NYAB Event - George Platt Lynes Exhibition

George Platt Lynes Exhibition

Throckmorton Fine Art

This event has ended.

The gallery is pleased to offer an exhibit of photographs by George Platt Lynes. The selection includes previously unseen images made from negatives conserved in cold storage at The Kinsey Institute.

Lynes, who was born in 1907, went to Europe in 1925 to better prepare for admission to college. In Paris, Gertrude Stein befriended him, and introduced him to her circle of artists and writers. He attended Yale briefly, but dropped-out and began a career in New York as a photographer. His talent led to assignments for Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, and Vogue; in those magazines, Lynes showcased fashion photos and celebrity portraits. The portraits- made in New York, Hollywood, and Europe- include luminaries such as Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Katharine Hepburn, and Salvador Dali. Lynes was especially celebrated for his dance photographs: the elegant, imaginative pictures of George Balanchine and his ballet company and are among Lynes’s most acclaimed achievements.

Lynes worked exclusively in black-and-white, and his photography is marked by the influence of Surrealism, its fascination with the unconscious, dreams, sexuality, and unexpected juxtapositions. He used light— and shadows and darkness— to great dramatic effect. Lynes’s pictures, exhibited at prominent galleries in New York, were included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 show, “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism.”

From the beginning of his career, Lynes photographed the male nude. Given the repressive social and political environment of the era, those intimate photographs were circulated only among his close circle of friends. Lynes considered the male nudes to be his most important work: he understood that they would establish his legacy. In 1955, when he was 48 years old and dying, he entrusted his negatives to his friend Alfred Kinsey for safekeeping. Those negatives have been in cold storage at The Kinsey Institute, unseen for the past half-century.

[Image: George P. Lynes "Ralph Cowan" (1952) Gelatin silver print]