George Platt Lynes The Daring Eye

by Ellenzweig, Allen

• ISBN13: 9780190219666
• ISBN10: 0190219661
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2021-11-23
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

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 This biography, drawing upon intimate letters and an unpublished memoir of Lynes's life by his brother, writer and editor Russell Lynes, paints a portrait of the emerging influence of gays and lesbians in the visual,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.

Author Biography

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.

Table 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 M?nage-?-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