Pioneers in Legitimizing Nude Male Photography as Art

In Naked Men, Pioneering Male Nudes 1935-1955, David Leddick tells a fascinating story of a group of American artists who bolstered the trend resulting in the legitimizing of nude male photography as art. Based in New York city, three men—Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and George Platt Lynes—began an intertwining professional and personal life in the early 1930s that changed art and culture in the city and eventually the country as a whole. 

Kirstein started out as an artist, writing then taking dance lessons, but quickly found his forte as art impresario and organizer. With George Balanchine whom he met in Paris in 1933, he founded a ballet school and what became the New York City Ballet. NYCB is one of the triumvirate of quintessential American ballet companies and the company with the largest repertoire, thanks to the genius of its first choreographers, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. 

The bulk of the photographs from the period was created by George Platt Lynes. He did editorial assignments for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar but Leddick notes that he was easily bored by fashion photography. His creativity sought more exciting venues. Through his friendship with Kirstein he did all the program and promotional photography for NYCB and accumulated an impressive collection of male nude photographs featuring ballet dancers. The subtextual connection between ballet and homosexuality was established. 

Lynes however did not want to trumpet his homosexuality with the prevailing cultural standards as they were. His nude male photographs  were not recognized widely as art until just the last twenty years or so as American society became more comfortable with images of nudity in men. Lynn would recycle sets created for fashion photography to shoot his nude studies. He experimented with dramatic lighting especially back-lighting as in his photograph of Gary Garrett in 1954. Another technique he used that is now commonplace in fashion photography is lighting up the white background to sharpen the model's silhouette and create a three-dimensional, "modeling" effect with softer fill lights

I am a dyed-in-the-wool Freudian. Like Sigmund I conceptualize Eros as more than sexuality. Eros is libido, the primal urge for life that is at the core of desire and creativity. People uncomfortable with themselves try to hush up or deny the power of Eros and intellectualize beauty. Beauty can be intellectual but it would not have remained such a vital force in our lives if it were not intimately linked to body and our physical senses. Erotic energy can be destructive, too. Life and death are opposite sides of the same coin. When out of balance and immoderate Eros can limit our lives that it becomes trivialized and unhealthy. Obsessions turn subtle features into gross caricatures. To me the challenge of creating art is to find the thin edge between subtlety and denial, a target I have yet to find.

Posted via email from Duende Arts