George Platt Lynes’s Forbidden Nudes Become Hot Property

A documentary about the photographer George Platt Lynes, who paved the way for the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe, is still pulling in crowds, two years after its release.

The film’s director Sam Shahid was at the Palm Springs Art Museum in May for a screening of Hidden Master, which tells the story of the photographer for Town & Country, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue in the 1930s and ’40s who, in private, was creating a trove of portraits of nude gay men.

Rago Auctions held a sale on August 4 led by Lynes’s works, ranging from his erotic nude photography to studio portraits of figures including Igor Stravinsky. The top lot was a silver gelatin print, Tex Smutley and Buddy Stanley (two works), which sold for $8,960.

The growing interest in Lynes’s work is reflected in his burgeoning market. Over the past two years, 91% of works sold at auction have exceeded auction houses' low estimate. His highest auction result over the past three years was $9,600 for a print of Narcissus (about 1939) from the Mythology series, which sold for six times its low estimate at Bonhams in December 2024.

Although Lynes exhibited his work in galleries during his lifetime, and his work is in the Met in New York as well as the Guggenheim and MoMA, his archive of male nudes long resided in relative obscurity at the Kinsey Institute in Indiana until photographers such as Bruce Weber recognized their originality. Weber first introduced Shahid to Lynes's work.

Before his death in 1955, aged 48, from cancer, Lynes bequeathed more than 2,700 prints and negatives to Dr. Kinsey’s Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Lynes and Kinsey had to arrange numerous cross-country trips to transfer work to the institute to avoid falling foul of the Comstock Law, which prohibits the delivery of sexuality-related materials by the US Postal Service.