The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930–1955 - Hardcover

Earnest, Jarrett

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1644230267 ISBN 13: 9781644230268

Publisher: David Zwirner Books, 2020

Synopsis

Lauded by Jerry Saltz as “one of the most reactionary yet radical visions of art,” The Young and Evil tells the story of a group of artists and writers active during the first half of the twentieth century, when homosexuality was as problematic for American culture as figuration was for modernist painting.

These artists—including Paul Cadmus, Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein, Charles Henri Ford, Jared French, Margaret Hoening French, George Platt Lynes, Bernard Perlin, Pavel Tchelitchew, George Tooker, Alexander Jensen Yow, and their circle—were new social creatures, playfully and boldly homosexual at a time when it was both criminalized and pathologized. They pursued a modernism of the body—driven by eroticism and bounded by intimacy, forming a hothouse world within a world that doesn’t nicely fit any subsequent narrative of modern American art. In their work, they looked away from abstraction toward older sources and models—classical and archaic forms of figuration and Renaissance techniques. What might be seen as a reactionary aesthetic maneuver was made in the service of radical content—endeavoring to depict their own lives. Their little-known history is presented here through never-before-exhibited photographs, sculptures, drawings, ephemera, and rarely seen major paintings—offering the first view of its kind into their interwoven intellectual, artistic, and personal lives.

Edited by Jarrett Earnest, who also curated the exhibition, The Young and Evil features new scholarship by art historians Ann Reynolds and Kenneth E. Silver and an interview with Alexander Jensen Yow by Michael Schreiber.

About this title

About the Author

Ann Reynolds teaches modern and contemporary art history and women’s and gender studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently completing a book entitled In Our Time, a history of intergenerational relationships among New York artists circa 1940 to 1970 that were shaped by shared, if heterogeneous, commitments to Surrealism and its legacy, primarily through a love of film.

Kenneth E. Silver is Professor of Art History at New York University. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and an American Council of Learned Societies Grant. He was a Getty Research Institute Visiting Scholar and a Mellon-Getty Fellow at the Phillips Collection. Silver is a contributing editor of Art in America. He is the author of numerous books and exhibition catalogues, and has curated exhibitions internationally. In recognition of his contributions to the dissemination of the art and culture of France, Silver was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts & Letters by the French government in the spring of 2010.

About this edition

• Publisher: David Zwirner Books
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 1644230267
• ISBN 13: 9781644230268
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160