Queer Modernism in New York, 1930–1955

The Young and Evil, a book edited by Jarrett Earnest, who also curated the exhibition, presents the little-known history of a group of artists and writers active during the first half of the twentieth century. These artists, including Paul Cadmus, Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein, Charles Henri Ford, Jared French, Margaret Hoening French, George Platt Lynes, Bernard Perlin, Pavel Tchelitchew, George Tooker, and Alexander Jensen Yow, were new social creatures, playfully and boldly homosexual at a time when homosexuality was both criminalized and pathologized in American culture. Lauded by Jerry Saltz as "one of the most reactionary yet radical visions of art," their work looked away from abstraction toward older sources and models, such as classical and archaic forms of figuration and Renaissance techniques, in the service of depicting their own lives, a radical content in the context of modernist painting's emphasis on figuration.

The book features never-before-exhibited photographs, sculptures, drawings, ephemera, and rarely seen major paintings, offering the first view of the interwoven intellectual, artistic, and personal lives of this circle of artists. The exhibition and the book present new scholarship by art historians Ann Reynolds and Kenneth E. Silver, as well as an interview with Alexander Jensen Yow by Michael Schreiber.

These artists pursued a modernism of the body, driven by eroticism and bounded by intimacy, forming a hothouse world within a world that doesn't neatly fit any subsequent narrative of modern American art. Their aesthetic maneuver, which might be seen as reactionary, was a deliberate choice made in the service of their radical content—the desire to depict their own lives and experiences in a time when homosexuality was heavily stigmatized.

The Young and Evil provides a unique and important glimpse into the lives and works of this fascinating group of artists, offering a new perspective on the history of modern American art. Through the presentation of their varied and compelling artistic output, as well as the scholarly essays and interview, the book sheds light on a previously overlooked aspect of the art world during a pivotal period in the twentieth century.

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