Lining Up for George Platt Lynes
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LINING UP for GEORGE PLATT LYNES (1907-1955) is a campaign to help me complete my biography of this unique 20th Century master photographer, slated for publication by Oxford University Press. Here is a young GPL in a portrait by George Hoyningen-Huene.
Famous in his era for remarkable portraits of writers and artists who commanded literature in the first half of the 20th Century, Lynes subjects included such major international figures as Gertrude Stein, Colette, Thomas Mann, Jean Cocteau (see below), Andre Gide, 
Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, Janet Flanner, and Marianne Moore, among so many others. Earning his living as a fashion photographer for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town and Country, he also photographed performing artists of renown, like Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Ezio Pinza, Vera Zorina, Alicia Markova, Kirk Douglas, and the many dancers who brought ballet to America through the companies that George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein formed, culminating in the landmark New York City Ballet. Dancers like Maria Tallchief and Tanaquil Le Clercq, Lew Christensen, Francisco Moncion, Nicholas Magallanes (seen below in "Orpheus" 1950) who helped popularize the classical ballet for the post-war audience.
Since the rediscovery of Lynes’s work in the late 1970s, interest has often focused on his unpublished and unexhibited pictures of the male nude, a remarkable archive of male beauty and erotic suggestion in images of rare intimacy and formal invention, lit in Lynes’s signature mix of deep shadows and hot highlights. Learning of the work when it was exhibited in NYC galleries in the late 1970s, I was prompted to research the whole history of same-sex male eroticism evidenced in photography since the medium’s invention. Thus, I came to write The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/Delacroix to Mapplethorpe, published first in 1992 and reprinted in softcover in 2012. For your interest, here's a video presentation I gave on the subject when the paperback edition was launched:
https://www.leslielohman.org/2013/10/03/speaker-series-a-history-of-the-history-of-the-homoerotic-photograph-book-and-talk-by-allen-ellenzweig/
Lynes was one of more than a dozen photographers whose pictures I discussed. But all Lynes genres come under my review in this current biography. Not only do his photographs help us retrieve a decisive moment of America’s cultural eminence on the world stage, but his photographs of the male nude, little seen in his lifetime, inspired those photographers who carried on his legacy in the era of sexual liberation following the post-Stonewall era: Herb Ritts, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Weber, and Duane Michals.
I have been researching and writing this book for nearly 10 years under difficult conditions; still, the book is now two-thirds complete. Your support will help me finish my work by the end of 2018, a period requiring intense focus on final research and writing. Adequate funding will allow for repeated research trips to the Beinecke Library at Yale to review the Lynes correspondence, and to do likewise at the Monroe Wheeler Archive in Newburgh, New York, culling pertinent information from letters between Lynes and his longtime lover, Monroe Wheeler, who was an important behind-the-scenes figure at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and already in a committed relationship with the novelist Glenway Wescott when they first met. George became their shared passion, and their domestic arrangement became a complex but unequal ménage-à-trois.
A trip to the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana will require several days of intense research to review letters that passed between sex researcher Dr. Kinsey and Lynes, and to review the Lynes archive of male nude photographs Dr. Kinsey amassed directly from George. Lynes’s life was as interesting as his artistic output: the elder son of an Episcopal minister and his elegant wife, George was a delicate beauty in childhood with a rich fantasy life who turned himself into a transatlantic cosmopolitan at home in Paris and New York. Remarkably handsome by his thirties with dazzling white hair and a practiced tan, he was equally the object of attention from men and women smitten by his charming personality, his generosity and personal style, and his wide-ranging interests in literature, music, and dance. His studio jukebox played Gershwin and Cole Porter to amuse his models. He adopted work clothes as a fashion long before they were fashionable. Asked of his brother, the writer and editor Russell Lynes, when George “came out of the closet,” Russell replied simply and truthfully, “He was never in it.” Lynes’s story gives us a fresh view of LGBTQ history little examined: the period when being gay among the urbane smart set was not a condemnation but a badge of honor in the manner of a secret code available only to those in the know. His professional life from the early 1930s to his death in 1955 was a rich period for LGBTQ contributions in all the arts, establishing networks that were mutually supportive and, in their way, established pre-conditions for the next generation of more politically-minded gays and lesbians.
Lynes photographed nearly everyone of note in the arts and society (poet Marianne Moore below) and was a
loyal friend to a large cast of characters on the transatlantic scene. His love of Monroe Wheeler is a story of high romance; the collapse of his career, amid personal problems, bankruptcy, and ill health, is a cautionary tale full of drama and pathos. Please help me complete the story of this remarkable man who was beloved by his friends, adored by his fashionable models and dancers (below, American fashion designer Muriel King), indulged by his lovers—several male and one female—and cherished in life and mourned in death by 
his mother and brother who outlived him by many years.
I have come this far with a modest advance but without any foundation support—not for lack of trying—and I need the next seven months to commit single-mindedly to completing my work and submitting a completed manuscript to Oxford University Press. I will be so grateful for the support of my friends and colleagues, and of their friends and colleagues, many of whom know the travails of the so-called “independent scholar,” the teaching adjunct, and the writer working on a years-long project. Gifts at any level will be much appreciated and acknowledged. Gifts of $250 and more will be made part of the book’s published record, and a signed copy of the book given in thanks. So, give according to your ability, and if you can, stretch your giving to make this book come to life. Line up for George Platt Lynes.
Famous in his era for remarkable portraits of writers and artists who commanded literature in the first half of the 20th Century, Lynes subjects included such major international figures as Gertrude Stein, Colette, Thomas Mann, Jean Cocteau (see below), Andre Gide, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, Janet Flanner, and Marianne Moore, among so many others. Earning his living as a fashion photographer for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town and Country, he also photographed performing artists of renown, like Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Ezio Pinza, Vera Zorina, Alicia Markova, Kirk Douglas, and the many dancers who brought ballet to America through the companies that George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein formed, culminating in the landmark New York City Ballet. Dancers like Maria Tallchief and Tanaquil Le Clercq, Lew Christensen, Francisco Moncion, Nicholas Magallanes (seen below in "Orpheus" 1950) who helped popularize the classical ballet for the post-war audience.Since the rediscovery of Lynes’s work in the late 1970s, interest has often focused on his unpublished and unexhibited pictures of the male nude, a remarkable archive of male beauty and erotic suggestion in images of rare intimacy and formal invention, lit in Lynes’s signature mix of deep shadows and hot highlights. Learning of the work when it was exhibited in NYC galleries in the late 1970s, I was prompted to research the whole history of same-sex male eroticism evidenced in photography since the medium’s invention. Thus, I came to write The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/Delacroix to Mapplethorpe, published first in 1992 and reprinted in softcover in 2012. For your interest, here's a video presentation I gave on the subject when the paperback edition was launched:
https://www.leslielohman.org/2013/10/03/speaker-series-a-history-of-the-history-of-the-homoerotic-photograph-book-and-talk-by-allen-ellenzweig/
Lynes was one of more than a dozen photographers whose pictures I discussed. But all Lynes genres come under my review in this current biography. Not only do his photographs help us retrieve a decisive moment of America’s cultural eminence on the world stage, but his photographs of the male nude, little seen in his lifetime, inspired those photographers who carried on his legacy in the era of sexual liberation following the post-Stonewall era: Herb Ritts, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Weber, and Duane Michals.
I have been researching and writing this book for nearly 10 years under difficult conditions; still, the book is now two-thirds complete. Your support will help me finish my work by the end of 2018, a period requiring intense focus on final research and writing. Adequate funding will allow for repeated research trips to the Beinecke Library at Yale to review the Lynes correspondence, and to do likewise at the Monroe Wheeler Archive in Newburgh, New York, culling pertinent information from letters between Lynes and his longtime lover, Monroe Wheeler, who was an important behind-the-scenes figure at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and already in a committed relationship with the novelist Glenway Wescott when they first met. George became their shared passion, and their domestic arrangement became a complex but unequal ménage-à-trois.
A trip to the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana will require several days of intense research to review letters that passed between sex researcher Dr. Kinsey and Lynes, and to review the Lynes archive of male nude photographs Dr. Kinsey amassed directly from George. Lynes’s life was as interesting as his artistic output: the elder son of an Episcopal minister and his elegant wife, George was a delicate beauty in childhood with a rich fantasy life who turned himself into a transatlantic cosmopolitan at home in Paris and New York. Remarkably handsome by his thirties with dazzling white hair and a practiced tan, he was equally the object of attention from men and women smitten by his charming personality, his generosity and personal style, and his wide-ranging interests in literature, music, and dance. His studio jukebox played Gershwin and Cole Porter to amuse his models. He adopted work clothes as a fashion long before they were fashionable. Asked of his brother, the writer and editor Russell Lynes, when George “came out of the closet,” Russell replied simply and truthfully, “He was never in it.” Lynes’s story gives us a fresh view of LGBTQ history little examined: the period when being gay among the urbane smart set was not a condemnation but a badge of honor in the manner of a secret code available only to those in the know. His professional life from the early 1930s to his death in 1955 was a rich period for LGBTQ contributions in all the arts, establishing networks that were mutually supportive and, in their way, established pre-conditions for the next generation of more politically-minded gays and lesbians.
Lynes photographed nearly everyone of note in the arts and society (poet Marianne Moore below) and was a
loyal friend to a large cast of characters on the transatlantic scene. His love of Monroe Wheeler is a story of high romance; the collapse of his career, amid personal problems, bankruptcy, and ill health, is a cautionary tale full of drama and pathos. Please help me complete the story of this remarkable man who was beloved by his friends, adored by his fashionable models and dancers (below, American fashion designer Muriel King), indulged by his lovers—several male and one female—and cherished in life and mourned in death by his mother and brother who outlived him by many years. I have come this far with a modest advance but without any foundation support—not for lack of trying—and I need the next seven months to commit single-mindedly to completing my work and submitting a completed manuscript to Oxford University Press. I will be so grateful for the support of my friends and colleagues, and of their friends and colleagues, many of whom know the travails of the so-called “independent scholar,” the teaching adjunct, and the writer working on a years-long project. Gifts at any level will be much appreciated and acknowledged. Gifts of $250 and more will be made part of the book’s published record, and a signed copy of the book given in thanks. So, give according to your ability, and if you can, stretch your giving to make this book come to life. Line up for George Platt Lynes.
Organizer
Allen Ellenzweig
Organizer
New York, NY