Search results for ""author allen ellenzweig""

George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye is a life of the gregarious American portrait, dance, fashion, and male nude photographer whose career spanned the late 1920s to 1955. From age 18, Lynes entered the cosmopolitan world of the American expatriate community in Paris when he became acquainted with the salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Intending to pursue a literary and small press publishing career, Lynes also began photographing authors like Stein, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Colette. Soon, he turned exclusively to photography, establishing himself as one of the premier fashion photographers in the Condé Nast stable, documenting the early ballets of George Balanchine, and pursuing his private obsession with seductive images of young male nudes almost never published in his time. Lynes's private life was as glamorous and theatrical as his images with their brilliant studio lighting and dramatic Surrealist set-ups. Barely out his teens, he met the publisher Monroe Wheeler who was already in a relationship with the emerging expatriate novelist Glenway Wescott. The peripatetic threesome maintained a polyamorous connection that lasted some 15 years. Their New York apartment became a mecca for elegant cocktail and name-dropping dinner parties. Their ménage-à-trois complicates our understanding of the pre-Stonewall gay "closet." This biography, drawing upon intimate letters and an unpublished memoir of Lynes's life by his brother, writer and editor Russell Lynes, paints a portrait of the emerging influence of gays and lesbians in the visual, literary, and performing arts that defined transatlantic cosmopolitan culture and presaged later gay political activism.

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Allen Ellenzweig traces the male gaze upon men as captured by the camera throughout the history of photography. More than one hundred striking, provocative duotone photographs reflect a wide-ranging history of photographic male homoeroticism and the spiritual, physical, and intellectual exchange among men. Accompanying these images is a detailed account of the multiple, complex meanings of the homoerotic that have taken shape from the 1850s to today. Ellenzweig situates each of his artists within their historical context, with chapters devoted to specific photographers and eras. He begins with nineteenth-century French photographer Eugene Durieu and his studies of the male nude, created under the direction of painter Eugene Delacroix. He then takes readers all the way through the rebellious 1960s and the disputes surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial retrospective in 1989 and 1990. Showing that homoeroticism in photography is anything but a contemporary invention, Ellenzweig unites photographers across the stylistic spectrum within a theme that came to inspire a host of larger spiritual, physical, and intellectual ideals.

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As Director of Exhibitions and Publications at the Museum of Modern Art from 1939 to 1967, Monroe Wheeler heavily influenced typography, book design, and the development of the museum exhibition catalogue. During his tenure at MoMA, Wheeler developed close relationships with many of the artists he exhibited and published. Season's Greetings is a volume of over fifty handmade art objects and limited printings that were sent to Wheeler from artists, many of whom he knew intimately, including never-before-seen work by such luminaries as Jean Cocteau, Ben Shahn, Miguel Covarrubias, Rufino Tamayo, Robert Parker, Roberto Montenegro, Herbert Bayer, and Max Weber. Essays by Allen Ellenzweig, Joseph Scott IV and Vincent Cianni establish the importance of this vast archive of art, letters, and ephemera, and highlight Wheeler's wide influence within his field. Season's Greetings is a fitting tribute to a man whose life's work centered on and celebrated fine art publications. Vincent Cianni is a documentary photographer and archivist for the Estate of Anatole Pohorilenko and the Monroe Wheeler Archive. He teaches at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York City, and has authored two books, including Gays in the Military, published by Daylight Books in 2014. Joseph Scott IV, Philadelphia, PA, became caretaker of the Manhattan apartment of Monroe Wheeler in 1990 to assist with organizing and preserving this important archive. His work continues today, as executor for Anatole Pohorienko, to help finish cataloging the remaining material for Mr. Wheeler, Glenway Wescott and George Platt Lynes. Allen Ellenzweig, New york, NY, is an arts critic and cultural commentator currently preparing a biography of twentieth-century photographer George Platt Lynes for Oxford University Press. He is a contributing writer to the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide and has published in Art in America, PASSION: the Magazine of Paris, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and the online magazine Tablet. He has also published works of short fiction. His landmark 1992 illustrated history, The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/Delacroix to Mapplethorpe, was reissued in paperback by Columbia University Press in 2012. He teaches in the Writing Program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He is a founding board member of The Robert Giard Foundation which offers an annual fellowship to photographers, videographers, or filmmakers.

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