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GEORGE PLATT LYNES PHOTOGRAPHS 1931-1955 |
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INTRODUCTION In the summer of 1925, the young George Platt Lynes traveled to Paris, drawn there -- like so many of his generation -- by the artistic and cultural magnet which the city had become. The works of Paris' writers and artists were familiar to him by way of Europe's 'little magazines,' and among their most influential and admired contributors was the American writer Gertrude Stein. Her approval or sponsorship of young artists and writers held the promise of their finding acceptance and support within her circle of notable friends; she took up George Lynes' nomination to that rarefied society when he presented himself at her Paris apartment. Later she volunteered her essay 'Descriptions of Literature' for Lynes' series of privately published literary pamphlets, issued during 1926 from his parents' home in Englewood, New Jersey. Stein's essay served as endorsement and introduction for Lynes, and he continued to spend successive summers in Paris surrounded by the artists and writers whose works had first brought him there. During 1927, the historical prominence of the company he was keeping and the timely gift of a view camera and darkroom apparatus prompted Lynes to experiment with portraiture. His interest soon became a commitment to learning the medium's technical possibilities, practicing with frequent portrait sittings that included among others, Stein, Andre Gide, Jean Cocteau and Marsden Hartley. The Surrealiste (1924) and Neo-Romantic (1926) movements in art, and particularly their practitioners Man Ray and Pavel Tchelitchew were the dominant visions and aesthetic standards on which Lynes' apprenticeship focused. A synthesis of the Surrealistes' "omnipotent dream" and the implied "mystery" in Neo-Romantic composition occupied Lynes' visual sensibilities. Principally, it was Man Ray's eccentric perceptions and manipulated images that convinced Lynes to consider photography in terms of an evolving art form, evoking and paralleling current art sentiment beyond then-popular pictorialist modes. By 1931, the self-taught Lynes believed himself capable of satisfying the medium's technical demands, and decided on a professional career in New York City. Julien Levy's New York gallery was a growing center for photography's new generation, the photographs of Walker Evans, Henri Cartier- Bresson, Clarence John Laughlin and Manuel Alvarez Bravo were among those he exhibited during the thirties. Levy's interest in Surrealisme and the Neo-Romantics accommodated George Lynes' efforts in photography and he exhibited regularly at the gallery throughout the decade, beginning with a Surrealiste group show in January 1932, which included the work of Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Herbert Bayer and Max Ernst. Capitalizing on his celebrity portraits and frequent gallery shows, Lynes opened a studio in 1932. Within two years his portraits of artists and debutantes were appearing regularly in the pages of Town and Country, Harpers' Bazaar, and Vogue. Rapidly accumulating 'fashion' accounts and a rising economic status soon enabled him to move into a large Madison Avenue studio and by the end of the 1930s he had become New York's most successful fashion and portrait photographer. While managing a thriving commercial career, Lynes' work as an artist of the medium involved much of his creative abilities. The male nude as subject matter was a central force in his photographic career -- initially as form, in the manner and neo- classical approach of George Hoyningen-Huene; and later as metaphor and symbol acting on his own thoughts. The male form prevailed in Lynes' use of the manipulated image, first seen in 'The Sleepwalker: a 1935 composition included in the Museum of Modern Arts' 1936 exhibition, 'Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism.' Lynes' work with this kind of imagery continued until 1939, and was dominated by his interpretations of Mythology, a photographic effort drawing on the use of classical motifs and historical themes in the arts. By 1941 Lynes' photographic reputation commanded a major one-man exhibition at New York's Pierre Matisse Gallery. Entitled "Two Hundred Portraits by George Platt Lynes Plus an Assortment of Less Formal Pictures of People," it realized the limits of his public and professional career success. Lynes' popularity had parodoxically prevented the showing of his male nudes, the photographs he considered his finest. In economic terms, he could not afford a controversy that would have adversely affected his reputation among conservative fashion editors, and alienated much of his like-minded society portrait clientele. The nudes would continue to be privately shared within the photographer's close circle of friends. In Lynes' 1939 portrait of George Tichenor, the young man's clouded reflection may be viewed as the emotional metaphor of Lynes' personal and public fortunes during the 1940s. In the course of his relationship with George Tichenor, Lynes filled an album with portraits of the young man, and carefully pasted to the last page is a government telegram; dated June 1942, it confirms Tichenor's death in the war. The sudden loss of the young man undermined Lynes emotionally and embittered his frustrations with the unimaginative demands of fashion clientele and portraiture for-hire. His sadness at the death of George Tichenor is implied photographically in his 1943 portrait of the American painter, Marsden Hartley, who worked in the photographer's studio during the winter of 1943, and shared with Lynes the similar loss of a man whom Hartley had loved in an earlier world war. Whatever consolation and intimacy passed between the two artists cannot be known, but their confidences may be marked in the Lynes portrait: heavy with age, Hartley gazes out at the viewer. Beyond him, lost in the scale of the composition, a figure of a young man stands in the shadow. These two figures, and the play of shadow and light around them-- our tangible points of reference -- create a juxtaposition that challenges the viewer to witness beyond the eyes' capacity. "You explain the world to me in an image," wrote Albert Camus; "I then realize you have ended in poetry." Hartley died later that year and Lynes apprenticed George Tichenor's brother Jonathan as a studio assistant. But Lynes' continuing attempts to transfer his affections and enthusiasm to the younger brother ended with the young man's sudden marriage and departure in 1945. Emotionally isolated and disenchanted with his life in New York -- Lynes accepted a position as head of Vogue magazine's Hollywood studios and sold his Madison Avenue offices. It is at this point that Cecil Beaton notes in his book, The Magic Image; "He (Lynes) was 'killed' by Hollywood." Beaton was correct in observing Lynes' professional collapse during the Hollywood years from 1945-1948, although its causes were in fact a culmination of his long discontent with his career in photography. What Beaton was not able to observe was George Lynes' efforts to turn his camera on himself. Photographing in the rooms and hallways of his Hollywood Hills home, often with only available light, Lynes realized the first of his romantic existential landscapes, replete with nude shadowy figures insinuating elements of individual isolation, sexual conflict and erotic tension. With little more than the remnants of a professional career, the financially troubled Lynes returned to New York in 1948. There his floundering commercial efforts sponsored a series of financial disruptions that led to his declaration of bankruptcy in 1951. Until his death in 1955, he lived and worked in a succession of apartments and studios, continuing his earlier commitment to the photographic visualization of a psychosexual landscape. Whether drawn by the outline of an adolescent girl's breast and belly, or peopled by figures considering each other across a bed, its topography of sexual forms and emotional distances held his attention. During this period Lynes' cancer made itself felt, though it was not diagnosed as terminal until May, 1955. He died at the age of forty-eight on December 6, 1955. Chronologically, the final image selected for this volume, and perhaps Lynes' last, may serve as the artist's epitaph. It is of a man dressing, his shoulders and head in flat anonymous form. Inflexibly focused thighs and genitalia are juxtaposed with a cigarette package and ashtray, two objects that become sexual icons in the context of this composition. Lynes' tradition of eloquent illumination isolates the half-clothed male figure, the metaphoric alterpiece in a liturgy interpreted and appercieved by George Platt Lynes and fixed with his camera.
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