George Platt Lynes, “Jared French, August 1938”, 1938, Gelatin Silver PrintThe Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
George Platt Lynes took his first photographs as a young artist living in New York and Paris in the 1920s. He maintained an interest in the male figure throughout his career and was part of a close-knit group of artists, including Paul Cadmus, Jared French, Margaret French, and George Tooker, who explored sexuality and the body in an age that increasingly favored abstraction.
The subject of this photograph, Jared French, was an important painter in the world of gay New York artists. French also served as the subject of Luigi Lucioni’s portrait as well as the model for Paul Cadmus’s “Gilding the Acrobats”, both of which are housed in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.