Comes Home
- Chapter 23: Breaking Away
- Chapter 24: Fortune Tellers and Paying Debts
- Chapter 25: "Finis"
- Part Six: Paradise Lost
- Chapter 26: Exiles in Paradise
- Chapter 27: Vogue-vagueness
- Chapter 28: Dr. Kinsey, E.M. Forster, and Bob: the dinner party
- Chapter 29: Pornographers, Visual and Verbal
- Chapter 30: The Great Barrington Boy II
- Chapter 31: A Naked Legacy
- Chapter 32: Vapors and Friends
- Chapter 33: A Gutsy and Courageous Performance
- Index
About the author
Allen Ellenzweig is a cultural critic and commentator who has published in numerous arts and general interest periodicals, including The Village Voice and Art in America, as well as the online journals Tablet, The Forward, and Poetry Magazine. His landmark history, The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/Delacroix to Mapplethorpe, was published in 1992. He is a regular contributor to the Gay & Lesbian Review/Worldwide and teaches in the Writing Program of Rutgers University.
Summary
George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye is a life of the gregarious American portrait, dance, fashion, and male nude photographer whose career spanned the late 1920s to 1955. From age 18, Lynes entered the cosmopolitan world of the American expatriate community in Paris when he became acquainted with the salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Intending to pursue a literary and small press publishing career, Lynes also began photographing authors like Stein, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Colette. Soon, he turned exclusively to photography, establishing himself as one of the premier fashion photographers in the Condé Nast stable, documenting the early ballets of George Balanchine, and pursuing his private obsession with seductive images of young male nudes almost never published in his time. Lynes's private life was as glamorous and theatrical as his images with their brilliant studio lighting and dramatic Surrealist set-ups. Barely out his teens, he met the publisher Monroe Wheeler who was already in a relationship with the emerging expatriate novelist Glenway Wescott. The peripatetic threesome maintained a polyamorous connection that lasted some 15 years. Their New York apartment became a mecca for elegant cocktail and name-dropping dinner parties. Their ménage-à-trois complicates our understanding of the pre-Stonewall gay "closet." This biography, drawing upon intimate letters and an unpublished memoir of Lynes's life by his brother, writer and editor Russell Lynes, paints a portrait of the emerging influence of gays and lesbians in the visual, literary, and performing arts that defined transatlantic cosmopolitan culture and presaged later gay political activism.
Additional text
George Platt Lynes dramatically staged and photographed a cosmopolitan network of friends, collaborators, and lovers during the 1930s and 1940s, revolutionizing such genres as the male nude, dance photography, portraiture, and fashion photography. Allen Ellenzweig's deeply researched and engagingly written biography provides context for the (re)discovery of an influential modern culture-maker.
