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).
