Original subtitles

-He made his fantasies into reality.

-I think he was truly original.

-There's such a breadth to his work.

-He created magic with his camera.

-The legacy he left with these pictures is so profound.

-I really came to think of him as the archetype

for an out gay American artist.

He is such a complicated figure.

The task at hand is to understand the human being

as a really full artist and as a person of his world.

-We see this world that's gone. It's passed.

It's lost, but we see it through George's eyes.

-George Platt Lynes isn't an household name,

and the story of his life as a little boy from New Jersey

ending up going to France,

knowing all these incredible people,

producing some of the most important photography ever done,

and then tragically, being somewhat ostracized

and dying penniless--

I mean, that's a story worth knowing about.

-George felt that his male nudes were the best of his work.

None of it was done at the behest of any commercial entity.

He was entirely dependent on his own sense of inspiration.

It all came out of him, so he was free.

-That was his art, and he wasn't able to practice it legally.

-George tells us that it wasn't always the way it is now.

He's this great creative genius

who was propelled by his aesthetic imagination,

by his need to suppress his gay identity

and his need to express it at the same time.

That just ground him down until he expired of a broken heart.

-I'm not sure why George Platt Lynes

still to this day does not receive the acclaim

that I think the work should.

-Toward the end of his life, George destroyed

an enormous number of his portraits of people.

-George was very ill and conscious of what he wanted

or didn't want to survive as his legacy.

-Could you imagine if this legacy was lost?

-George Platt Lynes was a very young, aspiring writer.

-When George was 18 years old,

his family sent him off to Paris.

-This ambitious kid from New Jersey

who wanted so much to be part of the cultural scene

of his moment.

The romance of the 1920s in Paris.

It was the summit of all

that anyone who was interested in culture

could possibly have lived through.

-That expatriate scene in Paris was laced through

with queer relationships.

-These modernists, all sorts of writers, visual artists,

and dancers interacting with each other.

-They all seem to be connected by Gertrude Stein.

She is the red thread that runs through this world.

-The family took George to meet Gertrude Stein.

She thought he was adorable.

And he was part of Gertrude Stein's salon.

-What an influence on George.

-He's mentioned in her infamous

"Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"

as "Baby."

-George came back to the United States.

He was accepted at Yale.

He wrote to Stein and he said that Yale was boring.

It had no interest for him.

Stein snapped back at him,

and she said that he was supposed to go back to school.

He told her that he wanted to go to salons in New York.

He dropped out of Yale in 1926.

What was he going to do?

-George connected with the literary and art world

in New York.

He was introduced to Monroe Wheeler

and to Glenway Wescott.

Monroe and Glenway were expatriates

who were part of the Stein circle.

-Glenway was, in his day,

the most famous writer in the United States.

Early on, he acquired a lover who would be with him

for the next 60 or 70 years-- Monroe Wheeler.

Monroe went on to be one of the founders

and directors of the Museum of Modern Art.

Monroe and Glenway were famously,

I would say, serial polygamists.

They had an open relationship.

In their relationship, they came usually three

or sometimes even four.

But the two of them had a bond that never failed.

When Glenway came to New York,

George went over to the hotel down in the Village

where Glenway was staying.

On the table, Glenway had a photograph

of his lover Monroe.

George picked it up, whistled.

And we still have Glenway's journal that said, "Uh-oh."

George went into that ménage

and was with them for about 30 years of his life.

So, he was the first, and I was the last.

Glenway went back to Paris and encouraged George to visit.

George had started a little bookstore in New Jersey.

He sold it six months later.

He had just enough money left over

from the proceeds of that sale

to buy himself a steamship ticket back to Paris.

By then, Glenway and Monroe were living

in Villefranche-sur-Mer, which is on the Riviera,

and they lived in a nice hotel above a popular sailors' bar.

And upstairs, Jean Cocteau lived.

One of George Lynes' first photographs

was of Cocteau with a spyglass

because Jean would like to sit up in his window

and wait for the fleet to come in.

George lived with them for another year there.

-While in France in the late '20s,

they made the so-called Travel Albums--

these very, very intimate snapshots

and some early portraiture of George Platt Lynes,

Glenway Wescott, and Monroe Wheeler.

George set his sights on Monroe Wheeler.

Whatever George went after, he invariably got.

-George decided that he was going to love Monroe

and that Monroe should love him,

and that Glenway just had to be thrown in

because that was all part of Monroe's life.

-George packed up and came back to New York.

George would send Monroe letters,

and their correspondence brought them closer.

-At Yale, in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library,

they have the papers of George Platt Lynes.

I spent a very steamy summer in the library

reading the correspondence between Lynes,

Glenway Wescott, and Monroe Wheeler,

Lynes is in America, and Monroe Wheeler is in Paris.

And the letters early in their relationship

are really erotically charged.

Desire is something that survives time.

It feels very fresh.

It feels, when you're in the archive,

that it is as new as the day he wrote it.

"I have loved no one but you. I dream of you.

I will do everything in my power to make you happy,

to make you glad you came, to make you love me more.

Believe in me."

There are also these telegrams.

There's one that says, "Your love has made me strong.

I fear and regret nothing."

I mean, some of them are so poetic.

"All here is wind and wisteria,

and I long for your shadowy beauty."

This is 1928.

I guess he was 21 years old.

And he looked incredible.

-George really, originally, hoped to be a writer.

-Over a dinner with Glenway and Monroe

when they were visiting back in New Jersey to see him,

he was in despair because he had realized

he didn't have the talent to be a writer.

Now what?

That evening, they told George,

"Let's look at your photographs."

The travel photographs that George had been making

when the three of them had traveled around Europe.

And it was Glenway who said, "George, why don't you see

if you can make a living doing this?"

-Their encouragement got him serious about photography.

-He gave himself an exhibition in his former bookshop,

of his first portraits and some of the landscapes.

His father giving a rare edition of "Huckleberry Finn,"

and so he sold that and that was his next steamship ticket

back to France.

George, by now, was fascinated with photography

and was taking photographs of some of the artists

and the writers and the musicians

that clustered around Glenway and Monroe.

-With Gertrude Stein's portrait for "Four Saints in Three Acts,"

he became a hotshot.

-The fact that Platt Lynes was self-taught is incredible to me.

-He managed, by dint of sheer willpower,

to learn how to be a photographer.

-Photographers in those days were vying to--

"I want to be considered an artist."

Like, photography is art-- is it?

-There were very few outlets.

I mean, there were very few galleries

that showed photography.

Almost no museums.

-On the third steamship trip that George made over to France,

he had a very fortuitous voyage.

He met the New York gallerist Julien Levy

over a bridge game, I think it was.

A year later, George was being invited by Julien

to show his photographs.

And that was really one of the first

photography art exhibitions in New York.

And then off he went, like a meteor.

-Julien Levy pairs George Platt Lynes

with Walker Evans in 1932 for an exhibition.

It was noticed. It was reviewed.

George is included in the first exhibition

at the Museum of Modern Art that features photography,

in 1932, called

"Murals by American Painters and Photographers."

-I think that was a monumental event

in the early part of George Platt Lynes' career.

-That sort of made him a name. People knew who he was.

-Suddenly, the entire art world was looking at George.

-George started to get fashion assignments in New York,

and he started his first studio.

-George's first assignment for Saks

was photographing the feet of famous women.

-Within a few more years, he became the most important

fashion photographer in New York.

He became the top of the game.

We're talking now about a boy that's 26,

and that was his time, that was his day,

and he was very successful,

made a lot of money, and lived well.

-I love George Platt Lynes' fashion pictures.

I think they're so odd and beautiful.

There was always an edge,

something that made you think a little, that had a story.

-There was Lynes taking these women,

and taking these clothes,

and putting them in the most fabulous settings

that could've been out of a surrealist painting.

He is creating a world

that looks like the world of nobody else,

especially at a time when fashion and advertising

was trying to make everything look real.

From George Platt Lynes, we get to see a whole new way

of looking at the 1930s.

-It was fascinating watching my uncle work,

and I remember going to his studio on Madison Avenue.

-It's a lively studio.

-Totally unpretentious.

-He wore workman's overalls cinched at the waist.

-Usually he would have his shirt off,

and sometimes he'd be smoking a little Cherub.

-He moved like poetry, like a dancer.

-It was New York in the summer,

so it was hotter than hell, and there's no air conditioning,

but you've got to photograph a fur coat

for, you know, the winter line.

What are you going to do to make it happen?

So, he went and got close to 50 ice blocks,

and he made an ice-block wall.

Which was also problematic because then they melted,

and so it had all this water damage.

-He did have a few innovations, like he had a ring light.

Sometimes you see the circle in the eyes of the model.

-He created a way of working that is kind of a template

for a lot of photographers who came after him.

-George Platt Lynes really, really excelled in portraiture.

Someone who's really a master of studio control.

Posing.

Lighting.

-He just had an instinct about how to light things.

-George devised a way of lighting

as if it came from nowhere and everywhere.

-A volume of light without intensity.

George also loved the large-format camera

because it could see with greater clarity than the eye.

And so that's why you see incredible detail and clarity

in his images.

That's also why he had to put perfect subjects

in front of the camera, too.

-The diversity of influences was so strong.

It was mythology, surrealism, and theater.

-They're very sensuous photographs,

but also electrically charged.

-He had a gay sensibility.

-There is a lot of emotion.

There's a lot of authentic sexual energy.

-At Harper's Bazaar,

Diana Vreeland in the editor's letters

is talking about,

"Not everybody has a jukebox in their studio,

but Lynes does."

-He did stuff that people weren't supposed to do,

and he wasn't ashamed of doing it.

-You don't see an antecedent to his style.

He invented it.

-There's nothing like it anywhere else.

-He was a genius at it.

-He created a way of seeing.

He created a way of photographing.

-He just wanted to get that moment.

And suddenly he'd click.

-In 1934, Europe was moving towards war,

and Glenway and Monroe moved back to the United States

and set up an apartment with George

at 89th Street off of Madison Avenue.

-Monroe and George had their own bedroom.

-It was three guys living together.

That worked as a beard for Wescott and Wheeler.

-It was a threesome, as much as threesomes usually are.

I don't think they're ever perfect.

-All of them had lovers.

Sometimes they were two, sometimes they were three,

sometimes there were a ménage of four.

-Monroe and Glenway's relationship was like US Steel.

Nothing was going to change that.

But also, George was part of the relationship.

They had no rules.

I think they're to be credited for that.

We're still pretty stodgy

thinking about relationships, I think.

-They made a triumph of their trilogy.

-To talk about George's circle is to talk about

a remarkable moment in cultural history.

George was allied to some of the great transatlantic,

cosmopolitan figures, many of whom were gay,

or lesbian, bisexual.

-This is the social and cultural milieu of New York,

of the United States.

-A circle of people who were, you know, central

to the cultural life of their time.

George lived in an avant-garde moment.

-All those people sort of became like a collective.

There's this fantastic interconnectedness.

-The friendships,

the intimate relationships,

the love affairs, the fights.

The success stories,

the failures.

-People, I think, don't always appreciate

how key that period of between the wars was

in developing American culture.

-These artists suddenly are ripe for rediscovery,

for relevance to our contemporary moment.

"The Young and The Evil"

was an exhibition about this group of artists

who were in New York in the '30s and '40s

and who were friends with each other

and were influencing each other with a lot of fluidity

between their intellectual projects,

their artistic projects, their social and their sexual lives.

-When you look at the art that these guys were making,

they were addressing it to each other.

They're a model for a group of friends

who are creating culture together.

And I think what's happening now

is there's, like, a lot of gay artists

who are in their 20s and early 30s

who are making work which, in their mind,

is coming out of new and untold freedoms

around representing gay sexuality,

but had this precedent that in many cases

they're not even aware of that was nestled into

the early part of the 20th century.

In the case of Lynes and his friends,

they're like the first gay American artists

in a full sense.

-"Oh, before Stonewall, everyone was in the closet."

Not true.

-It was an age in which

cocktail parties were common.

-If you were at a gay cocktail party,

you were very likely to meet some gay creative types.

Now, people don't have cocktail parties anymore.

They don't know what they're missing.

-There are some people whose special task in culture

is almost like a bee.

They're like the cross-pollinators.

And Lynes was clearly that.

-Everything floated around George,

his parties, his connections.

-Lynes lived somewhat luxuriously.

Not even "somewhat"--

he was an extremely luxurious man.

He wanted to, like, be surrounded

by sumptuous, beautiful people and things.

-He wanted to live, you know, a glamorous life,

in some of the best years in the history of New York City.

-He had dinners and cocktail parties.

And then...

...people went into the bedroom.

The party kept going.

-It was opulent and exciting and very sexy.

-He was drinking. He was cavorting.

He was enjoying everyone's snappy patter.

And there was probably a lot of snappy patter,

you know, in New York in the '30s and '40s.

-They're a group of people that were extremely modern

and asking questions

about what relationships can be on every level,

and how they could be different.

Part of what looks so contemporary

about George Platt Lynes,

and about this group of artists in general,

is the way that their art that deals with sexuality

seems fun.

One of the things that's really deadly

about looking at this group of artists,

and about this time in history,

is to try and be way too serious about it,

in which it's like, "Oh, these incredible masters,

which have been forgotten to time."

It's like, you know,

when Paul Cadmus and his bisexual boyfriend,

Jared French, and Jared French's wife,

the painter and photographer Margaret French,

started a collaborative, they called it PaJaMa,

which was short for the first letters of their names--

Paul, Jared, Margaret.

And PaJaMa is silly.

Like, it's a silly name.

And the work that they did was take pictures

of their friends, like, naked in Fire Island.

Like, this is not, like, the society

for contemplating existential dread.

Like, this is funny.

These are people who were pushing homoeroticism in art

to a very far point,

as far as it had ever been done in art since antiquity.

And at the same time, it's important to acknowledge

that they are buoyed on all this whole current of privilege.

You know, they are white men who are more or less affluent.

They were not outsiders. They were not on the margins.

So, I think that all of these forces kind of lifted them up

so that they were free to go so far in this one way.

-George was as beautiful as a Greek statue.

-He was so spectacular-looking, you know.

I was overcome by it.

-I remember him always with a suntan,

which became more and more pronounced

as his hair became whiter and whiter.

He was obsessed with beautiful people

because he knew he was one of them.

-He didn't like not being the center of attention.

He would charm the birds out of the trees if he could,

usually to his own advantage.

-Very self-centered, egotistical.

Very loving, at the same time.

-George could be extremely wicked, extremely catty,

extremely devilish, didn't mince words.

-You can just imagine this person behind the typewriter

just popping off his letters with incredible wit,

with incredible humor, with incredible innuendo.

-He had a canary, and he only taught him to speak one thing,

which was when somebody walked into the room,

the canary always said,

"Get a load of you."

-George was never hidden.

George's brother Russell was asked at one point

when it was that George came out of the closet,

and Russell has always said

that George never came out of the closet--

he was never in it.

-George wanted it to be

a perfectly normal thing of life.

Okay, fine. So what?

Everybody is different, thank God.

-George had come out of this really

straitlaced Episcopalian family,

with a minister father and a high-society type mother,

and here's flamboyant, fearless, unfiltered George.

Oh, my.

-When Monroe left and went home to Europe with Glenway,

George was devastated and cried on his father's shoulder

at some point and made it quite clear

that Monroe was the most important person in his life.

-His father was a Victorian gentleman.

I mean, he knew the Oscar Wilde trials.

He couldn't believe that George was stuck in this mess.

George didn't think of it as a mess.

He thought of it as a really wonderful situation.

-Russell Lynes, who was George Platt Lynes' younger brother

just by a couple of years,

did everything the straight way, in every sense of that word.

He went to Harvard. He got married.

He was an editor of Harper's Weekly.

-Russell loved his brother, and George loved Russell.

They were deeply devoted to one another.

-He was my favorite uncle.

My memories of him are, of course, very fond.

Uncle George loved to be in the sun.

And once we were out in the middle of this lake,

he stripped down to a jockstrap.

That was all he had on.

And though I was a fairly young teenager,

I knew that Uncle George was gay.

And I was brought up in a family

where it didn't matter who you were

unless you were, you know, a right-wing Republican.

-Lincoln Kirstein and George were classmates

at the Berkshire School, which is a prep school.

But it wasn't really until later,

after George moves to New York City

with Glenway and Monroe, that they really form a bond.

Lincoln was a great, great supporter

of George's work early on.

-The thing I remember about Lincoln

was that he was astonishingly handsome.

I mean, he walked in a room and everybody's, "Mm?"

We have to thank Lincoln for the fact

that we have a major ballet company in this town.

-With his passion for dance,

Lincoln Kirstein brought Balanchine to the United States.

Started the American Ballet Company,

which became the New York City Ballet.

That gave George a lifetime position

as the official photographer for the ballet,

which he did for about 30 years.

-George was at his best working with a group of dancers.

-He seems very, very intuitive in exploring the body,

exploring corporal form.

-You think about dance as being something in motion.

And how do you convey the magic of that experience?

-Highly structured, very classical, very sculptural--

that's what Balanchine used to love about George's work.

-Balanchine said that George Platt Lynes' photographs

would be all that would be remembered of his work

in 100 years.

-Once George found the ballet, he found the guys.

-Many of the dancers were people

who ended up posing for him without clothes.

-You didn't really often see photographs

of the male nude from the 1930s.

-There were a lot of other people who were doing

fashion work, portrait work at that time.

But in terms of doing the male nudes,

George Platt Lynes is singular in that regard.

-The nudes were an essential part of his work.

They were the heart, the dynamo that ran everything.

-This was the most important work to him.

-His true intent was the creation of art.

-He loved the male body, and it shows.

It's the energy, it's the tension of the photograph.

He brought drama, he brought theatre.

Good photographs are always demanding.

You want to spend time with them.

You want to flirt with them.

You want to look at them, "Hmm, gee,

wish I was in that room."

-The art that he valued the most,

these nude photographs,

was being made in the same studios,

in the same spaces, with the same props,

as the advertising and fashion work.

And you see the same props showing up again.

-It is genuinely erotic

and, at the same time, really sophisticated.

This is where his strength was.

This is where he is unique.

This is where he stood out.

-George Platt Lynes' strongest work

were his male nudes.

I think it's inevitable that that's the work

that he will be remembered for.

-From the very beginning, George photographed the nudes.

-The first subject was himself.

His first nudes were self-portraits.

He made a valentine that he gave to his new boyfriend,

Monroe Wheeler,

of self-portraits that were nude.

Late in their lives, still in Monroe's room,

next to his bed, was that valentine.

He kept it forever.

-His brother, Russell, was one of his first portrait models.

-The next series were Yale friends

of his younger brother Russell,

who were willing to take their clothes off,

and George practiced on them.

-A lot of this material that I was finding

came from the papers of Monroe Wheeler,

from his personal holdings that are now

in the hands of a man named Vincent Cianni.

-It's an amazing documentation

of not only their love for each other,

but the kind of very physical sexual relationship

they had with each other.

-So, I was going through these archives with him,

and he pulled out these little folder of photographs.

And in it was a brown paper envelope that they had come in,

and on one of them it said "Intimacies,"

and on another, it said, "MW-GPL Private."

Sounds good.

The images that were inside them were photographs

that have never been reproduced of George Platt Lynes

and Monroe Wheeler in the early '30s, having sex.

-They were basically selfies

that they made of each other at the time.

-What really struck me about them was the intimacy,

the real gentleness of the sexuality in them.

It was so sweet.

-George Platt Lynes felt that the word pornography

was too loosely used in describing male nudes--

they were immoral or somehow wrong.

They came out of a lineage of the male nude

in the history of art going back to antiquity.

-The definitions between art and pornography, to me,

it lies in the intent.

If it's not meant to be pornography,

I don't think that it is.

Lynes, I think saw himself, rightfully so, as a fine artist,

which isn't to say that fine artists

cannot also make pornography.

-That line between pornography and eroticism is very fine.

-They're intimate.

And are we to say that every intimate photograph

is pornographic?

-George did not like pornography.

That didn't mean he didn't eroticize

a lot of his photography.

But it never went over the edge into pornography, ever.

It was always more elegant than pornography.

-We did discover a few pieces, though.

-I suspect.

-Part of what I love about Lynes' work,

it's the first time you really see the male body

in an art photographer's work

without the excuse of physique or classicism.

It's just people as they are.

At the time that Lynes was making this work,

it was completely groundbreaking even to show the male nude

or to have, like, an erection in a photo.

And you see people in a way that they wouldn't have been

able to express themselves publicly at the time.

-You had to be very chary and wary about anything gay.

-These images are still dangerous and provocative.

We can only begin to imagine what this was like

in the 1940s and '50s, during the McCarthy years,

when one could be jailed for this material.

And yet, George did them.

- The times were, um... problematic

in terms of people within that circle

not really sort of understanding

the power dynamics that were going on.

George Platt Lynes considered himself modernist.

Modernists, it was their duty, really,

to break social sort of artistic taboos.

Of course, interracial relations were taboo during the period.

Same-sex relationships were also taboo.

So, they really loved this idea

of mixing the erotic, the homoerotic with the racial

as a means of showing that they're modernist,

that they're a sort of vanguard

you know, against the status quo.

But at the same time,

there's a very exploitative aspect to that.

-It was not written about.

The work was never published.

It was never shown in museums or galleries.

-When you know you're making work to share with the world,

there's a different kind of energy that goes into that.

When you're making work for yourself

and for maybe a very small circle of friends,

it can be whatever you want.

And it can be as daring as you want to be.

But it must have been difficult for him to be making work

that he knew no one was going to see.

And maybe that's part of what, the reason why

it's so potent still.

-Here I have a collection of mostly vintage

George Platt Lynes pictures

from different eras.

Then a whole series of pictures

which are of three different models together

and a series of them sort of disrobing.

And what we discovered

once these were printed in a large format,

was George had Scotch-taped their eyes closed

to possibly have them not become aroused,

or so he could direct them

and they would have to just act on their own

without being nervous around each other.

Or maybe because the surprise being

that there's a third person waiting for him

once he does arrive in bed.

And here's the one having his underwear taken off

by the other, and he's sort of grimacing,

not knowing what's going to happen.

-George was charming.

He was able to get men

who sometimes didn't want to remove their clothes,

to remove their clothes and to sit for the camera.

-He could charm any model into doing anything

he wanted them to do.

-George would go to the YMCA a lot.

Or if the fleet was in, he would go down and meet the sailors.

He can photograph the toughest-looking guy

and make him look like a million bucks.

He didn't care really so much what you did in your life.

He cared about who you really were.

You know, you can feel that.

-George's models were lovers, friends,

the physically perfect ones.

-Some of the models did come from ballet.

Some of the models were hustlers.

Some of them were gymnasts or athletes.

-There are so many people in these photographs

that I don't know and that I can never know.

We don't have much information about them anymore.

-This is one of the first photographs

he took of me

when I first met him in the studio.

Yes, I did do some modeling for him.

He filmed me because he liked me.

He wanted to take my picture.

So, he took some nudes of me and so forth.

-Glenway Wescott

introduced me to George at a party of George's.

George was famous for giving a lot of parties.

Glenway asked him to photograph me.

And George scheduled not one but three different sessions.

I was very happy with that, I can tell you.

To be photographed by him was as though we were just chatting.

'Cause he always seemed to be looking the other way

when he was taking a shot.

George wanted to catch you at a moment

when you were least expecting it.

I liked it. I loved it.

-George had fallen in love

with a studio assistant of his, George Tichenor.

Tichenor went off to war

and was, unfortunately, killed in the war.

George then took up with Tichenor's younger brother,

Jonathan, famously declaring,

"If I can't have the Tichenor I want,

I'll take the Tichenor I can get."

This was circa 1945.

George decided to leave the domestic arrangement

and move in with Jonathan Tichenor.

And Glenway Wescott was so mortified that--

that George would so openly declare his homosexuality

in this kind of way, as though all of New York society

didn't already well know what the three men

had been doing all these years

living in a heap together.

-George had lunch regularly at the Plaza Hotel.

It was right across the street from his studio

on Madison and 60th.

And he invited his sister-in-law, Mildred,

to lunch so that he could introduce her

to his new boyfriend, Jonathan.

He pulled out a box with a ring in it,

and he said to Mildred,

"Jonathan and I are going to be married."

Well, Mildred tells us that she was flabbergasted.

She said, "The homosexuality was fine, it was one thing.

But the fantasy of getting married

was something completely off the wall."

There was a kind of visionary quality,

a sort of genius, to George's fantasies.

-George suddenly declares that he has accepted a position

running the Vogue Studios in Hollywood,

which everyone in the circle thought

was a tremendous mistake.

-I think he rather imagined that this was going to be

a terrific career boost.

-He goes out there after going through not one,

but two bankruptcies.

He always lived beyond his means.

He was always looking for more.

His lifestyle was never rich enough.

-Money was the bane of his existence.

He simply did not know how to constrain himself financially.

-You know, you have to admire people

who don't worry about how to pay the rent

and just want to make art and somehow survive.

-George was enamored of fortune tellers,

astrologists, numerologists,

and often consulted them throughout his life,

at a moment when he kind of was looking for

a way to make the next decision, make the next move.

And I sometimes felt like he was shopping around for his future.

-He's trying to start anew with Condé Nast in Los Angeles.

He does some remarkable portrait work there.

-Despite photographing some of the great beauties

and iconic male heartthrobs of the period,

it was a bit of a shit show.

Life in Hollywood, at the standard George wanted to live,

was goddamn expensive.

He bought a house. He had to have it decorated.

It had to be designed to the nines.

He threw parties there.

It just ate up money.

-He soon finds himself in financial straits again.

He suffers from living beyond his means.

-And he kind of knew, at a certain point,

that he should have stayed in New York.

-George said this, that,

"It's one of the most homosexual towns,

but it's so anti-homosexual."

He deeply missed New York, and he missed his friends.

-He starts to suffer depression.

He begins to lose interest in even making photographs.

And if you look at the correspondence,

especially with Bernard Perlin, there's a futility,

and there's a self-destructive...

or almost a, um...

a wanting for it to be over.

So, George comes back to New York in '48, bankrupt.

He's forced to, you know, borrow money from friends.

-The studio space that he left in New York was taken over

by a young fashion photographer named Richard Avedon.

-Here's a person who's still relatively young.

He's only in his 40s.

One would think he still has a lot to give, a lot to do.

But I think he lacked the discipline

that some of the photographers

who really come to the forefront in the '40s--

I'm thinking specifically of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.

-There was this real shift

in terms of what was happening in magazines.

-Alright, Marcel! Lights!

-The movie "Funny Face" with Fred Astaire

and Audrey Hepburn

is about Dick Avedon.

-Holy-moly! You look fabulous!

Stop! Stop!

-I can't stop! Take the picture!

-That famous scene where Audrey Hepburn's

running down the stairs of the Louvre

is emblematic of what fashion photography

had become, and George Platt Lynes

had never taken pictures like that.

His pictures were much more classical.

They were quieter.

They were just more static.

-He was a has-been by the late '40s.

-The high-living days, the glory days are over.

He's been supplanted.

-George Platt Lynes, he was embraced

by the titans of New York modernism.

He was reaching a level of success

very early on in his career.

In a way, he just kind of burns out.

He wanted to show the work that he considered his best,

which is the male nude,

and there were no outlets for that.

I'm certain that added to that futility, to that depression,

and, you know, he was just...

he was, you know, painted into a corner.

-In the early '50s, he was assessed for back taxes.

The IRS forced him to sell off

basically all of his professional life.

-His brother Russell rescued it by buying it back from IRS

and then lent it all back to George.

-My father put up with him.

Though we loved him, he was not easy.

-They had to bail him out again and again.

They discovered that he had given his Picasso as collateral

to someone else as well.

-It must have been extremely demoralizing

to have this happen to him.

-It was a very important relationship

between Bernard Perlin and George Platt Lynes.

-From the late '40s through the early '50s,

Bernard had gone to live and paint in Rome.

-George's letters were delicious.

Sharing updates on their lives,

certainly on their sexual conquests.

-Right away, he arrives in New York on the 16th.

He calls George instantly while he's waiting on the docks

for them to unload his Vespa.

Goes right to George's that evening,

and he's there for months thereafter.

And you can see the parties.

They were both men who were avid pursuers

of the sensual pleasures of life.

Bernard moved into a spare room at George's apartment

and was involved in various all-boys soirees.

One story he told was of how inventive George Lyons could be,

and there was apparently an evening alone together,

after one of George's dinner parties

had broken up for the night,

that George got a fire going in the fireplace, laid out...

Jared French designed needlepoint pillows,

and on the pillows,

George produced an ice cube.

-George was incredibly inventive, incredibly playful,

and highly exploratory and sensual.

-He must have been very charming because he got around.

-George was a hungry soul.

-Oh, he was in love with a lot of people.

-I think everything that George did was fueled by sexual energy,

and the boys were fuel for George.

George loved the attention,

and I think he also loved the conquest.

-As long as they were young and good-looking,

he liked to photograph them.

-"Dougie"-- Laurie Douglas--

was a fashion model in the 1940s,

and in fact, became George Lynes' favorite model.

He used her frequently in his work, in his fashion work,

but also in his fine art photography, to call it that.

They became not only creatively collaborative

in his-- in his studio,

but they became very, very close, very close friends.

Interestingly enough, George, who was a devout homosexual,

fell into a sort of on-again, off-again

sexual relationship with Dougie.

She was incredibly accepting of this wild world

of these high-society gay men

and all of their various exploits.

There was a certain kind of sadistic element

in certain episodes.

-His behavior, seen from today's standards,

might look, um... aggressive.

Let's put it that way.

-There was a moment when Bernard Perlin

was staying with George in his apartment,

and Dougie was there.

It's nighttime. They're all asleep.

And all of a sudden, Bernard says

he was awakened in the middle of the night.

And it's George Platt Lynes saying,

"Perlin, get in here. Fuck Dougie."

And Bernard told me this story about, you know,

how, you know, he has to get up,

he has to go in the bedroom, he has to make love to Dougie,

and George is there, basically, you know,

watching and recording.

The stories are quite bawdy sometimes, very, very explicit.

On another evening with a young model

named Gary Garrett,

and George likewise pounded on the wall

between their bedrooms-- "Perlin, get in here!"

And on entering, the young man was face-down on the bed.

George was in a chair,

and George instructed Bernard to mount Gary

because Gary had just had a hemorrhoidectomy,

and George's philosophy was that he should

remount the horse as soon as possible

and that Bernard just proceed and do this young man a service.

It seemed to me

somewhat, you know, manipulative and sadistic.

-♪ It's too darn hot ♪

♪ It's too darn hot ♪

-Kinsey was introduced to George Platt Lynes

through Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler.

-There was such admiration for Dr. Kinsey.

Their literary circle, they were just all in thrall

to the research that he was doing, and they were so eager

to participate because no one had done that

kind of focused study on homosexuality.

It was a marvelous declaration of hope and acceptance

for them.

-♪ According to the Kinsey Report ♪

♪ Every average man you know ♪

-George and Kinsey hit it off.

-He needed an expert on homosexuality among men.

-Kinsey became fascinated

with the world that George knew.

They got along famously.

-♪ 'Cause it's too, too, too darn hot ♪

♪ It's too darn hot ♪

♪ It's too, too darn hot ♪

-Dr. Kinsey had just published

"Sexuality in the Human Male"

and was looking for more artistic

and photographic representations

of the nude male, of gay men.

-Kinsey immediately started collecting work from George.

-Kinsey would frequently come to New York

and would attend some of these all-male parties

at George Lynes'.

He was there as voyeur.

He would be sitting on the sofa

with his notebook, watching.

-Kinsey is known to have said that he thought

that Lynes himself was one of the most tender lovers

he'd ever had the chance to watch.

-For him, it was taxonomic.

It was-- It was so-called proof of homosexuality.

-♪ It's too darn hot ♪

♪ It's too darn hot ♪

-The conversations about

just how the hell they were gonna get the photographs

from New York to Bloomington, Indiana...

In some ways, just takes you back.

-George was afraid that this legacy of the male nudes,

which he considered his most important work,

would disappear.

Who would want them? Who would take care of them?

-Lynes is worried that anyplace that they go,

these really erotic nudes,

something could happen to them.

-Are you a member of the Communist Party

or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

-This was the McCarthy era, the Red Scare era,

and it was also the Lavender Scare era.

-And there were witch hunts for homosexuals.

-Gay men and lesbians were also under suspicion.

-Homosexuality was the biggest taboo.

Everyone was terrified of it.

-It was illegal to put the work in an envelope

and send it across state lines.

-They could have been arrested

for the transport of these "filthy" images.

It was hot and dangerous stuff.

-When Lynes started thinking in a more sort of pointed way

about his legacy, it was really his relationship with Kinsey

that I think made him realize

that the Institute for Sex Research,

then to be called the Kinsey Institute,

would be a safe space for his work

to sort of be protected and preserved.

So, that's how we are lucky enough to have

this wonderful treasure trove.

-He was staring down a barrel without knowing it.

-I was supposed to meet him at the Plaza Hotel.

I saw this old man wandering around the lobby there,

and I didn't know it was George.

And he had on a black, ragged raincoat

and long hair, which he had curled.

He was obviously not himself, not like he used to be.

-He wanted to relive his youth in Paris.

He was as excited as could be.

-His trip to Paris,

which he hoped would rejuvenate him,

but it didn't.

-By the time he came back,

he was almost immediately hospitalized.

-The devastation of cancer, and the devastation was monumental.

I mean, it started in his lungs

and eventually went to his brain.

-What a waste.

-We went to the ballet a couple of times

after he got sick, even from the hospital.

He was in bed at the hospital, of course.

But he would get dressed,

we'd take a taxi from the hospital and go to the theater.

-He got out of his hospital gown,

put on his suit and tie,

and went AWOL to go to the ballet.

-Only Uncle George would have gotten out of a hospital bed

and gone AWOL, to the distress of an entire nursing staff.

Not too many people would have the balls to pull that one off.

Came back, took his clothes off, and got in--

back into bed, and died within the next few days.

-George was 47 when he died.

-I think about these things now that I'm older.

It seems like such a long time ago now.

But George reoccurs in my dreams occasionally.

There was a large crowd of people

that came to George's funeral at Saint George's church.

-The funeral was extremely well-attended.

All of his model friends, all of his friends in fashion.

-There have been rumors that there was an all-male orgy

that happened as a sort of celebratory send-off to George.

-I went to the funeral.

I don't remember there being any orgy,

but there could've been.

He had gang bangs.

-Near the end of his life, George destroyed his early work,

all of his fashion work.

-George was destroying so many

of those absolutely wonderful portraits.

It was just George.

-When George passed away,

George had entrusted his photographic negatives

and many of his prints to Bernard,

and named Bernard his artistic executor.

Bernard revered George, he adored George.

In fact, Bernard passed away in his bedroom

with a view of this photo.

-My name is Rebecca.

I'm the manager of traveling exhibitions

for the Kinsey Institute.

I have been in the art world for a long time.

I'd never heard of George Platt Lynes.

And I was actually really upset by that

because his work is so phenomenally beautiful.

-I guess, somewhere in your mind, you know about

that the Kinsey Institute exists,

but I don't really think of it being in the heart of Indiana.

One day, we went over and met the folks

at the Kinsey Institute.

And because they knew we were an art museum group, we said,

"Well, maybe there's a project we could work on together."

And they said, "Well, we have over 4,000 works of art here."

Which again, I was like, "Well, that makes total sense,"

but I never knew they collected art.

That's where I first really learned

the story of George Platt Lynes,

his relationship with Alfred Kinsey

that in some ways saved his legacy.

And the story, to me, was just so amazing

that it seemed logical that we needed to do a show on it.

-The Kinsey Institute has the largest collection

of George Platt Lynes' work.

This is a chance to elevate an artist

who should be in the canon, but is not.

-Why there hasn't been a major exhibition

of George Platt Lynes' work,

at least not on this scale, and to our knowledge, ever--

I think that's a really deep question.

I think it has a lot to do with his sexuality,

with his content.

-We've had some negative feedback about this show.

-I did get some hate mail.

I got one magazine written back across, it just said "smut."

But that, to me, makes it all the more important

that we would be doing an exhibition like this

because it's still relevant today.

There's no better time than absolutely right now

in a country that frankly has discriminated

against a lot of different groups of people

over its whole history and still does today in many ways.

So, Lynes, even though he's been dead since 1955, is so relevant.

I mean, it would be an ironic, horrible end

to his legacy to the world to have it also

technically stay, live in the darkness.

And we help him live again and keep his legacy alive.

-This seems legendary at this point, but it's real.

George entrusted a box, a so-called secret box,

to the Kinsey Institute.

-I love trying to push boundaries,

and so I think there was, like, a moment where I was like,

"So, like, how can we look in that box?"

-I know about the box, and I've never seen the box.

I don't know what's in the box.

At one point, some of the negatives

that I worked on digitizing, I kind of thought,

"Oh, maybe these are part of it," and no.

-Oh, gosh, you know, there it is, languishing away.

What's in that box?

It's like the holy grail.

-There is a box in the collection

that George Platt Lynes had requested to keep private,

and we have kept it private.

I don't know that the box will ever be made public.

I have not seen the contents of this box.

-Oh. -Yeah.

-Why did we lose track of George Platt Lynes?

How did he manage to drop out of history?

-I don't know why he disappeared.

-I... Honestly, I don't know.

-Why do you think George Platt Lynes disappeared?

-Well, I have no idea.

He was such an incredibly amazing photographer.

And, I mean, I never fully understood

why he seemed to become so eclipsed for a certain time

until, in essence, his rediscovery.

-My name is John Olsen, and I worked for Frederick Koch

for the last 13 years of his life.

He was the son of Fred Chase Koch.

He had a tremendous fortune and collected voraciously--

houses, art, furniture.

This is all the Platt Lynes prints

that came from Bernard Perlin's estate.

In 1985, Fred bought the enormous estate

of George Platt Lynes--

the items that weren't given, I think, to Kinsey--

and had it all carefully catalogued and then boxed

and placed in shelves in storage here.

And I don't... We never looked at them.

And he never...

You know, he didn't really discuss them much.

So, this is the photography library,

and these are a lot of the collection albums.

George Tichenor and Jonathan.

And these are two albums of some of his best nudes.

-Fred Koch amassed an enormous collection,

that when he died last year, in 2020,

I was asked to go in and appraise it.

And really, nobody knew exactly what was there.

It was like walking into King Tut's tomb.

-At the beginning of the appraisal process,

we thought maybe they were 8,000 items.

And by the time she was finished,

she said it's close to 20,000.

All of these cases, boxes are filled with cards,

each one representing a different photograph

or a different album.

-When we look at archives like this,

our worlds open up and we realize anything

that has been written about these photographers,

where they have been placed in the course of history,

is this big.

-I've been visiting this house for more than 30 years.

And today was the first day

that we really dug into, you know,

the archives of what's here.

It's incredible.

Maybe Fred-- he didn't even realize what was here.

The joy really was in assembling the collections

more than, you know, sharing them.

-George never entered the official photographic canon.

He's not the kind of figure

that most photography histories include,

and when they include him,

he's really considered a secondary figure.

-It's really hard to know

the extent of George Platt Lynes' work

because it was distributed in such weird ways

and sold piecemeal.

-His legacy was sleeping in storage boxes,

in file cabinets.

-If the works essentially stayed in the closet,

that's where his legacy is going to reside.

-Male nudes have never been acceptable at the museum level.

-There is undeniably a double standard

in the representation of female nudes versus male nudes.

-With the female nude, we're able to separate--

"this is art, this is the naughty."

With the male nude, I think it gets very confusing.

What did the male have? A lot of dangly parts.

And what do you do with that?

-It is frustrating for me as a woman to walk around

and see naked women everywhere in art museums,

and, like, there's one penis and everyone is freaking out.

The male body is much more threatening to people.

-I think that there is renewed interest

in George Platt Lynes now

because he's extremely relevant to the kind of art that people

are making and the kind of lives that people are leading.

-I think there's a way for him to be appreciated now

that didn't exist 10 or 20 years ago,

certainly not when he was living.

-George Platt Lynes perhaps now is on the radar more than ever.

There's a kind of resurgence of interest in his work.

-George Platt Lynes had a tremendous influence,

both directly and indirectly,

on subsequent generations of photographers.

-You sense his work

in the work of artists of the '70s and '80s.

Shows that it still circulated and had a lot of power.

-Lynes basically gave the subsequent photographers

the freedom to explore making work with the male nude.

-Peter Hujar and Mapplethorpe,

and there's a series of photographs

that George Platt Lynes took just of men's heads at climax,

which seemed to me to prefigure Warhol.

-So, this is a great example of a very obvious,

clear photograph

that Robert Mapplethorpe would have been inspired by.

-I don't know why George hasn't risen

to the mythological plane of Robert Mapplethorpe.

I think it's only because George produced his body of work

at a moment in time that is often overlooked.

-It would be fantastic to have a major institution

launch a one-man-- a show devoted to George Platt Lynes.

-It's crucial that there be

a major museum exhibition of this work

because it really requires sort of significant analysis.

-Why a major museum has never shown

his nudes, I don't understand.

So, you know,

it's something to do with American puritanism, I think.

For years and years, it was impossible to show anything

that even hinted at homosexuality

in American museums.

My museum would be delighted to show his work

if we could access enough of it.

It fits perfectly into our collection.

I mean, look around you. What do I have here?

I have a pretty, pretty targeted collection.

-We have to find a way to make this collection,

his other collections, accessible to the public.

Fred's will directed the establishment of a foundation,

and it's in its infancy right now.

It's a huge opportunity to be able to share Lynes' work.

-What we'd like to do is allow him to be seen

as he was seen

during the days in which he was a successful photographer.

-We need to have that overall contextualization

and get him back into the canon of photographic art history.

-There are so many pictures that we've never seen before

or have never been published.

So, that's kind of intriguing.

There's always more of a mystery about Mr. George Platt Lynes.

-His is a story that was extinguished way too soon.

He was a man who was so driven,

not only as a liver of life, but as a creator.

-With George Platt Lynes,

we have to realize that we're almost doing an archeology here,

that we're looking at fragments of an enormous person.

I think to understand George is to see him, not only his art

but his life, in the context of his time.

So, step back and look and say, well, where did he fit in

with Gertrude and Alice, and why?

And who was this famous young writer who was fascinated by him

and ended up with giving him to his boyfriend,

and they had to live together for 30 years?

And who were the people that they knew

and that they collaborated with

and who influenced them and who they influenced,

this community that moved through history?

And that's what is waiting to be reassembled.

The bits that are here, the bits that are there,

the museum that has this, the collection that has that.

Put the puzzle back together and be amazed at what you see.

It's more than he was a wonderful photographer.

It's more than that he was a gay hero.

It's more than he was a fascinating person.

It's more than he was beloved.

It's all of those things.

It's the story of his life.

-Oh, my gosh.

I would have loved to have met George Platt Lynes.

-We would have gotten on famously.

-Oh, I never met him, no, but I wish I had met--

Oh, he's probably-- Yes, we could have met, my dear.

-I would have loved to have met him, of course.

-I don't know if I would have been cool enough for him.

He would have liked the hat. You know?

-I'd like to take a walk with him.

-I would have loved to have been given a cocktail

by George Platt Lynes.

-I would've liked to go to his parties.

-Wonderful, delicious stories and gossip.

-I was always curious about what he might've sounded like.

It's through the photographs

that we must reconstruct this personality.

-I would have loved to have met George Platt Lynes.

And I think that probably within a matter of 10 minutes,

we would probably have some kind of argument.

-But I don't know if we would be diehard friends for life.

-What would I ask him? You know, "How did you do it?"

"How did you talk all these people

into taking off their clothes, including your relatives?"

-I think we would talk about the things

that gay guys talk about now, which is, like, hot guys

that you fucked, movie stars that you think are pretty,

and, like, the books that you read that are really good.

-I think it would have been interesting to meet George.