George Platt Lynes : A Life In Portraits

Date: Wednesday, November 18

Time: 6 – 7pm, Reception to follow

Place: Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art

26 Wooster Street, NY, NY 10013 http://www.leslielohman.org

Allen Ellenzweig will give a Powerpoint presentation about the life of the extraordinary twentieth-century American photographer, George Platt Lynes. Using a wide range of illustrated material, Allen Ellenzweig will offer portraits of the amazing cast of characters who peopled Lynes’ relatively short but exciting life (1907-1955), including Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Lincoln Kirstein, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore, and the PaJaMa photography collective (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French). Ellenzweig will also discuss all the major genres in which Lynes excelled: celebrity portraiture, ballet images, Surreal imaginings from Greek mythology, fashion photography, and, most especially, pictures of the male nude. Lynes created thousands of images of the male nude over three decades, few of which were exhibited or published in his lifetime. Through pictures and commentary, this presentation will describe how professional and personal friendships established cosmopolitan gay life in New York and Paris in the decades before and after World War II.

Allen Ellenzweig is an arts critic and author of The Homoerotic Photograph (Columbia University Press). His cultural commentaries have appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, The Forward, and the online journal, Tablet. He is currently working on a biography of George Platt Lynes for Oxford University Press. Allen Ellenzweig is a founding board member of the Robert Giard Foundation.

Event sponsors: The Robert Giard Foundation, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, and the George Platt Lynes Foundation.

image: George Platt Lynes, Untitled (Male Nude in Directors Chair), c. 1943 © Estate of George Platt Lynes