Books like Intimate Companions by David Leddick

In *Intimate Companions*, David Leddick presents a meticulously researched biography of photographer George Platt Lynes, painter Paul Cadmus, and critic Lincoln Kirstein, three pivotal figures who helped build the institutions of the American art world from the late 1920s through the early 1950s. Leddick draws on hours of conversations with surviving members of their circle, as well as unprecedented access to papers, journals, and previously unreleased photographs, to illuminate the artistic, cultural, and personal dynamics that forged a distinctive gay aesthetic and desire in American art. The book reconstructs both the public achievements and the private lives of these artists, revealing how their overlapping friendships, lovers, and collaborators formed a vibrant, often clandestine, ecosystem that influenced modern American visual culture.

First publish date: 2000