GEORGE PLATT LYNES’ 25year career, which spanned from the late 1920s to his death in 1955, encompassed celebrity portraiture, the classical dance, women’s fashion, mythological subjects, the self-portrait, and the nude figure, especially the male nude. The first three genres identify the specifically commercial aspect of his production, otherwise known as his livelihood. “PaJaMa” was the photography moniker for a trio of artists who painted figuratively and eschewed the tide of abstract Modernism. They included Paul Cadmus and Jared French, a couple who had been art students together in the 1920s, joined in 1937 by Margaret Hoenig, another painter who, fifteen years his senior, married Jared. Their “brand name” was a composite of their first names. They shot photographs cooperatively on the summer beaches of Provincetown, Fire Island, and Nantucket. They photographed each other, frequently joined by a changing cast of friends—often artists and usually gay, including Lynes and his intimates Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott: another gay trio. PaJaMa gave out their pictures at social gatherings, treating them as “tokens of friendship ... family photographs.” Nick Mauss’ essay on George Platt Lynes, “The Uses of Photographs,” gives sensitive readings of Lynes images and the ways his categories—portraits, nudes, fashion— could bleed into each other. Mauss also shrewdly decodes some of Lynes’ images as transmitted to the queer viewer. For example, a 1940s Lynes advertisement for men’s aftershave appeared in a souvenir program for the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo. While the foreground image is the ad’s bottle, behind it a picture of a man “taking a drag from a cigarette looms in the background like a rear-projection in a film noir.” Mauss proposes that the tight framing of the fingers splayed to caress the cigarette “is the essence the bottle promises” with the ad’s tagline “Men, too, may enjoy fine toiletries.” Turns out the background “smoking man” was cropped from a portrait of Lynes by English photographer-dandy Cecil Beaton. Lynes was the de facto official photographer of George Balanchine’s early classical dance companies, and he knew the audience for the Ballet Russe program. Mauss reminds us that this was an era when “homosexuals” were forbidden from openly assembling in public spaces—and representation of gay bodies and behaviors were proscribed in films, on stage, “or in images circulated through the post.” Yet ballet performances remained venues for queer sociability. Mutual portrait sittings by queer photographers and other visual artists established a coterie of like sensibilities, establishing what Mauss calls a “self-elected ‘inner circle’” that, in this particular instance, at least some in-the-know would have recognized. Mauss also imparts original ideas on how Lynes distributed his work privately, focusing on his scrapbooks of sample photos. Writes Mauss: “Lynes resorted to the discreet presentational format of the album and the scrapbook to ‘exhibit’ his nudes to friends and interested parties at his home or studio.” Lynes also cut down draft proofs and sent along the newly cropped pictures as postcards. Mauss registers other artists who likewise found “novel ways” to present their work, avoiding typical “display ... in galleries and museums.” Composerphotographer Max Ewing had invited guests to view the interior of his closet where he thumb-tacked from floor to ceiling a Camp potpourri of celebrities in a collection he titled “Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits.” Photographer Carl Van Vechten “projected his portraits ... as slideshows in his home.” And the innovative painter and salon hostess, Florine Stettheimer, launched each new painting in her studio with a “birthday party” and invited chosen artists and critics to celebrate the “new arrival.” Mauss’ text is dense with inquiries into Lynes’ practice, concentrating on the shifts and affiliations between his commercial modes. One such inquiry offers an examination of the photographer’s transformation of Hippolyte Flandrin’s iconic Jeune Homme nu assis au bord de la mer (1836), in which a beautiful ephebe sits nude on a rock, arms wrapped around his legs, his head resting on his knees, eyes closed. This image of solitude and male beauty has become an archetype “for the homosexual’s isolation from society.” Lynes’ 1937 studio shot Demus has a similar lone male bent over to rest his head on his knees against a backdrop of sea and sky, while seated on a modern geometric white “banquette” enclosed between rising walls painted in thick horizontal bands. Artists as Art Subjects ALLENELLENZWEIG BODY LANGUAGE The Queer Staged Photographs of GeorgePlatt Lynes and PaJaMa by Nick Mauss and Angela Miller Univ. of California. 153 pages, $28.95 Allen Ellenzweig is the author of George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye. 40 TheG&LR George Platt Lynes
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