“Firebird #2” is a historic vintage original gelatin silver photograph by photographer George Platt Lynes of legendary dancers Maria Tallchief and Francisco Moncion performing in George Balanchine's ballet Firebird captured in 1949.
Firebird #2 is 7.5 x 9.25 inches in excellent condition.
Photograph is a vintage original gelatin silver image, printed in 1949, with the official stamp of George Platt Lyons on the verso. It is from Moncion’s personal collection of Platt Lynes photographs. In the last 40 years this image has been shown in many publications celebrating the photographer’s work.
This photograph in #2 in a series of 4 iconic images of the Firebird ballet by Platt Lynes from Moncion’s collection. Moncion was a close friend and frequent model for Platt Lynes through the 1940s and 1950s.
Balanchine’s staging of Firebird set to Igor Stravinsky’s music served as the newly formed New York City Ballet's first major breakthrough and international success. As a result of the ballet’s success Maria Tallchief became America's first major prima ballerina and the first Native American dancer to achieve top-tier international acclaim. Francisco Moncion was a founding member of the New York City Ballet and a key dramatic dancer who originated major roles for both Balanchine and Jerome Robbins.
Photographs by George Platt Lynes are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and countless art museums throughout the world.
George Platt Lynes (1907–1955), was a gregarious American portrait, dance, fashion, and male nude photographer whose career spanned the late 1920s through the early 1950s. From age eighteen, Lynes entered the cosmopolitan world of the American expatriate community in Paris when he became acquainted with the salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. He began photographing authors like Stein, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Colette and soon established himself as one of the premier fashion photographers in the Condé Nast stable, documenting the ballet companies of George Balanchine/Lincoln Kirstein, and pursuing a private obsession with seductive images of young male nudes rarely published in his lifetime.
Lynes’s personal life was as glamorous and theatrical as his images with their brilliant studio lighting and dramatic Surrealist setups. Barely out of his teens, he met publisher Monroe Wheeler, who was already in a relationship with emerging expatriate novelist Glenway Wescott. The peripatetic threesome maintained a polyamorous connection that lasted some fifteen years. Their New York apartment became a mecca for elegant name-dropping dinner parties. Their ménage-a-trois complicates our understanding of the pre-Stonewall gay “closet.” This biography, drawing upon intimate letters and an unpublished memoir of Lynes’s life by his brother, the writer and editor Russell Lynes, paints a portrait of the emerging influence of gays and lesbians across cultural genres that defined transatlantic cosmopolitan culture and presaged later gay political consciousness.
Maria Tallchief (1925 - 2013) born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, was America’s first major prima ballerina and the first Native American (Osage Nation) dancer to achieve international stardom, permanently altering the global ballet landscape in the mid-20th century. Renowned for her electrifying speed, technical precision, and fiery artistic presence, she became the definitive muse for choreographer George Balanchine during the formative years of the New York City Ballet.
Her historic 1949 performance in Balanchine’s Firebird catapulted both her and the young company into worldwide acclaim, shattering long-held prejudices that elite ballet was strictly a European art form. Throughout her legendary career, Tallchief consistently refused to dilute her Native heritage for marketing purposes, choosing instead to let her unparalleled artistry pave the way for generations of American dancers.
Francisco Moncion (July 6, 1918 – April 1, 1995) was a charter member of the New York City Ballet. Over the course of his forty year career, choreographers George Balanchine, and Jerome Robbins in the New York City Ballet created 22 major roles for Moncion including the Dark Angel in Orpheus, Death in La Valse, Prince Ivan in Firebird, and the Boy in Afternoon of a Faun. He was also a choreographer and a talented painter who exhibited alongside Miro, Picasso and Carrado Cagli.