Sam Shahid | Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes / 2023

the enormous closet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matthew Kraus, John MacConnell, and Sam Shahid (screenplay), Sam Shahid (director) Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes / 2023

 

This documentary attempts to do a great many things at once, including presenting a narrative of the photographer George Platt Lynes’ life, detours into his multitudes of relationships and the communities that surrounded them, discussions of the four major aspects of Lynes’ photography, a short history of gay life of the 1930s through the early 40s—at least from Lynes’ and his friends’ perspective—and finally an attempt to answer why Lynes’ quite amazing photography never became part of the established art world and what to do about it.

     In the process of attempting all of these tasks, director Sam Shahid trots out over 30 talking heads representing the museum, gallery, and art academic worlds (Vince Aletti, Sarah Morthland, Peter H Halpert, Rebecca Fasman, Charles Leslie, James Smalls) photographers (Vincent Cianni, Duane Michals, Dimitri Levas, Bruce Weber), ex-lovers and friends (Bernard Perlin, Don Bachardy, Jensen Yow), fellow film makers (James Crump), Lynes authorities (such as Allen Ellenzweig), and others. Many of these figures, also gay, bring various perspectives to Lynes’ art.

     The subject of the film, George Platt Lynes, lived such a fascinating life that one could, in fact, ignore the art and speak only of the complete openly homosexual work which he and others created in the legendarily repressive era in which he lived. Born into a conservative Episcopal family in New Jersey, Lynes was sent to the best of schools and like so many young women and men of his age was shipped off immediately after high school graduation for a grand tour, the final piece of the perfect education which was to have ended in a Yale degree.

      In Lynes’ case the grand tour consisted simply of Paris, but it was after all the Paris of 1925, and the beautiful young man with proper connections soon became a favorite of Gertrude Stein, who named him Baby, and through her and others made close friends with the French writer and  filmmaker Jean Cocteau, gallerist Julien Levy, and numerous US writers, including Glenway Wescott whose long term lover (the couple were eventually together for 68 years) was then small-print publisher Monroe Wheeler. Lynes fell in love with Wheeler immediately, and the young beauty was just as quickly invited into to Wheeler’s and Wescott’s relationship creating what today would be described as a polyamorous relationship, the three living together in France, New York City, and elsewhere until the early 1940s.

      Lynes originally wanted to be a writer, but soon realized he simply did have the talent. He kept photo travel journals of his trips with Westcott and Wheeler and portraits of their many friends, which led Wheeler to suggest that he become a photographer.

      Meanwhile, the teenager was forced to return to the US and was enrolled at Yale, a situation against which he immediately balked, writing Stein that he was unhappy there, she replying that he should simply stick it out and get his education before going wild. But Lynes couldn’t wait, dropping out in his first year and opening a small bookstore in Englewood in 1927 before selling it and with the money returning to Paris and a life with Wheeler and Wescott.

      They, in turn, had sexual relationships with others, creating a kind of community of close gay friends who would define Lynes’ and their society for some years.

       Returning to New York, Lynes was given a photography show by Levy. And soon after, he began working as a portrait and fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, and Vogue, working out his New York apartment to create some of the most arresting fashion images and remarkable portraits of the time.

     Suddenly Lynes was much in demand and by the time his work of the super-model Lisa Fonssagrives appeared on a cover he had become famous. His Berkshire School high school friend Lincoln Kirstein, married incidentally to Paul Cadmus’ sister, invited him to become the photographer for his and George Balanchine’s newly founded American Ballet (which became the New York City Ballet). His output was stunning.

      When he took a few photographs of Stein on one of his trips to Europe, she invited him to be her regular photographer, replacing Man Ray whom she described as becoming more and more difficult.

      By this time, moreover, Westcott and Wheeler, like so many expatriates felt with the rise of Nazism in Germany that they needed to leave Paris. Their return meant access also to their mutual friends such as artist Paul Cadmus and his bisexual lover, Jared French and his artist wife Margaret, along with Cadmus’ former lover, painter George Tooker, all artists who, in one way or another, were pushing the boundaries of homo-eroticism.

 

                                           Painting by Jared French of Monroe Wheeler, Glenway Wescott, and George

                                           Platt Lynes at Stonehall

 

                                              Jared French, photography by George Platt Lynes

 

     Lynes begin his own regular cocktail parties, which brought together a large openly gay community along with notable female fashion models, writers, and artists. Their parties, beginning, as Bernard Perlin observes, with martinis, were followed by dinner, and usually ended in the bedrooms. Lynes was never in the closet, Perlin notes, of if he was it as surely “an enormous closet.” Everyone knew that he, Wescott, and Wheeler were together.

      Increasingly, however, Lynes became less and less interested in photographing for fashion and celebrity portraits, although he brought a new sense of energy to his pictures of dance and would continue photographing for Kirstein and Balanchine until the very end of his life—even as he was dying, recalls Jensen Yow, he escaped the hospital, hailing a taxi, and attended a dance performance one evening—much to the consternation of doctors, nurses, and friends—returning to the hospital after the performance and slipping back into bed. He died the next day.

 

                                  Ballet scenes                                           

                          

     Back in the mid-1930s, however, the then-noted photographer was becoming more and more interested in photographing the male nude, showing made nudity sometimes as narrative—in one very private series even showing Wheeler and him engaged in sex including erect penises and cum—by also portraying his nudes in narrative situations. His models, often dancers who were willing to pose nude, or sailors he would round up from the most recent ship in port, or even, his far more conservative but also loving brother. In one case even friend Christopher Isherwood’s boy lover, Don Bachardy was asked to pose in white sailor pants. Bachardy remembers that he was determined to go no further than his tightly pinned (pinned up in the back by Lynes himself) pants; but when Lynes asked him to drop them, he couldn’t resist. Friend after friend recalls that Lynes was so charming and so beautiful himself that he could make anyone do what he wanted, in some few cases hinting in the direction of slightly abusive behavior at the border of S&M. Lynes even persuaded a young Yul Brynner to pose nude for him.

    Finally, in 1943 Lynes announced the end of his Wheeler-Wescott romance, beginning a relationship with his studio assistant, George Tichenor. Wheeler and Wescott were somewhat upset, obviously for their loss of their long-time joint lover, but even more so because he had publicly announced it, they both terrified of the ramifications for the discovery that they were gay. Perlin jests, everyone knew they were gay and no one cared!

                                                                 “Jonathan Tichenor” by George Platt Lynes                                                                      

                                                                                                                                                                  

     When Tichenor was killed in World War II, Lynes took up with Tichenor’s younger brother, Jonathan. But by this time Lynes was behaving rather erratically. He had already come into debt for his lavish life style, attempting to establish new career as a Hollywood portraitist in Los Angeles. Although he took some very notable photos of Burt Lancaster, Guy Madison, and others, he didn’t like the scene or the role and soon returned to New York. At one point he burned up many of his fashion photographic negatives, not wanting to be remembered as a fashion photographer, even though many of these most clearly reveal his creativity. But then, fashion photography itself had changed with the entry into the field of men such Richard Avedon, who Lynes couldn’t abide. The discovery of serious lung cancer which had spread to his entire body, brought his career to a close at an early age of 47.

 

                                                 “Burt Lanchester,” by Georges Platt Lynes

 

      During these last years, he was also terribly afraid of what would happen to the work he most valued, his male nudes. Meeting several times with the sexual scientist Alfred Kinsey, and finding that the two of them got on well, he even invited Kinsey to some of his parties—as a sort of voyeur only, Kinsey was observed by some partygoers such as Perlin scribbling notes the entire time. Soon after, Lynes offered a large part of his work to the Kinsey Institute, which already held a substantial collection of homosexual and lesbian artworks. The trouble, in those days, was how to even get it to Bloomington, Indiana without the US mails confiscating the works. Somehow, the collection was brought to the Institute and sat there for many years with few knowing of its existence.

     Similarly, Lynes named as his executor Bernard Perlin, who ardently kept the negatives, books, and photographs in safe-keeping; but when he died they were bought up by Frederick R. Koch. Even the executor of Koch’s estate, John Olsen did not know of the existence of all these works that were not sent to Kinsey Institute. Appraising the collection upon Koch’s death Sarah Morthland discovered more than 20,000 items of Lynes’ art, many of them never before seen by anyone outside of his few friends and maybe Koch himself, although Olsen hints that it was possible that the collector did not actually view them, but collected for “collecting’s” sake. At the Kinsey Institute, moreover, there is a notorious box containing work that Lynes himself asked should never be seen, and, accordingly to the Kinsey curator Rebecca Fasman, even she has not seen what is the box.

     When the talking heads are asked, accordingly, why is it that this incredible photographer dropped off the radar of the art world and why his work as remained so unknown even to those savvy about photography, it seems somewhat disingenuous of them, who one by one, shake their head without being able to explain the phenomenon. It seems evident, to me at least, that Lynes’ important works were seen only by a few, the male nudes being unable to be shown at a time when gay and lesbian images resulted in hear hysteria and which photography in general was not perceived as a major form of art. I remember, even as late as 1965 when I was a student at the University of Wisconsin, a small photography show of male nudes causing an uproar with some arguing for its closure, these small photos hardly revealing anything outside of an occasional half-hidden penis. One commentator points out the irony that, although Lynes was never closeted with regard to his sexuality, his art most certainly was, hidden away in two unlikely places that interested curators might never have imagined.

      And what none of these commentators want to say is that, despite the importance of Kirstein to contemporary dance and Monroe Wheeler’s involvement with New York’s Museum of Contemporary Art—where he quickly moved up from Director of Membership to the Director of Publications and the following year became the first Director of Exhibitions before becoming one of MOMA’s trustees—most of the artists with whom Lynes was closest (Wescott,  Cadmus, French, and Tooker) are hardly recognized today as major innovators, and would probably be unknown to most younger art students. Cadmus, French, and Tooker have often been grouped primarily with American realists of the 1930s and early 40s along with figures such as Grant Wood, Reginald Marsh, and Thomas Hart Benton. Although their work has been collected by some major institutions, they are recognized as anomalies, painting realism at a time when European art and soon US art would become dominated by painters interested in abstraction. Although Wescott was perceived in some New Critical academic circles as being an excellent writer of novellas and novels such as The Pilgrim Hawk and The Grandmothers, today his writing is virtually ignored because of his traditional methods of storytelling. And none of these gay artists are of the importance of figures of the same generation—those born in the last years of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century—such as gay friends Aaron Copland (1900), Virgil Thomson (1896), and Leonard Bernstein who was born another decade later in 1918. When one thinks of them in relationship to John Cage (1917), Merce Cunningham (1919), and, born a few more years later, Robert Rauschenberg (1925), and Jasper Johns (1930)—who might be said to represent just such a gay grouping as Lynes’ friends—we have little choice but to make a major distinction of their artistic contributions.

     For all that, Lynes’ nudes and even his portraits maintain a freshness today that is hard to deny. And when compared, for example, to another gay popular portrait photographer and writer such as Carl Van Vechten, one immediately recognizes Lynes’ genius as opposed to Van Vechten’s old-fashioned if loveable photos which read as being just a step up from snapshots.

 

 

                                                          “Robert (Buddy) X. McCarthy and John Leapheart,” 1952

 

    And a large number of the Lynes’ nudes we see in the documentary point in the direction of Robert Mapplethorpe (1946, of my own generation). Indeed, Lynes was the best artist of his tight community. And it does remain frustrating that there hasn’t been any large-scale exhibition of his work, or when there are smaller well-intentioned shows such as the 2001 DC Moore gallery exhibition Interwoven Lives: George Platt Lynes and His Friends the arts still receive such basically homophobic reactions such as Ken Johnson’s comments in The New York Times:

 

“Lynes believed that his most important works were his noncommercial studies of the male nude. (In the late 1940's, the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey took an interest in this body of work.) Today these photographs, though expertly made, look rather silly—an arty mix of classicizing style and soft pornography. The most interesting pictures, because of their greater historical as well as psychological specificity, remain the images of people who made Lynes's world one of uncommon creative fecundity—Katherine Anne Porter, George Balanchine, W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster and many others.” 

 

But then perhaps I should add that the critic Johnson was not particularly fond of art by women or people of color either.

    As excellent and informative as Shahid’s documentary is, however, it ends up sounding too much like a squad of cheerleaders shouting out for a George Platt Lynes retrospective while declaiming at the very same moment the Kinsey Institute’s refusal to open up Pandora’s damn box. Let us hope such a show happens and someday someone will gain entry to Lynes’ hidden trove. We can only pray it doesn’t contain child pornography or something villainous that would surely end any hopes that Lynes might find his rightful place among US artists of photography. But someone who had burned his fashion photos, I’d argue, would surely never have saved outright pornography.

 

Los Angeles, July 22, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).