Russell Lynes ( Joseph Russell Lynes, Jr.; December 2, 1910 – September 14, 1991) was an American art historian, photographer, author and managing editor of Harper's Magazine.
Early life
Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Lynes was the younger son of Adelaide Sparkman and Joseph Russell Lynes.
[ Russell Lynes, 80, an Editor and Arbiter of Taste by Richard Severo, September 16, 1991, New York Times online retrieved February 18, 2008 obituary] His older brother was George Platt Lynes (1907-1955), the photographer. In 1932, he graduated from
Yale University.
Career
Lynes started as a clerk at Harper & Brothers, the publishing house, from 1932 to 1936 and was director of publications at
Vassar College in 1936 and 1937. He then took a job at the
Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where he was assistant principal from 1937 to 1940, then principal until 1944. He then joined Harper's Magazine as an assistant editor and became managing editor in 1947, a position he would hold for the next twenty years.
Lynes was interested in historic preservation, notably and influentially writing about the threat to Olana, the home of Frederic Church in upstate New York, in
The Tastemakers and in the February 1965 issue of
Harper's.
Bibliography
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Life in the Slow Lane (1991)
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The Lively Audience: A Social History of the Visual and Performing Arts inAmerica, 1890-1950. (1985)
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The Art Makers: An Informal History of Painting, Sculpture & Architecture in Nineteenth Century America (1983)
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More than meets the eye: The history and collections of Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design (1981)
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Good Old Modern; an intimate portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (1973)
[ New Criterion discussion of some of the issues that are fully discussed in Good Old Modern]
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The Art-Makers of Nineteenth Century America (1970)
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Confessions of a Dilettante (1966)
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The Domesticated Americans (1963)
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Cadwallader: A Diversion (1959)
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A Surfeit of Honey (1957)
["WE ADORE self-appointed scolds who tell us what shallow characters we are. Here is Mr. Lynes casting us as History's Spoiled Children. We have it too good, he says." Commentary Magazine]
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The Tastemakers (1954)
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Guests (1951)
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Snobs (1950)
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Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow (1949)
Personal life
In 1934, he married Mildred Akin (died 1999),
who was a
Vassar College graduate, the step-daughter of artist Henry Ives Cobb, Jr. (1883–1974) and a granddaughter of George W. Wickersham (1858–1936), U.S. Attorney General under William Howard Taft. Together, they had two children:
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George Platt Lynes II (died 2015),
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Elizabeth R. Lynes (1939–2015),
He died on September 14, 1991, in New York City at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.
External links
