Over the span of his forty-eight years George Platt Lynes made his way from the unassuming life of a New Jersey pastor’s son to dallying with the great artists of his age, ultimately becoming one in his own right. How did he travel so far from such inauspicious beginnings? How does a young boy who dreamt of being a writer in East Orange end up in Paris photographing everyone from Tennessee Williams to movie stars to the world’s most renowned ballet dancers, finding himself suddenly at the center of Gertrude Stein’s salon, a circle of artists and writers that included household names like Picasso, Hemingway, and Matisse among others?

And from there how does that same East Orange boy go bankrupt, travel across Europe learning from the Surrealists, live in a decade-long ménage a trois, risk arrest for obscenity laws alongside the foremost sexologist in all the world, and ultimately end up burning piles of one’s own negatives in an effort to shape a legacy so unthinkable in one’s current time and place that it might only remain a pipe dream, a hand off in good faith to future generations? 

George Platt Lynes did all of that and then he did some more for good measure, and this documentary means to traverse that tale, crack open its secrets.

There has still never been a major museum exhibition of George Platt Lynes’ male nudes, nor has there ever been a documentary of any kind on George or his work. Antinous Films has interviewed scholars, critics, and curators, as well as current artists who have found inspiration through his work, as well as a number of people who were actually close to George during his lifetime. 

Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes, will reveal the full extent of his impact and place his name into the pantheon of art where it rightfully belongs.

CONTRIBUTORS

Original interviews have been collected for the film with the following.

INTERVIEW EXCERPT

Bernard Perlin

Artist and Former Model to George Platt Lynes, reminisces about his former lover.

INTERVIEW EXCERPT

Don Bachardy

Artist and Former Model to George Platt Lynes, recounts his experience with George.

INTERVIEW EXCERPT

Jensen Yow

Former Assistant and Model to George Platt Lynes, describes how he remembers George.

GEORGE

George Platt Lynes began his career photographing celebrities, and it’s those portraits along with his extravagant fashion work that he’s best remembered for today. However George’s heart, his passion, and his greatest talent lay elsewhere, in his work with the male nude. Thanks to the mores of his times – the 30s, 40s, and 50s - this work, sensuous and explicit, has only recently begun being fully uncovered and appreciated for the revolution that it represents – a man capturing his present fantasies as a gift, a window to a future his camera saw coming before anyone else.

George drew his models from the men he liberally, happily surrounded himself with – dancers from the newly formed New York City Ballet, where he photographed nearly every one of Balanchine’s productions; actors, friends, and lovers. Divorced from the allegory of his commercial work George’s male nudes are startlingly intimate – focused entirely on the sensuality of the form in front of him, George lay bare his own fantasies and with them, our own looking in.

Much too risky for public consumption in the homophobic McCarthian atmosphere of the 1950s, George sent this, his more daring and precious work, off to the famous Alfred Kinsey for safe-keeping. But George’s premature death of lung cancer in 1955 led to his negatives being shut up in the cold storage of The Kinsey Institute for over five decades, only finally being uncovered time-capsule-like come 2010.

In the intervening decades George’s male nudes, what few of them there were in circulation, would still manage to influence entire generations of photographers – from Robert Mapplethorpe to Herb Ritts, descendants among many – but George’s place in photographic history has been obscured. Until now. 

TIMELINE

LEGACY

George Platt Lynes’s influence in the art world.

RESEARCH, REENACTMENTS, & RIGHTS

• Research will be done at the Huntington Library to search for original footage of George Platt Lynes by Christopher Isherwood

• Additionally, footage from Lynes’s hometown in New Jersey will be collected.

• Archival footage from the era will be shared. 

• Post-production and color and sound correction need funded.

• Art and music rights need to be acquired.

• Post-production and color and sound correction need funded.

DURATION

Full-length feature

TARGET RELEASE

Fall 2022

DISTRIBUTION

Seeking national and international distribution

DIRECTED BY SAM SHAHID

Coming Soon