George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye

Author:   Allen Ellenzweig (Adjunct Instructor of Writing, Adjunct Instructor of Writing, Rutgers University)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
ISBN:  

9780190219666


Pages:   656
Publication Date:   18 January 2022
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
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George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye


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Overview

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 This biography, drawing upon intimate letters and an unpublished memoir of Lynes's life by his brother, writer and editor Russell Lynes, paints a portrait of the emerging influence of gays and lesbians in the visual,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

Full Product Details

Author:   Allen Ellenzweig (Adjunct Instructor of Writing, Adjunct Instructor of Writing, Rutgers University)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:   Width: 16.30cm , Height: 4.70cm , Length: 24.20cm
Weight:   0.988kg
ISBN:  

9780190219666


ISBN 10:   0190219661
Pages:   656
Publication Date:   18 January 2022
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

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 ménage-à-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"

Reviews

This masterly biography is a triumph of comprehensive research and highly sophisticated analysis. Ellenzweig's graceful, nuanced assessments expand our understanding not only of Lynes the individual, but of an entire epoch of cultural history. This is scholarship of the first rank, as well as psychological acuity of remarkable depth. -- Martin Duberman, author of The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein At last! A sweeping biography of George Platt Lynes, whose exquisite fashion photography, portraits of major cultural figures, and male and female nudes have attracted considerable interest in recent years.A Drawing on his extensive research in Lynes's intimate correspondence and journals, Ellenzweig has unearthed illuminating new details about the once charmed and ultimately tragic life of this daring mid-century photographer and his influential gay circle. -- George Chauncey, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University, and author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 George Platt Lynes dramatically staged and photographed a cosmopolitan network of friends, collaborators, and lovers during the 1930s and 1940s, revolutionizing such genres as the male nude, dance photography, portraiture, and fashion photography. Allen Ellenzweig's deeply researched and engagingly written biography provides context for the (re)discovery of an influential modern culture-maker. -- Tirza Latimer, Professor Emerita, History of Art and Visual Culture, California College of the Arts, San Francisco


This masterly biography is a triumph of comprehensive research and highly sophisticated analysis. Ellenzweig's graceful, nuanced assessments expand our understanding not only of Lynes the individual, but of an entire epoch of cultural history. This is scholarship of the first rank, as well as psychological acuity of remarkable depth. * Martin Duberman, author of The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein * At last! A sweeping biography of George Platt Lynes, whose exquisite fashion photography, portraits of major cultural figures, and male and female nudes have attracted considerable interest in recent years. Drawing on his extensive research in Lynes's intimate correspondence and journals, Ellenzweig has unearthed illuminating new details about the once charmed and ultimately tragic life of this daring mid-century photographer and his influential gay circle. * George Chauncey, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University, and author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 * George Platt Lynes dramatically staged and photographed a cosmopolitan network of friends, collaborators, and lovers during the 1930s and 1940s, revolutionizing such genres as the male nude, dance photography, portraiture, and fashion photography. Allen Ellenzweig's deeply researched and engagingly written biography provides context for the (re)discovery of an influential modern culture-maker. * Tirza Latimer, Professor Emerita, History of Art and Visual Culture, California College of the Arts, San Francisco *


"""This masterly biography is a triumph of comprehensive research and highly sophisticated analysis. Ellenzweig's graceful, nuanced assessments expand our understanding not only of Lynes the individual, but of an entire epoch of cultural history. This is scholarship of the first rank, as well as psychological acuity of remarkable depth."" -- Martin Duberman, author of The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein ""At last! A sweeping biography of George Platt Lynes, whose exquisite fashion photography, portraits of major cultural figures, and male and female nudes have attracted considerable interest in recent years. Drawing on his extensive research in Lynes's intimate correspondence and journals, Ellenzweig has unearthed illuminating new details about the once charmed and ultimately tragic life of this daring mid-century photographer and his influential gay circle."" -- George Chauncey, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University, and author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 ""George Platt Lynes dramatically staged and photographed a cosmopolitan network of friends, collaborators, and lovers during the 1930s and 1940s, revolutionizing such genres as the male nude, dance photography, portraiture, and fashion photography. Allen Ellenzweig's deeply researched and engagingly written biography provides context for the (re)discovery of an influential modern culture-maker."" -- Tirza Latimer, Professor Emerita, History of Art and Visual Culture, California College of the Arts, San Francisco"


Author Information

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.

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