Nearly half of the exhibitors will be showing at this iteration of Independent for the first time, including London’s Alison Jacques, São Paulo’s Gomide&Co, and New York’s Ippodo Gallery, as well as Fair Warning, the auction platform founded by Loïc Gouzer, a former chairman for postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s.

Among the solo booths that will feature in the fair are Raoul Dufy, an early 20th-century artist associated with the Fauves, presented by Nahmad Contemporary; Almine Rech showing Karel Appel’s work of the 1950s and ’60s; Lenore Tawney’s fiber works from the second half of the 20th century via Alison Jacques; and Diane Rosenstein Gallery’s focus on Sarah Schumann, a queer figurative painter and collagist working in postwar Germany.

Similarly, dealers will also show the work of multiple artists in their booths. Richard Saltoun Gallery will exhibit 12 female Surrealists working, including Eileen Agar, Bĕla Kolářová, Maria Martins, and Juliana Seraphim. Ryan Lee will have a two-person featuring the work of Richmond Barthé and Emma Amos, while Gomide&Co will show the work of Brazil-based Maria Lira Marques and Paraguay-based Julia Isídrez (Guaraní), who is also featured in the 2024 Venice Biennale. Similarly, P420 will show the work of Filippo de Pisis, who is likewise a participant in the current Biennale.

In a statement, Elizabeth Dee, the fair’s founder, said, “Independent 20th Century is broadening our understanding of the canon, by showcasing key artists and movements currently undergoing reassessment in our cultural landscape. We present a platform for well-informed collectors and museums who are actively engaging with opportunities to thoughtfully explore new art historical conversations. Our mission as a fair is to link the past to the present moment in contemporary art.”

The full exhibitor list follows below.

Alexandre Gallery
Mitchell Algus Gallery
James Barron Art
Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art with MACK FOUNDATION
Dutton
Fair Warning
Galatea x Simões de Assis
Gomide&Co
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center
Ippodo Gallery
Alison Jacques
Galerie Michael Janssen x Marisa Newman Projects
Jane Lombard Gallery
Luxembourg + Co.
Galeria MaPa
Nahmad Contemporary
OSMOS
P420
Almine Rech
Diane Rosenstein Gallery
RYAN LEE
Salon 94
Richard Saltoun Gallery
Sies + Höke
John Szoke Gallery
Cristin Tierney Gallery x Abattoir Gallery
Van Doren Waxter
Venus Over Manhattan

In April, Fonda, Gagosian, and Christie’s partnered on a two-part benefit that was aimed at combatting a voter referendum on the California law SB1137, which was signed into law in 2022 and prevents new oil wells from being within 3,200 feet of communities across the state.

“It’s the biggest setback in the country,” Fonda told ARTnews in a phone interview. “It was a huge victory. It took millions and millions of dollars, and years and years of activism.

The benefit, which included an exhibition and a star-studded opening reception, raised more than $14 million. Earlier this month, the California Independent Petroleum Association announced that it would withdraw the referendum.

“I think that scared off the oil companies,” Fonda said. “It’s not over yet because the oil companies are working on ways to try to advance their agenda. The proceeds from the exhibit are going to protecting frontline communities from Big Oil’s next attempts at pollution because they’re going to trying.”

Despite this major victory, Fonda said she has no plans to slow down her activism against Big Oil and protecting Californians. “I’ll be fighting the oil companies until the day I die,” she said. “They’re doing this all around the country. It’s happening in Colorado, it’s happening in Pennsylvania, it’s happening in the state of Washington. It’s happening all over the country. And if we couldn’t beat them in California, it was going to be hard to beat them anywhere else.”

When Fonda was planning the first art benefit, she asked a friend, the artist Ed Ruscha, for advice and if he would contribute a work. In addition to Ruscha, the first benefit exhibition included work by Christina Quarles, Joey Terrill, Charles Gaines, and Jonas Wood.

“I’d never done [an art auction] before, and if I had any idea how hard it was, I wouldn’t have done it,” she said, adding that Ruscha’s help “gave me the courage to keep going. If he said ‘no,’ I probably would have ended it right there.”

The new exhibition, which runs through August 30 at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills location, features pieces by Jackie Amézquita, Andrea Bowers, Shepard Fairey, Nan Goldin, Lonnie Holley, Jessie Homer French, Alex Israel, and more.

In a statement, Larry Gagosian, the gallery’s founder and a longtime friend of Fonda, said, “It has been an honor to partner with her on this crucial issue impacting my home state of California—from the launch event in April to the upcoming exhibition to raise funds to support this effort into the future. I am incredibly grateful for the artists’ generosity in helping us ensure a safe and healthy California for generations to come.”

Fonda added, “We still have reasons to have to raise money to fight big oil. They’ve got the deepest pockets in the world, so it’s not easy.”

González is a leading curator, with over three decades of experience at institutions across Latin America, as well as in Europe and the US and with more than 80 exhibitions under her belt. She is most recently the artistic director of the Instituto Inhotim in Brazil, a sprawling sculpture park founded by mega-collector Bernardo Paz. She is currently co-curating “Histórias latino-americanas,” scheduled to open in 2026 at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, where she is curator-at-large for modern and contemporary art.

Prior to Inhotim she was artistic director and chief curator at the Museo Jumex and senior curator at the Museo Tamayo, both in Mexico City. She has also held curatorial roles at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York, Tate Modern in London, and the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas in Venezuela.

“Julieta is a seasoned curator with a great capacity of research, you know, and having written some seminal catalogs of exhibition that you can’t even find [anymore],” Gaëtane Verna, the recently appointed executive director of the Wexner, told ARTnews. “I spoke to different people with whom she worked with, they were all very consistent, [highlighting] the seriousness of her endeavor, the generosity, the leadership, and the projects that she has done in the past.”

Verna said she first came to know González through the work of artist Franz Erhard Walther. They both curated career surveys for the artist: Verna at the Power Plant in Toronto in 2016 (the artist’s first in Canada) and González at the Museo Jumex (his first in Latin America). “I went to the opening [at the Museo Jumex], and we felt like a big family,” Verna said, noting that she was also impressed by the concurrent thematic exhibition curated by González, “Memories of Underdevelopment: Art and the Decolonial Turn in Latin America, 1960–1985.”

As head of exhibitions, González will oversee the Wexner’s exhibition calendar and manage its curatorial team, as well as look to foster further collaboration between the museum and its broader community at Ohio State.

“The Wexner is a place that has always been on my radar in terms of the shows they were doing,” González said. “I also felt that I could work well with Gaëtane because I had followed her program at the Power Plant, and there were a lot of points in common, a lot of common ground.”

Looking to the future of the Wexner, Verna and González both said they want to present groundbreaking exhibitions, running the gamut from emerging artists to late artists, local artists to international artists, with an eye toward research and a global take on how artists are addressing today’s most pressing issues.

“I want to build on the capacity and the history of the institution, but really look forward,” Verna said. “Together we bring this international perspective into the American conversation. We’re in a Tier-1 research university, there is so much capacity to push the envelope.”

González added, “For the past 15 years, I have focused on intersections between the fields, of art, film, architecture, design, anthropology, ecology, and cybernetics. … This academic setting would offer precisely a very good opportunity to do so.”

Called the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Environment and Art Prize, the award, which comes with $100,000, will go to an artist whose practice “address[es] critical intersections in art, architecture, design, climate, conservation, sustainability, and environmental justice,” according to a release.

“Eric and Wendy Schmidt, through their philanthropic initiatives, have long supported projects at the intersection of science, technology, and the arts. MOCA is immensely grateful to them for their generous gift to establish this prize,” MOCA’s director Johanna Burton said in a statement. “This new prize enables the museum to continue to forefront the work of artists who are creating dialogue and visibility around issues of climate, conservation, and sustainability.”

Eric previously served as the CEO and then executive chairman of Google, and later executive chairman of Alphabet. Wendy serves as president of both the Schmidt Family Foundation and the Schmidt Ocean Institute.

The inaugural winner of the prize will be announced this fall. The winner will work over the next year and a half to realize a new commissioned work that will be unveiled at MOCA in spring 2026. Each winner will be selected a five-person jury, drawn from a list of nominees selected by a group of 15 to 20 specialists in art and architecture, conservation and ecology, and more. Each nominee will then develop a proposal for the final work.  

This year’s jury is composed of Burton; John Kenneth Paranada, curator of art and climate change at the Sainsbury Center; Carson Chan, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and director of its Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment; Maria Seferian, chair of MOCA’s board; and Dan Hammer, an advisor to the MOCA Environmental Council.

The prize is endowed by the Schmidts, who are collectors and patrons, through 2030. Together, the couple founded a family foundation in 2006 that has a wide philanthropic scope, from working to provide clean renewable energy and healthy oceans to the protections of human rights. They also established the Schmidt Ocean Institute, which provides scientists access to a research vessel in exchange for making their findings publicly available.

“Science and technology help us explain the world, while art and community give us understanding and belonging,” Wendy Schmidt said in a statement. “We are delighted to establish this prize with MOCA because, as we’ve seen across our philanthropy, connecting scientists, artists and communities appears to reveal essential truths about people and our planet.”

The gift will go to support FAWC’s two main programs: its fellowship, where a cohort of 10 visual artists and 10 writers stay at the organization’s campus for seven months during the off season, and its Summer Workshops, weeklong programs in focused disciplines of art and writing.

“The mission of this place is to grant fellowships to emerging artists and writers that has no expectations on it,” FAWC’s executive director Sharon Polli told ARTnews. “It’s just a gift of time and space to be in community with other artists and writers for seven months, which was the minimum amount of time that the founders felt that you needed as a young artist, to get up every day and kind of face yourself and your own the expanse of time in order to develop that really robust, rigorous studio practice that would define you and transform your life into that of a working artist.”

Each year, FAWC receives over 1,400 applications for the 20 fellowship spots; it has hosted over 1,000 fellows to date. The fellows stay in live-work spaces at the historic Days Lumberyard, which provided affordable studio spaces to artists, including Motherwell, between 1914 and 1972, when FAWC acquired it. Each fellow receives a stipend of $10,000, with visual artists receiving an addition $1,000 materials stipend. Past visual arts fellows include Lisa Yuskavage, Tala Madani, Jacolby Satterwhite, Jennifer Packer, Firelei Báez, Ellen Gallagher, Jack Pierson, Duane Slick, Candice Lin, and Troy Michie. 

Between June and August, when Provincetown’s population swells from a population of around 3,000 year-round residents to anywhere between 60,000 and 80,000 daily visitors, FAWC hosts around 65 weeklong workshops that are open to the public, ranging from printmaking and figurative painting to creative nonfiction and prose poetry.

Additionally, the Motherwell gift will help support its Scholars Awards, which allows for more than 100 young people, from low-income backgrounds or historically marginalized groups, to attend the Summer Workshops for no cost on tuition, as well as a housing and travel stipend from those not from Cape Cod.

In 1968, Motherwell, who had visited Provincetown since the early ’40s, cofounded Fine Arts Work Center with a group of artists, writers, and patrons that included past US poet laureate Stanley Kunitz and collector Hudson D. Walker. The founding group, Polli said, “started thinking about the future of Provincetown as a place that would always be a place of experimentation and creativity. Even at that time, it was starting to become too expensive for artists and writers to live and work here, and so they formed the Fine Arts Work Center.”

She added, “The Motherwell family is incredibly important to this small artist community here at the tip of Cape Cod.”

While $200,000 may seem like a modest sum, Polli, who began her tenure in May 2021, said for an organization of FAWC’s size, with an annual operating budget of $2.5 million, the sum accounts for about 10 percent of its yearly expenditures, including $200,000 in fellowship stipends and $100,000 for the Scholars Awards program. Polli estimated that the total cost of hosting one fellow to the organization to be around $50,000. The gift allows the organization “to invite talented emerging voices here and give them the opportunity to experience that and say yes to that opportunity,” she said.

In 2018, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, FAWC established its first endowment, which now totals around $3 million. Since the pandemic, the organization has increased its stipends both for fellows and the summer faculty by around 20 percent.

“The most important thing to know is that we’re investing that directly into artists and writers,” Polli said. “Something like $200,000 goes directly into those artist stipends and artist fees and allows us to really enable artists and writers to live and work here and thrive when they come.”

Because of Provincetown’s important role to artists over the past century, Polli said she sees FAWC’s support of artists to be essential to that history. The organization will also have a booth at the Armory Show this September, in the fair’s nonprofit section, where it will showcase the work of 19 past fellows, curated by past fellow, artist Matt Bollinger.

“We consider the mission to nurture artists and writers in a creative community, with no expectations other than that they invest in their creative practice, experiment and take risks, and have the space to do that, to be essential to American culture,” Polli said. “We’re making that investment in them in the very early stages of their career, before they have any book deal signed, before they’ve got major gallery representation or major museum exhibitions.”

She continued, “So many [past fellows] really cite this unstructured gift of time and space as having been an essential moment for them and their creative development to discover their artistic voice, so we consider the mission essential for American arts and letters.”

The 2024 edition of the fair will be the first to be led by Bridget Finn, a former gallerist who was hired to serve as the fair’s director last year. This year’s figure is slightly above the 277 galleries that took part in the marquee US fair last year; the 2022 edition also hosted 283 exhibitors.

The fair will also include 32 first-time exhibitors, the biggest grouping of newcomers to a Miami Beach fair since 2008. Among those are Gallery Wendi Norris, ILY2, Fabian Lang, Dastan Gallery, Gallery Baton, Pearl Lam Galleries, Catinca Tabacaru, Gallery Nosco, Gajah Gallery, and Sweetwater. While participating galleries come from 34 countries and territories, the fair said that around two-thirds are from the Americas.  

Among the blue-chip exhibitors are Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, David Zwirner, Blum, Sadie Coles HQ, Paula Cooper Gallery, Jeffrey Deitch, Gladstone Gallery, David Kordansky Gallery, Lehmann Maupin, Galerie Lelong & Co., Victoria Miro, Mnuchin Gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, and Jack Shainman.

Additionally, 25 galleries will show in the fair’s main Galleries section for the first time. Of those, 21 of them are doing so after previously participating in a different section; they include Instituto de Visión, Edel Assanti, Daniel Faria Gallery, Central Fine, and Afriart Gallery and Rele Gallery, who will share a booth. Several of these galleries benefit from the introduction of a minimum-size booth option.

In a statement, Finn said, “It was incredibly important that we carve out a more equitable path to participation for small and mid-sized galleries entering the main sector of this show, and the proof is in the extraordinary number of newcomers joining this edition. We remain super agile and attuned to the changing and individual needs of our galleries and their artists, and committed to creating an absolutely cannot-miss experience for them and for collectors, museums and foundations, major cultural partners, and visitors from Miami Beach and around the world.”

In addition to the main Galleries section, the fair will also include five additional sections: Nova, for work made in the past three years; Positions, for solo showcases of emerging artists; Survey, for presentations of work made before 2000; Kabinett, for presentations within a main booth; and Meridians, for large-scale works, which this year is curated Yasmil Raymond, the outgoing director of Portikus. Details on the latter two sections will be announced at a later date. This year’s edition will also see the return of the fair’s Conversations program, which will be organized by writer Kimberly Bradley.

Galleries in the Nova section include Charles Moffett, Kendra Jayne Patrick, Pequod Co., Silverlens, Soft Opening, Gallery Vacany, and Welancora. Positions includes Sebastian Gladstone, Gordon Robichaux, Gypsum Gallery, Peana, Proyectos Ultravioleta, and Verve. And Survey will feature Luis De Jesus, Charlie James Gallery, Lyles & King, PKM Gallery, and Ryan Lee.

“We have an exceptional roster of galleries participating in our Miami Beach show this year, coming from all corners of the Americas, Europe, and Asia,” Finn said. “The proposals in Nova, Positions, and Survey are of exceptional quality and ambition, and it’s clear that galleries in the main sector will not be holding back come December, bringing their best of the best to this all-important fair in the world’s leading art market.”

Galleries

Nova

*Espacio Valverde and Fabian Lang will share a booth.

Positions

Survey

McMillan has a range of experience in the art market. Most recently, she founded her itinerant gallery and consultancy company, Saint George Projects, which has staged exhibitions for artists like Alvaro Barrington and Henri Paul Broyard in New York, Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Berlin, and elsewhere.

Prior to that, she was a director at David Zwirner for a year, and worked at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise for four years, where she was also a director. She has also worked at Alexander Gray Associates and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

“I am honored to join The Armory Show at this important moment in the fair’s history,” said McMillan said in statement. “My goal is to empower collectors and emphasize the fair’s role as a platform for artists, galleries and art enthusiasts. The Armory Show has long been celebrated as a foundational fair for New York and the US art market. I look forward to building on The Armory Show’s achievements, while also championing new voices and creating opportunities for diverse perspectives in contemporary art.”

McMillan’s appointment is the first major leadership change at the fair since it was acquired by Frieze in 2023. The fair’s next edition is scheduled to run in early September. Marking its 30th anniversary this year, the upcoming edition announced its exhibitor list last month. Frieze’s director of fairs, Kristell Chadé, and its Americas director, Christine Messineo, were in charge during the application process.

In a statement, Chadé said, “We are thrilled to welcome Kyla McMillan as Director of The Armory Show. Her wide-ranging experience and creative drive will undoubtedly take the fair to new heights, fostering an inclusive and dynamic environment. Her past projects have demonstrated a talent for reaching new audiences and forging meaningful connections with art.”

The Marciano Art Foundation was founded in 2013, when the Marciano brothers purchased a former masonic temple on Wilshire Boulevard, not far from LA’s Miracle Mile. It opened to the public in 2017, with an exhibition drawing from the brothers’ blue-chip holdings, including pieces by Sterling Ruby, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, and Mike Kelley.

But, the foundation closed its doors abruptly in November 2019, saying at the time, “We have no present plans to reopen.” The foundation had laid off some 60 employees, many from its visitor services department, just days after 70 employees had announced a union drive. At the time, the union claimed on social media that the foundation’s sudden closing was due to the unionization efforts, calling the layoffs “a gross obstruction of workers’ rights.” Shortly afterward, the union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board and the laid-off employees filed a lawsuit against the foundation, which was settled in July 2020 for around $205,000 to the workers and $70,000 in legal fees.

In the interim, the Marciano Art Foundation’s building has been activated by a select number of exhibitions by outside organizations. The most prominent of these is by Gagosian gallery; the Marcianos are longtime clients of the gallery. Between 2021 and 2023, Gagosian mounted three solo shows at the foundation for Oehlen, Urs Fischer, and Anselm Kiefer. Additionally, in 2022, LAXART (now called the Brick) mounted a two-night program at the space, and last fall, LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) staged an opera by Justen Leroy in its theater space.

In a statement to ARTnews, a spokesperson for the foundation said, “Following a period of prolonged closure brought on by the pandemic, Marciano Art Foundation determined that it was important to make use of this historic building by donating it to partner organizations for them to realize unique projects and public programs on an ongoing basis, alongside allowing access to the collection–beyond educational groups–for free and by appointment as part of a new, scaled down model.”

In addition to growing, managing, and mounting exhibitions of the Marciano collection, part of Skerath’s charge, per a press release, is to lead the organization’s “efforts to lend its historic Wilshire Boulevard building to non-profit organizations and various other creatives to realize unique projects and public programs on an ongoing basis. This new direction will allow MAF to operate under this renewed commitment to the public.” (According to the spokesperson, Skerath will review the foundation’s staffing needs over the coming months and “advise on the best direction for the Foundation’s long-term future.”)

In a statement, Skerath said, “I’m excited to join the Marciano Art Foundation as Director, and I look forward to collaborating with the team to continue to expand and exhibit the collection and to explore new creative opportunities for the Foundation’s unique spaces.”

In February, the foundation presented its first official collection exhibition since its closure, “Transmissions: Selections from the Marciano Collection,”co-curated by Douglas Fogle and Skerath. The Marciano Art Foundation now maintains regular public hours, Tuesday to Saturday, from 12pm to 6pm; admission is free but visitors are required to reserve a time slot to come to the foundation.

Skerath has been an independent curator and writer for a decade. With Fogel, she cofounded a curatorial enterprise named Studio LBV. Through that company, the duo served as founding artistic directors of Palomar, a private foundation on Lake Como in Italy, and they also edited the 2021 volume Making Strange: The Chara Schreyer Collection, focused on the late California collector’s holdings.

Additionally, her curatorial credits include “Friends in a Field: Conversations with Raoul De Keyser” at MuZEE in Ostend, Belgium; a solo exhibition for Shio Kusaka at LA’s Neutra VDL Studio and Residences; and group exhibitions at Thomas Dane Gallery, Marc Selwyn Gallery, and Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery.

In a statement, Olivia Marciano, who has previously held the role of the foundation’s artistic director, said, “We are thrilled to welcome Hanneke Skerath to the Marciano Art Foundation. As we place our focus on fostering a collaborative creative environment for the Los Angeles community, Hanneke’s extensive experience could not be more fitting. In her years working in L.A. she has worked across both traditional and unconventional contexts, demonstrating her distinct talent to realize projects that prioritize collaboration, insight, and rigor.”

Nawi, who has worked independently for several years, has organized several acclaimed US biennials in the past five years, including the 2023 edition of Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum (with Pablo José Ramirez) and 2022’s Prospect.5 in New Orleans (with Naima J. Keith). She has also curated solo exhibitions for artists such as Mark Bradford, Michael Rakowitz, Adler Guerrier, Haroon Mirza, John Akomfrah, and Shana Lukter.

Nawi has previously held curatorial positions at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. More recently, she has worked as a guest curator and curatorial adviser for the Contemporary Austin, as well as a serving as a curatorial consultant on public art projects for Orange Barrel Media, founded by ARTnews Top 200 Collector Pete Scantland. Earlier this year, she organized the inaugural exhibition of the Olivia Foundation in Mexico City.

In an email to ARTnews, Nawi said, “I first visited LACMA as an undergrad at UCLA and the evolution of the museum under [director] Michael Govan’s leadership has offered several models that I have looked to throughout my career for how we might keep museums relevant, accessible, and adaptable. On a personal level, exhibitions at LACMA have had a profound impact on my thinking.”

Nawi’s appointment comes as LACMA prepares to open a new building that will present works from across centuries of art history side by side. (Construction for the Peter Zumthor–designed building, now called the David Geffen Galleries, is scheduled to be completed later this year.) Nawi joins Rita Gonzalez, the head of the contemporary art department, and assistant curator Dyhandra Lawson, as well as two curatorial assistants.

“I’m excited in particular to work alongside Rita Gonzalez, who has consistently been doing the work of writing and rewriting art histories in ways that have changed the terms of our field,” Nawi said. “Additionally, this is the first opportunity I’ve had to situate contemporary conversations and artworks within a larger, longer trajectory of transnational, indigenous, diasporic, and local art and culture—it’s an interesting new context for me.”

In a statement, Gonzalez said, “Diana is known for her deep knowledge and connection to artists in Southern California as well as her impressive history of organizing international biennials, public art projects, and museum exhibitions. She will join Dyhandra Lawson and I in overseeing a wide-ranging and constantly growing collection of contemporary art and strengthening its presence throughout LACMA’s campus.”

It’s tempting to say that photographer George Platt Lynes was ahead of his time. Between the 1930s and his untimely death at age 48, he produced a body of work—elegant fashion photography, sleek images of nude men—that feel fresh today. But Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes, a recently released documentary by Sam Shahid, argues that, in fact, Lynes was very much of his time. The ’30s and ’40s in New York saw a bustling scene of gay men who threw fabulous cocktail parties, created art, and, of course, had sex with each other. Hidden Master is quick to remind viewers that plenty of gay men were out in their own way, decades before Stonewall. At the center of this milieu, which is largely understudied, was Lynes. “We see this world that’s gone… through George’s eyes,” says Steven Haas, an art historian and the director of Lynes’s foundation, at the beginning of the documentary.

Toward the end of Hidden Master, Shahid asks several interviewees—including Vince Aletti, Nick Mauss, Mary Panzar, and Bruce Weber—why Lynes isn’t part of the canon. The resounding answer seems to be that they don’t know. It is surprising that Lynes’s images aren’t as prominent as those of his artistic successors like Andy Warhol or Robert Mapplethorpe. But then again, many of Lynes’s best works went unshown during his lifetime: when he was creating his male nudes, it would have been taboo, if not illegal, to exhibit them. What he did show, in magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, was his fashion photography: dreamy images of women in the latest couture. His innovations in that genre include an early form of the now-ubiquitous ring light, which are reflected in his models’ eyes.

Though Lynes wasn’t publicly showing his nudes, he wasn’t exactly in the closet either. His nephew, George Platt Lynes II, says he was one of those people who never needed to come out; his minister father and high society mother did not disown him. In the 1920s, he traveled to Paris and befriended Gertrude Stein and her circle; Stein would eventually appoint him as her official photographer. During one steamship voyage across the Atlantic, he met Julien Levy, who exhibited his work. Through Stein, he met Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler; they would essentially form a throuple for three decades. (Their circle included another famous throuple, artists Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French, who often collaborated as PaJaMa.) The three lived together on the Upper East Side, at times attempting to pass for roommates. At the height of his fame, Lynes would befriend Lincoln Kirstein, the founder of the New York City Ballet, who also made Lynes the company’s official photographer. Through it all, Lynes made his nudes, gently convincing men—athletes, dancers, sailors, lovers—to disrobe before his camera.

A lover’s death in World War II, the throuple’s dissolution, and another bad breakup led Lynes to move to Hollywood for two years, where he worked for Vogue; there, he lived beyond his means and quickly derailed his career. When he returned to New York in 1948, he had been supplanted in the fashion magazines by Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, who had rented out Lynes’s former studio. (Lynes did not mince words about Penn and Avedon, whose work he called “spinsterish” and “the all-time low in formula-dreariness,” respectively.) He declared bankruptcy at least twice. Much of his equipment was repossessed by the IRS (his brother bought it back then loaned it to him), and he used a Picasso as collateral for another loan.

Lynes destroyed much of his early work and entrusted the rest to sexologist Alfred Kinsey and painter Bernard Perlin. They live on in various archives, and much of it still has not been exhibited. As dealer Peter Hay Halpert points out, they have been regulated back to the closet. Perhaps they will find new life once again.