GEORGE PLATT LYNES
American
George Platt Lynes was an accomplished fashion
photographer during his lifetime, most sought after
for his technically virtuosic commercial work for
Harper’s Bazaar,Vogue, and other popular maga-
zines. He was sought after as well as for his enga-
ging portraits of some of the most influential
literary figures of his day, including dance critic
and ballet impresario Lincoln Kerstein, and poets
W.H. Auden and Marianne Moore. The images for
which he today commands a great deal of attention,
however, are his Surrealist-inspired homoerotic
nudes (Male Nude on Faux Skin Rug, 1953) and
mythological studies (Birth of Dionysus, 1936–
1939). Lynes was formed, for the most part, by the
expatriate era of the 1920s and 1930s and the artistic
luminaries he encountered in his frequent trips to
Europe. More specifically, the intellectual and emo-
tional attachment he sustained throughout his life-
time with Monroe Wheeler, the head of New York’s
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Exhibitions and
Publications departments during this time, and with
Gertrude Stein, were the most important influences
that would steer him towards his achievement and
as one of the most significant, yet almost forgotten,
photographers of the twentieth century.
George Platt Lynes was born in 1907 in East
Orange, New Jersey, the son of a clergyman. Edu-
cated at private schools and briefly at Yale Univer-
sity, Lynes made his first trip to France in 1925
where he met artists Jean Cocteau and Pavel Tche-
lichev and writers Andre Gide and Gertrude Stein,
with whom he corresponded for the next ten years,
and all of whom he later photographed. He returned
stateside that same year and published a series of
literary pamphlets including Stein’sDescription of
Literature and Ernest Hemingway’s first play,
Today is Friday, with cover designs by Cocteau
and Pavel Tchelichew. Lynes began photographing
in 1927, under the mentoring of a local professional
photographer in Englewood, New Jersey, and
opened The Park Place Book Shop in 1928. Accom-
panied by Monroe Wheeler and writer Glenway
Wescott, he made his second trip to France in
1928, during which he was probably introduced to
the work of expatriate photographers Man Ray,
George Hoyningen-Huene, Germaine Krull, Paul
Outerbridge, Jr., and Berenice Abbott. Lynes
began experimenting with ‘‘double exposures and
other controlled accidents in the surrealist manner,
however, there is little to suggest that Lynes sub-
scribed fully to the tenets of surrealism.’’ (Crump
1993, 140).
In 1931, Lynes met and was encouraged by Julien
Levy, with whom he collaborated on a series of
Surrealist-influenced still-lifes. Levy included work
by Lynes in theSurrealismexhibition at the Wads-
worth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut, and in
the seminal Surre ́alismeexhibition at the Julien
Levy Gallery in New York in 1932. Lynes had his
first solo exhibition at the Leggett Gallery, New
York in 1932. Levy also exhibited his work in con-
junction with Walker Evans later that year, as well
as in the influential exhibition,International Photo-
graphers, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Lynes
opened a portrait studio in New York City in 1932
and quickly became known for his portraits and
fashion photographs. The same year, Levy and
Lincoln Kirstein, Lynes’s friend since prep school,
included his work inMurals by American Painters
and Photographersat MoMA, its first exhibition to
include photography. In 1934, he had his second
solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery and in
1936, he was included in the controversialFantastic
Art, Dada, and Surrealismshow at MoMA (seeThe
Sleepwalker, 1935). Over 200 of Lynes’s portraits
and photographs were shown at the Pierre Matisse
Gallery in New York City in 1941.
Alexey Brodovitch, who as art director for Har-
per’s Bazaar, began giving Lynes fashion assign-
ments because of his ability to solve difficult
artistic problems that studio lighting offered.
Lynes acted as official photographer to Lincoln
Kirstein’s American Ballet Company (later the
New York City Ballet) documenting George Bal-
anchine’s productions until the early 1940s in the
tradition of Baron Adolph de Meyer and Hoynin-
gen-Huene. Lynes also photographed choreogra-
pher and dancer Frederick Ashton and the
principal dancers in the operettaFour Saints in
Three Acts, 1934 (Crump 1993, 141).
Lynes’s mythological series, completed between
1937 and 1940, legitimized the male nude in theLYNES, GEORGE PLATT