(Book contains eight essays including: 'Music After the Gr...)
Book contains eight essays including: 'Music After the Great War', 'Music for Museums?', 'The Secret of the Russian Ballet', 'Igor Strawinsky: A New Composer', 'Massenet and Women', and more.
(First published in 1925, the novel centers around a wide ...)
First published in 1925, the novel centers around a wide cast of characters whose lives are irrevocably changed by the mysterious Gunnar O'Grady in 1920s New York.
(At the center of the story, two young people - a quiet, s...)
At the center of the story, two young people - a quiet, serious librarian and a volatile aspiring writer - struggle to love each other as their dreams are slowly suffocated by racism.
(A compilation of photographs of famous actors, artists, d...)
A compilation of photographs of famous actors, artists, dancers, musicians and writers taken by Van Vechten from the 1930s to the early 1960s. Includes portraits of Bessie Smith, Lena Horne, Billie Holliday, Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando, Georgia O'Keefe, Henri Matisse and more.
The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946
(This monumental collection of correspondence between Gert...)
This monumental collection of correspondence between Gertrude Stein and critic, novelist, and photographer Carl Van Vechten provides crucial insight into Stein's life, art, and artistic milieu as well as Van Vechten's support of major cultural projects, such as the Harlem Renaissance.
Generations in Black and White: Photographs from the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection
(This portfolio of eighty-three photographs constitutes a ...)
This portfolio of eighty-three photographs constitutes a stunning celebration of African American achievement in the twentieth century. Carl Van Vechten, a longtime patron of black writers and artists, took these photographs over the course of three decades - primarily as gifts to his subjects, such luminaries as W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Joe Louis, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ruby Dee, Lena Horne, and James Earl Jones.
Carl Van Vechten was an American writer and photographer. He photographed many of the major artists and intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century.
Background
Carl Van Vechten was born on June 17, 1880, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He was the son of Charles Duane and Ada Amanda Fitch Van Vechten. They were well into their forties by the time their youngest son Carl was born. Van Vechten spent his childhood surrounded by four adults. Predictably, this atmosphere nurtured a precocious child.
Education
Carl graduated from Washington High School in 1898. In 1903, he received Ph.B. from the University of Chicago.
Following graduation, Van Vechten immediately began to build his reputation as a journalist and critic. He wrote for the Chicago American, while becoming increasingly immersed in contemporary culture. In order to pursue that fascination, Van Vechten moved to New York City in 1906, where he soon sold an article to Theodore Dreiser’s Broadway Magazine. By 1907, Van Vechten began reviewing music and culture for the New York Times.
During these years, Van Vechten developed a career as an essayist and journalist. His articles, written on a variety of art forms for the Times and The New York Press, were published in a series of books: Music after the Great War (1915), Music and Bad Manners (1916), Interpreters and Interpretations (1917), The Merry-Go-Round (1918), In the Garret (1920), and Red (1925). Despite Van Vechten’s success as a critic, however, he turned from that career in the 1920s, famously explaining that his “intellectual arteries had hardened too much for more criticism.”
Instead, Van Vechten began to write more creatively, producing seven novels between 1922 and 1930. Peter Whiffle (1922) was Van Vechten’s first foray into the novel genre; in it, Van Vechten renders a (fictional) biography of an unpublished writer. Van Vechten’s last novel Parties (1930), was nonetheless a commercial and critical failure. Following this slightly disappointing critical reception, Van Vechten ended his writing career, shifting his interest for the third time to photograph the celebrities he loved and championed, functioning completely as a photographer after 1932. He also spent much time promoting the works of his friends and contemporaries, Gertrude Stein and James Weldon Johnson.
Van Vechten was Stein’s literary executor after her death in 1946, and edited much of her collected writing. He also developed library collections of the music and writing he loved at Yale University, Fisk University, the University of New Mexico, the New York Public Library, and the Museum of Modern Art.
Van Vechten expostulated on subjects as diverse as ragtime, electrical picture concerts, and opera production.
Personality
Although Van Vechten was often criticized for superficial dabbling, his broad interests also enabled him to cross-fertilize urban cultural scenes.
Quotes from others about the person
“Van Vechten is full of allusions, of pungencies, of learning in his times. He knows how to laugh, he scorns solemnity, he has filled his book with wit and erudition. He is a civilized writer.” - Carl Van Doren
Interests
Entertaining
Connections
In 1907, Carl married Anna Elizabeth Snyder, but they divorced in 1912. In 1914, he married Fania Marinoff, an actress.