George Platt Lynes photograph of famed Ballet Russe and Hollywood dancer George (Yuri) Zoritch taken against an iconic Platt Lynes studio set in 1938.  


Photograph is a vintage original gelatin silver image, printed in 1938, from Zoritch’s personal collection of historic photographs of himself by Platt Lynes, Lido, Maurice Seymour, George Hurrell and many others. In the last 40 years this image has been shown in many publications celebrating the artistry of Platt Lynes.

Photograph is 8 x 10 inches on heavy paper printed with a hint of sepia tone. Photograph is in excellent condition. 

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 This biography, drawing upon intimate letters and an unpublished memoir of Lynes’s life by his brother, the writer and editor Russell Lynes, paints a portrait of the emerging influence of gays and lesbians across cultural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.

George Zoritch (born Yuri Zoritch 1917– 2009), was a Russian-born American ballet dancer who was a star dancer is the the Ballet Russe companies throughout Europe, South America and the United States in the 1930s. In the early 1940s he came to Hollywood and over the next decade was a featured dancer in 8 major films working with Alexis Smith, Cary Grant, Eleanor Parker, Errol Flynn, Ray Bolger, Gordon MacRae, Victor Mature, Hedy Lamarr and others. He returned to ballet in the 1950s to revive the legendary roles of Nijinski specifically “Spectre de la Rose” and “Afternoon of a Faun” with Le Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.  Zoritch was internationally known as one of the most glamorous figures and striking personalities in mid-twentieth-century ballet. He was a regular and iconic model for photographers Carl van Vechten, George Platt Lynes, and Maurice Seymour. In the first draft of his autobiography “Dance Mystique” Zoritch reported to have had an affair with Flynn as well as an ongoing friendship.