Russell Lynes

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.

Russell Lynes
Born	December 2, 1910 Great Barrington, Massachusetts
Died	September 14, 1991 (aged 80) New York City
Occupation	Art historian, photographer, author, editor
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Yale University
Notable works	The Tastemakers, Snobs
Spouse	Mildred Akin
Children	2

Early life

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Lynes was the younger son of Adelaide Sparkman and Joseph Russell Lynes.^[1] His older brother was George Platt Lynes (1907-1955), the photographer. In 1932, he graduated from Yale University.^[1]

Career

Lynes started as a clerk at Harper & Brothers, the publishing house, from 1932 to 1936 and was director of publications at Vassar 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.^[1] 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.^[2]

Bibliography

• Life in the Slow Lane (1991)
• The Lively Audience: A Social History of the Visual and Performing Arts inAmerica, 1890-1950. (1985)
• The Art Makers: An Informal History of Painting, Sculpture & Architecture in Nineteenth Century America (1983)
• More than meets the eye: The history and collections of Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design (1981)
• Good Old Modern; an intimate portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (1973)^[3]
• The Art-Makers of Nineteenth Century America (1970)
• Confessions of a Dilettante (1966)
• The Domesticated Americans (1963)
• Cadwallader: A Diversion (1959)
• A Surfeit of Honey (1957)^[4]
• The Tastemakers (1954)
• Guests (1951)
• Snobs (1950)
• Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow (1949)

Personal life

In 1934, he married Mildred Akin (died 1999),^[5] who was a Vassar 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:^[1]

• George Platt Lynes II (died 2015),^[5] who married Jane Lynes.^[6]
• Elizabeth R. Lynes (1939–2015),^[7] who married Sidney Hollander^[5] in 1962.^[8] They divorced and in 1997, she married Carl Kaestle (born 1940).^[7]

He died on September 14, 1991, in New York City at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.^[1]