The Brooklyn Rail

The idea for the photomontage was Magritte’s: they would place a reproduction of his painting of a nude woman looking away, attempting to cover her breasts, at the center of the composition. The reproduction would be enclosed by a border of standard photo booth portraits of members of the Surrealist group—sixteen of them, all men. The woman’s figure, like a hieroglyph, completes a sentence in French painted on the image in two parts above and below her form: I don’t see [the woman] hidden in the forest. The gazes of the Surrealist men are not averted like the woman’s. Instead, with their eyes closed, they turn their gazes inward as if to conjure this figure. The photomontage, emblematic of the Surrealists’ aesthetics and gendered power structures, appeared in December 1929 in the final issue of La Révolution surréaliste, alongside questionnaire responses on the topic of love. The introduction to this “Inquiry on Love” presented the object of its investigation as the “idea of love, capable of reconciling any man [sic], momentarily or not, with the idea of life.”

Artist Nick Mauss and critic Angela Miller’s co-authored Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa offers a study of queer American artists in contact with modernist avant-garde movements like Surrealism, but striking out in new directions in their lives and works. (Mauss offers an essay on Lynes, Miller on the artist trio/ménage à trois of Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French). Perhaps best known for his work in commercial fashion photography, Lynes was showing work in magazines and galleries and socializing alongside members of the European avant-garde around the time Magritte’s photomontage was published (he met Gertrude Stein on his first trip to Europe in 1925). Mauss focuses attention on an early photomontage by Lynes (ca. 1935) that echoes the Surrealist one in form and theme, but with a slyly obvious difference. At the center of the montage sits a studio portrait of Lynes that Mauss likens to a matinée idol’s headshot. Around this central portrait, an overlapping array of smaller photos of handsome men’s faces and toned, naked body parts pens Lynes into his waking revery. Lynes’s self-portrait photomontage, with its image of the open-eyed artist gazing longingly at the panoply of men’s bodies surrounding him, proposes a queer community woven together by devotion and desire.

Though Mauss doesn’t make the explicit connection to the possible influence of Magritte’s photomontage in his essay, he describes Lynes’s composition as his “imaginary carte de visite.” The comparison weds the work of community-building to a subversive, erotically charged take on an everyday object (certainly an inheritance from surrealism) that announces both the presence and absence of its bearer. Lynes gifted the self-portrait to Monroe Wheeler, his lover and part of a fifteen-year romantic triangle the two formed with Wheeler’s partner, Glenway Prescott. Of these kinds of images given to friends and lovers, Mauss writes, “Mementos of an other, or of the self seen enmeshed with an other, gift images transmitted a sense of mutual understanding, respect, and affection that was otherwise lacking a world in which homosexuals were, at best, tolerated, and granted conditional public visibility on in the form of derisive cartoons.”

The subversive power of these gift images—or, to the homophobe, their threat—meant that they were often exchanged by hand, in private settings, perhaps after a weekend spent with friends at a beach or country home. As Miller notes in her essay, Cadmus sent Lynes posed photos he had created with Jared and Margaret during a summer spent on Nantucket in 1946; according to the painter, “They [told], so much better than I could, something about the summer”—something of a social and emotional way of living that words couldn’t capture, or perhaps shouldn’t describe explicitly in a letter. In a different kind of gift image, Cadmus painted Lynes lying on a suburban lawn alongside his lovers in Stone Blossom: A Conversation Piece (1939–40).

Intersubjective images like these, both created through collaboration and picturing queer social configurations or including queer-coded messages, recur in the work of Lynes and PaJaMa. From the beaches of Nantucket, Provincetown, and Fire Island, the trio of PaJaMa took their collaboratively staged photographs toward a performative dimension. They mixed references to sculpture, as in the totemic use of driftwood they found on the beach, and neoclassical poses. “In place of the ‘truth value’ of the photographic index,” Miller writes, “these images presented a highly choreographed ‘theater’ of everyday life.” The theatrical tableaus of their inner emotional lives that they substituted for capturing fleeting moments countered, in Miller’s explanation, the modernist predilection for the ephemeral. In a scrapbook of photos Lynes took on Fire Island in 1941, he imitates PaJaMa’s style to pose himself, Cadmus, and Margaret French beside driftwood. For Mauss, this “suggest[ing] the way in which this group of artists understood artistic practice in intersubjective terms, rather than as a declaration of singular originality” (another thumbing of the nose at modernist values). As part of his last solo exhibition in 1941, Lynes installed driftwood as a deceptively decorative element in rooms displaying portrait photos including Jared French and Cadmus as models—a private message for friends.

However, as with gift images, it is the scrapbook that offers another example of queer images circulating by hand in private formats, taking on extra power from the performative depictions of queer relations in the photos themselves. Mauss calls scrapbooks a “social space […] at the core of Lynes’s lifelong artistic project.” In Miller’s discussion of PaJaMa’s performative scenes, she turns to the work of literary theorist Kenneth Burke and his notion of “symbolic action,” produced by rhetorical forms that draw their meaning from the often conflicting (and so “dramatistic”) human motivations of their contexts, with examples including literary forms and legal contracts. Miller enlarges this formal definition to include the visual, arguing PaJaMa’s photos “represented a form of symbolic action that returned agency to them.” In that description, these staged photographs of the artists on northeast beaches function similarly to gift images exchanged by hand, and the scrapbook that collects some of them perhaps becomes a new book-form to contain symbolic action, as well. In this case, PaJaMa’s performative photos regulated an emotional economy of queer sociality for their viewers and helped them imagine new configurations for living those emotions not deemed acceptable by society.

For Miller, the stage that PaJaMa set in their images for action to unfold marks an important difference from the Surrealists. “Surrealism,” as Miller describes it, “offered a tangled and displaced economy of motives, exposed by the accidental, irrational, and dreamlike symptoms of unconscious processes originating in the psyche.” However, in her explanation, PaJaMa and their extended circle, including Lynes, structured their work by composed, interpersonal exchange. Mauss and Miller’s two essays live up to the controlled, evocative complexity of these images. As they each brush up against each others’ ideas, the conversation between their essays reproduces the intersubjective enmeshment of these artists, their lives, and their works. In their shared resonances, the essays feel like objects circulating between the writers and ourselves the readers, for us to touch and read and share, as in the haptic experience of paging through a scrapbook assembled by friends. The metaphorical touching of these essays offers a method for bringing these artists out of history, for helping us to see, to imagine, almost to touch, a new forest to live in.