George Platt Lynes

Steven Kasher Gallery

poster for George Platt Lynes

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Steven Kasher Gallery presents George Plan Lynes, an exhibition of over 40 vintage prints drawn from an important private collection. The exhibition includes major examples of nudes, portraits. ballet pictures and surreal images photographed by this American master between 1933 and 1953.

Extraordinarily. Lynes celebrated homosexuality in an era of harsh repression. Lynes’ nudes embody an intimacy unequaled in their time. They are the template and inspiration for the modern homoerotic photograph; Mapplethorpe, Weber and Ritts are unthinkable without Lyncs.

Lynes’ portraits for Vogue and Bazaar remain amongst the most elegant in the modern canon. He is celebrated for the grace and inventiveness of the ballet images he made with George Balanchine. and for the psychological intensity of his surrealist images.

Born in East Orange, New Jersey. George Platt Lynes did not initially intend to have a career in photography. The summer after his graduation from high school, Lynes traveled to Paris, where he met the writers Gertrude Stein and Jean Cocteau. He returned to enroll at Yale University but left school after one semester. His parents helped him stan a publishing house, but the business soon failed. The serendipitous gift of a camera led him into taking portraits of his literary friends. including Marianne Moore. Colette. and W.H. Auden.

ln 1933 Lynes opened his first New York studio where he did fashion photography for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar; throughout the l930s his elegant portraits gained popularity among the city's elite. In I935, Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine invited Lyncs to produce promotional photographs for their ballet company. For twenty years. Lyncs photographed many of the era's greatest ballet dancers. Balanchine hailed the photographer's work as "all that will be remembered of my repertory in a hundred years."

The l940s saw Lynes' decline as a fashion photographer. but also the production of his extraordinary male nudes. After an ill-fated foray into Hollywood publicity photography, Lynes retumed to New York, but was stricken with debt and illness. Diagnosed with cancer in May 1955, he died later that year at age 48.

Media

Schedule

from March 01, 2012 to April 07, 2012

Opening Reception on 2012-03-01 from 18:00 to 20:00

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