George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye

Description

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 This biography, drawing upon intimate letters and an unpublished memoir of Lynes's life by his brother, writer and editor Russell Lynes, paints a portrait of the emerging influence of gays and lesbians in the visual,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. Cover Page Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Page Contents Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations Note on Sources PART I: THE PRECOCIOUS PUP 1. Past Is Prologue— 1955 2. Imperial Fantasies 3. The Great Barrington Boy 4. “Baby George” at the Stein Salon 5. Missing Miss Stein and Hating Yale PART II: THREE- CORNERED HATS 6. The Triangle Takes Shape 7. The Hôtel Welcome, Jean Cocteau, and the Return to Paris 8. A New Career 9. Camera Work 10. You’ve Got to Have Friends 11. Gertrude in Clover Amiably 12. Twice a Debutante PART III: THREE- CORNERED HATS TIMES TWO 13. The Mural Show and a Threat of Marriage 14. A Death in the Family 15. Four Saints and a Ménage- à- Trois 16. Fifty Photographs and a Family Wedding at City Hall 17. A Country House; Cocteau in Coney Island; The Sleepwalker 18. A Return to Paris; Bachelor and PaJaMa Parties PART IV: THE HEIGHT OF FASHION 19. Models, Myths, 640 Madison Avenue 20. The Affair Beaton and a Conversation Piece 21. An Anthology of Faces at Pierre Matisse PART V: BATTLES ON THE HOMEFRONT 22. The War Comes Home 23. Breaking Away 24. Fortune Tellers and Paying Debts 25. “Finis” PART VI: PARADISE LOST 26. Exiles in Paradise 27. “Vogue- vagueness” 28. Dr. Kinsey, E. M. Forster, and Bob: The Dinner Party 29. Bankrupt 30. The Great Barrington Boy II 31. A Naked Legacy 32. Vapors and Friends 33. A Gutsy and Courageous Performance Notes Archival Materials and Bibliography Index