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Wednesday, August 5, 2020


Is he helping the other guy out of his T-shirt, or is that a band of cloth symbolic of some deeper bond or confinement or something else entirely?  George Platt Lynes, like his friends Jared French and Paul Cadmus practiced the Magic Realism genre of art in which a realistic or natural (and often simple) narrative is combined with surrealistic elements making them more complex.
Edited to add:  This is not by Lynes.  See the comment by lovernotafighter55 below for details.
I'm leaving it up just to show how much Lynes influenced later artists and how easily I can be fooled.

6 comments:

  1. I have to respectfully question whether this is a genuine Platt Lynes photo. If you zoom in on the underwear you can clearly see "Calvin Klein" imprinted on the waste band. Platt Lynes died in 1955. Way before Calvin Klein tighty whities were available!

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    1. I did wonder about that underwear, but didn't zoom in on the label. I'm correcting the caption, but leaving the picture up because I think doing so is instructive on a couple of levels. Thanks!

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    2. Nice picture. I like it. For anyone who cares, here is a bit more information about it:
      Artist: Isaac Julien, British, born 1960
      Title: After George Platt Lynes, Nudes 1942 (Looking for Langston Vintage Series), 1989/2017
      Accomplished filmmaker and video installation artist Isaac Julien is well-known for films like Looking for Langston (1989), a poetic treatment of gay black poet Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, and other ground-breaking studies of racial and sexual identity, voyages, and cultural displacement. His multi-screen installations and accompanying photographic works for museums and galleries explore fractured narratives of memory and desire, often uniting elements from dance, painting, sculpture, theater, and music.
      (from the artsy.net website)

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    3. Thanks, Tom! I hope people read your interesting comment as I can't edit at the moment for reasons explained elsewhere.

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  2. I certainly read it. I never heard of Isaac Julien before but will investigate. You learn something new every day!

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    1. Indeed. And I have to to say I'm glad Julien acknowledged the inspiration by Lynes. I don't feel quite so silly knowing that.

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