George Platt Lynes (1907 - 1955)

b. 15 April 1907
d. 6 December 1955

American photographer George Platt Lynes became one of the US's most successful fashion and portrait photographers, but his greatest work may have been his intensely homoerotic dance images and male nudes.

He made his first trip to France in 1925. There he met Gertrude Stein, as well as such luminaries as Jean Cocteau and Pavel Tchelitchev, and two young Americans, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott. The latter were to become his close friends and lovers.

Lynes made a second journey to France in 1928, this time traveling with Westcott and Wheeler, both well known in the literary and avant-garde circles of expatriate France. It was at this time that Lynes began to take portraits of the many celebrities he met.

He eventually photographed Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Colette, Dorothy Parker, E. M. Forster, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, W. Somerset Maugham, Marsden Hartley, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, among many others.

Upon returning to New York he began to work as a fashion photographer and lived with Wheeler and Wescott in a ménage à trois.

Although Lynes had achieved early fame as a commercial photographer, he also gained a wide reputation for his dance images.

In addition to photographing dancers in the 1930s and 1940s, Lynes also photographed several series of male nudes. These photographs frequently depict mythological figures, utilize theatrical lighting, feature symbolic tableaux or props, and are nearly always frankly homoerotic in their appeal.

Given the state of censorship at this time, it is not surprising that Lynes never published these photographs. Instead, he restricted their circulation to friends and admirers. Nevertheless, he considered these private photographs his most significant work, a judgment in which some later critics have concurred.

Lynes, George Platt, glbtq

Paul Cadmus (1904 - 1999). American, Painter.

b. December 17, 1904
d. December 12, 1999

American artist, best known for his paintings and drawings of nude male figures. His works combined elements of eroticism and social critique to produce a style often called magic realism.

During the 1930s and 1940s, American artists responded to the Great Depression and World War II with heroic images of ordinary people in the Social Realist style. Paul Cadmus was the only artist affiliated with this movement who devoted himself to recording the experiences of gay people. In monumental paintings at once satiric and celebratory, Cadmus depicted men cruising in gyms and parks. His Fleet's In (1934) provoked such outcry that it was removed from an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., in a process that foreshadowed the response to Robert Mapplethorpe's work in the 1990s.

"The Fleet's In"

"Summer"

"Jerry"

Robert Rauschenberg (1925 - 2008)

b. October 22, 1925
d. May 12, 2008

Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor and the Combines are a combination of both, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1993.

Rauschenberg's approach was sometimes called 'Neo-Dada', a label he shared with the painter Jasper Johns , with whom he had a long artistic and personal relationship.

Rauschenberg's oft-repeated quote that he wanted to work 'in the gap between art and life', suggested a questioning of the distinction between art objects and everyday objects reminiscent of the issues raised by the notorious 'Fountain' of Dada pioneer Marcel Duchamp. At the same time, Johns' paintings of numerals, flags, and the like, were reprising Duchamp's message of the role of the observer in creating art's meaning.

By 1962, Rauschenberg's paintings were beginning to incorporate not only found objects but found images as well - photographs transferred to the canvas by means of the silkscreen process. Previously used only in commercial applications, silkscreen allowed Rauschenberg to address the multiple reproducibility of images, and the consequent flattening of experience that that implies. In this respect, his work is exactly contemporaneous with that of Andy Warhol, and both Rauschenberg and Johns are frequently cited as important forerunners of American Pop Art.

In addition to painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg's long career has also included significant contributions to printmaking and Performance Art. He also won a Grammy Award for his album design of the Talking Heads album Speaking in Tongues.

Gay Artist Robert Rauschenberg Dead at 82
Let's not assign gay artists to the obituary closet
OUR PICASSO? by Jerry Saltz

George Quaintance

b. June 3, 1902 
d, November 8, 1957

American artist famous for his "idealized, strongly homoerotic" depictions of men in physique magazines.