George Platt Lynes

Photography by George Platt Lynes

In the 1930’s and 40’s, George Platt Lynes was the best-known fashion and portrait photographer in the U.S. He was also producing an abundance of male nudes that he circulated among friends and occasionally published in the Swiss homosexual magazine “Der Kreis” under the pseudonyms Roberto Rolf and Robert Orville. Over time, the male nudes became his most valuable artistic endeavor.

The photographs we have come to associate with Lynes are often his highly staged studio images, which he crafted with exacting control over the smallest detail. These images display his inventive use of diffused lighting that seems to come from everywhere and yet from nowhere. Idealized and perfected, bodies and faces are wrapped in light and shadows, their contours defined with precision by the spaces around them.

Lynes began a friendship with Dr Alfred Kinsey of the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana and helped with his sex research. Between the years 1949 to 1955, Lynes sold and donated much of his erotic nudes to Kinsey. By May 1955, Lynes had been diagnosed terminally ill with lung cancer. He closed his studio and destroyed much of his print and negative archives, particularly his male nudes. It is now known that he had transferred many of these works to the Kinsey Institute. After a final trip to Europe, Lynes returned to New York City where he died on December 6, 1955.

Insert Image: George Platt Lynes, Self Portrait, 1934, Photogravure, Private Collection

Calendar: March 1

A Year: Day to Day Men: March 1

On the Edge of His Seat

The first day of March in 1932 marks the kidnapping of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the twenty month-old son of aviator Colonel Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, from his crib on the upper floor of the family home in East Amwell, New Jersey.

On the evening at nine o’clock, the Lindbergh’s nurse Betty Gow discovered that the child was not with his mother who had just come out of the bath. She alerted Charles Lindbergh who went to the child’s room and discovered a ransom note on the windowsill. Armed with a gun, Lindbergh and the family butler, Olly Whateley, searched the grounds and, under the window of the child’s room, found impressions of a ladder and the child’s blanket. Whateley telephoned the Hopewell police department while Lindbergh contacted the New Jersey State Police as well as his attorney and friend Henry Breckinridge.

Both police departments conducted an extensive search of the home and its surrounding area. A fingerprint expert examined both the note and ladder; however, no usable footprints or fingerprints were discovered. No adult fingerprints, outside of the inhabitants of the house, were found in the child’s room. The examined ladder was built incorrectly, but by someone who had prior experience in construction. It was categorized as to type of wood, pattern of nail holes, and as to whether it was made indoors or outdoors.

The handwriting of the $50,000 ransom note contained many spelling and grammatical errors; the note was determined to have been written by one person. The bottom of the note contained two blue, interlocked circular lines surrounding a red circle; a hole was punched through the center of the red circle. Two more holes were punched to the left and right of the blue circular lines.

In an effort to get the public involved, the New Jersey State police offered a reward to anyone who could provide information. The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not have federal jurisdiction in the case until the thirteenth of May in 1932 when the President declared that the bureau was available to the New Jersey State Police. Full federal jurisdiction over the kidnapping case did not occur until October of 1932. Many theories were advanced and examined by the authorities. The reward for information on the kidnapping kept increasing until it eventually reached a total of $75,000 US dollars ( approximately $1,317,000 US dollars in 2022).

On the sixth of March, a ransom letter for $70,000 arrived at the Lindbergh home. The envelope was postmarked from Brooklyn, New York; the letter contained the same strange marks and holes as the original ransom note. Ten days later, a package containing a note and young Lindbergh’s sleeping suit arrived at the home. The ransom money was placed in a wooden box and delivered on the second of April to a man who claimed to be part of the kidnapping team. In exchange, a note was presented saying the Lindbergh child was in the care of two innocent women.

On the twelfth of May, delivery truck driver Orville Wilson and his assistant William Allen pulled over to the side of the road about 4.5 miles (7.2 km) south of the Lindbergh home. In a grove of trees, they found the body of a child. The child’s skull was fractured and the hastily buried body was badly decomposed. Nurse Betty Gow identified the child’s body as being Charles Lindbergh Jr. Due to the state of the body, the family insisted on cremation.

Two and a half years later, gold-certificate bills from the ransom money was traced back to a Bronx, New York, man named Richard Hauptmann. When arrested, he was found carrying one of the bills from the ransom. A search of his residence revealed over $14,000 of the ransom money in his garage. Hauptmann denied any part in the crime; however, the search of his residence revealed a construction sketch of a ladder similar to that found at the Lindbergh home. A section of wood discovered in the attic was tested and found a match to the wood of the ladder.

Richard Hauptmann was indicted in New York for extortion on the twenty-fourth of September in 1934. On the eighth of October in New Jersey, he was indicted for murder and transferred to New Jersey authorities two days later to face kidnapping and murder charges for Charles Lindbergh Jr.

At the end of the long trial, Hauptmann was found guilty of the kidnapping and murder charges; the sentence for the crimes was death. His sentence was appealed two times by his lawyers; both appeals failed. Hauptmann was given a last minute offer to commute his death sentence to life without parole in exchange for a confession to the crimes; he refused the offer. Richard Hauptmann was executed in the state of New Jersey on the third of April in 1936.

Jesse Reno

Paintings by Jesse Reno

Jesse Reno is a self-taught American painter and muralist, whose art is based on his interest in native and primitive societies. Reno himself terms his art as “neo-primitivism”.

Jesse Reno was born in Teaneck, New Jersey in 1974. He was born with an extreme fever, which caused severe damage to his optic nerve. Because of this, Reno spent almost his entire first year in a hospital, where doctors were trying to examine and evaluate all of the damages caused by the high temperature. As it turns out, fever affected blindspots in over half the visual field of his right eye, and left him with a lazy eye and bad vision.

All of these damages, as well as the chronic pain caused by the problems, affected his perception as a painter and an artist, but hasn’t stopped him to draw since he could hold a pencil. His damaged vision causes strange distortions in depth perception, forcing his to always stay close to his works while painting. In addition, Reno’s vision is sensitive to both light and color, caused by a high level of contrast. Jesse Reno’s different vision greatly shaped his art, both in a color pallet and in terms of depth within his paintings, murals and commissioned works.