To wear a straw hat - four photographs of José “Pete” Martinez by George Platt Lynes, 25 May 1937

 

*

From his time with the PaJaMa artist collective, most likely taken on Fire Island, New York, circa 1937-39. (Five images.)

José Antonio Martinez-Berlanga (he sometimes used the stage name Pete Stefan; 13 March 1913, Mexico - 24 June 1997, Pasadena), dancer, teacher, and artist's muse. He was born in Mexico, but his family moved to Houston, Texas while he was still quite young, and he became involved in dance early on; his mother had been a folklórico dancer back in Mexico. After graduating high school, he moved to New York to study at the School of American Ballet and, upon graduation, he was invited to join the company. 

In 1936, at the age of twenty-three, he met and began a relationship with philanthropist, arts patron, and ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein. Only two years previously, Kirstein, along with George Balanchine and Edward Warburg had founded the school and dance company. And the year the couple met, Martinez joined Kirstein's second company, the touring Ballet Caravan. The two lived together for several years, and Martinez associated with the loose group of friends that was centered on the artist collective and personal ménage that called itself "PaJaMa" - after the initials of artists Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and French's wife Margaret - where he was a frequent subject of photographs and a model for Cadmus. (George Platt Lynes was another participant in the group.) 

His relationship with Kirstein continued until the latter married Cadmus' sister, Fidelma, in 1941; she moved into the apartment the two men shared, and Martinez continued to live with them for the first year of their marriage. After being denied enlistment at the beginning of WWII, he began work at a Jewish refugee hostel in Haverford, Pennsylvania. Writer Christopher Isherwood was already working there - the two had met previously, in 1939 - and they developed a close, occasionally intimate, friendship. Finally allowed to join the military in 1943, he was in Northern France at the end of the war. 

Returning to New York, he resumed his career with Ballet Society, Balanchine and Kirstein's latest incarnation of their ballet company. (It finally became the New York City Ballet in 1948, the name it retains to this day.) But a lingering knee injury put an end to his performing career in 1947. He eventually decided to become a teacher and opened his own dance studio in Norfolk, Virginia. He later founded other dance studios in Ohio and then California, where he worked until retiring in the mid-1960’s. He died at the age of eighty-four, a year and a half after Kirstein.

*

Portrait of Martinez by Paul Cadmus, 1937.