The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930–1955

Lauded by means of Jerry Saltz as “probably the most reactionary but radical visions of artwork,” The Younger and Evil tells the tale of a bunch of artists and writers energetic all through the primary part of the 20th century, while homosexuality used to be as frustrating for American tradition as figuration used to be for modernist portray.

These artists—together with Paul Cadmus, Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein, Charles Henri Ford, Jared French, Margaret Hoening French, George Platt Lynes, Bernard Perlin, Pavel Tchelitchew, George Tooker, Alexander Jensen Yow, and their circle—had been new social creatures, playfully and boldly gay at a time while it used to be each criminalized and pathologized. They pursued a modernism of the frame—pushed by means of eroticism and bounded by means of intimacy, forming a hothouse international inside a global that doesn’t well are compatible any next narrative of brand new American artwork. Of their paintings, they appeared clear of abstraction towards older assets and fashions—classical and archaic kinds of figuration and Renaissance tactics. What may well be observed as a reactionary aesthetic maneuver used to be made within the provider of radical content material—endeavoring to depict their very own lives. Their little-identified historical past is gifted right here via by no means-prior to-exhibited pictures, sculptures, drawings, ephemera, and seldom observed best art work—providing the primary view of its type into their interwoven highbrow, creative, and private lives.

Edited by means of Jarrett Earnest, who additionally curated the exhibition, The Younger and Evil features new scholarship by means of artwork historians Ann Reynolds and Kenneth E. Silver and an interview with Alexander Jensen Yow by means of Michael Schreiber.