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

The catalogue of Jarrett Earnest's acclaimed 2019 exhibition at David Zwirner, recovering a circle of queer artists and writers (Paul Cadmus, Pavel Tchelitchew, George Platt Lynes, Jared French, Margaret Hoening French, Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein, Bernard Perlin, George Tooker, Charles Henri Ford and their intimates) who pursued a figurative, body-driven modernism in New York between 1930 and 1955, when homosexuality was as transgressive for American culture as figuration was for modernist painting.

Taking its title from Ford and Parker Tyler's 1933 novel, the book documents the exhibition held at 533 West 19th Street (February 21 – April 13, 2019), gathering never-before-exhibited photographs, sculptures, drawings, and ephemera, including erotic material from the Kinsey Institute, alongside rarely seen major paintings such as Cadmus's Shore Leave (1933). New scholarship by art historians Ann Reynolds and Kenneth E. Silver and an interview with Alexander Jensen Yow by Michael Schreiber frame these interwoven lives 162 color illustrations are set in a kraft-board binding designed by McCall Associates.

Earnest, a New York critic and writer, is the author of What It Means to Write About Art (2018), editor of Peter Schjeldahl's Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light (2019), and host of the New York Review of Books podcast Private Life this catalogue remains his defining curatorial statement on queer modernism.