by Edward White
Financially secure, Van Vechten had the freedom to pick and choose his subjects and never had to compromise for the sake of meeting a commission or appealing to a particular audience. He refused to sell his work too and only ever gave away prints or permitted them to be reproduced as a personal favor. That degree of autonomy allowed him to produce an enormous portfolio of work strikingly different from any other major American photographer of the era. The 1930s marked the start of a golden age of photojournalism in the United States, with magazines such as Life and Sports Illustrated giving photographers the opportunity to share their work with millions, bridging the gap between the artistic tradition of Stieglitz and Steichen and the functional mass-market photography that appeared in popular newspapers. The New Deal also freed up millions of dollars for government bodies such as the Farm Security Administration to fund the work of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Louise Rosskam, and other social documentarian photographers whose work fell somewhere between art and journalism as they captured an ailing rural and small-town United States colliding with the forces of modernization. Van Vechten existed entirely outside the social documentarian tradition, yet he used much of the same vocabulary to describe his work, insisting that the purpose of his photography was also “documentary.” He saw it as his mission to document a different America, one of modernity and sophistication that he had seen develop over the last three decades, inhabited not by the average folks of the nation’s heartland but by a cosmopolitan breed iridescent with talent and personal magnetism. In the fantasia of his studio the outside world evaporated; the Depression, the New Deal, and all the other facts of 1930s America ceased to exist. Nothing remained but the individual and the act of self-expression.
In that sense Van Vechten’s photographs were a fluid continuation of his novels. His gaze through the camera was that of an elitist; his concern was to immortalize outstanding individuals, the brilliant and the beautiful. His rigid individualism kicked against the trend he discerned among many young artists of the 1930s for politicizing their work with leftist dogma. When Langston Hughes sent him Good Morning, Revolution, a collection of his latest poems that was as staunchly ideological as the title suggests, Van Vechten was dismayed. “The revolutionary poems seem very weak to me,” he wrote Hughes, who at that point was traveling the Soviet Union. “I mean very weak on the lyric side. I think in ten years, whatever the social outcome, you will be ashamed of these.” Of course Hughes’s political views were his own concern, he said, but he worried that in servicing them in his poetry, he had sacrificed his individuality, the essence of his genius. He urged him to abandon this new direction and rediscover the warmth and personality of his earlier work. “Ask yourself … Have I written a poem or a revolutionary tract?” As if to underline his own commitment to the cause of individual expression, he concluded the letter by letting Hughes know that “I am still taking photographs: Better than ever.”
As far as Van Vechten was concerned, politics, especially the politics of the left, could only corrupt or dilute individual character and was therefore antithetical to art. A half dozen years later he summed up his position when he wrote his friend Noël Sullivan about Paul Robeson’s growing attraction to socialism, at which he was equally appalled. Politics in all systems and irrespective of ideological persuasion, he informed Sullivan, is nothing more than a game played by megalomaniacs. For those who want to change the world the best they can do is to lead by example and invest their energies in self-development, because ultimately “the only person one can improve is oneself.” Even the rise of fascism in Europe could not rouse him to take an interest in politics. On March 7, 1934, Marinoff went with Lawrence Langner and Armina Marshall to join twenty thousand other spectators at Madison Square Garden, to watch a mock trial of Adolf Hitler put on by the American Jewish Congress. As a proud Jew herself Marinoff was eager to attend and acutely concerned about the situation in Germany. But Van Vechten chose to spend the evening indoors, exercising his Promethean powers in the darkroom, creating his own tiny universe populated by talented and fascinating souls, untouched by the complications of the real world.
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It might be a stretch to say that Van Vechten was now living a quiet and healthy life, but it was certainly a world away from the self-destruction of the late twenties. His drinking was under control, and the constant business of taking and developing photographs provided a diversion from temptation. He also made frequent trips to a health resort at Briarcliff Lodge in Westchester County under the supervision of Dr. William Hay, a naturopath whose regimen of vegetarian diets and colonic irrigation was a popular fad with the Van Vechtens and many of their friends in the early thirties.
The bond with Marinoff remained intact but no less fraught. When they were together, they sniped and bickered constantly, and when apart, they pined for each other. Marinoff, now semiretired and with fewer grand projects than Van Vechten to keep her occupied, suffered bouts of tremendous loneliness and anxiety. She spent a good deal of time with Eugene and Carlotta O’Neill at their home in Georgia, silently studying their mutual dependency, at times envying the tranquillity and normality of their relationship compared with her own peculiar marriage. She was delighted that debauchery had finally relaxed its grip on Van Vechten, though she often felt excluded by his new obsessions with air travel and photography, activities he chose to practice in the company of the young and beautiful, as if their vitality would seep into his pictures. In the summer of 1933 Van Vechten left Marinoff behind and flew out for a grand tour of the West with Mark Lutz, photographing him at every new place they visited: at the Grand Canyon; in Chinatown, San Francisco; on the beach in Malibu; outside Mabel Dodge’s home in Taos. Vacations in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Genoa, Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Mallorca, Marrakech, and Casablanca all followed soon after, with Van Vechten rekindling acquaintances along the way and taking more pictures of new subjects, Joan Miró and Salvador Dali included. As was invariably the case with Van Vechten’s closest male companions, Lutz quickly became a dear friend of Marinoff’s. Their adoration of the same man gave them common ground on which to meet, but Marinoff also used the friendship as a means of maintaining a romantic closeness to her husband. In the past she had been able to accommodate Van Vechten’s affairs with relative ease, perhaps because her busy and successful career as an actress had given her opportunities to express herself independently of Van Vechten. Now, without a career to invest in, she could not help feeling the time that Van Vechten devoted to his young men and his photographs was an act of rejection and abandonment. Van Vechten behaved as if oblivious that his new fixations were causing Marinoff upset. He was once again lost in self-interest; the fulfillment of his wishes took precedence over all else, including the health of his marriage. Even on December 31, 1935, when Marinoff hoped they might see out the year together by sharing lunch in their apartment, Van Vechten refused, saying he was too busy in the darkroom across the hallway to spare her an hour of his time.
His obsession with photography was total. Wherever he went he captured the world with his Leica. Even if he was walking ten blocks to meet a friend, the camera went with him in case he saw something enchanting in a department store window or was struck by the beautiful face of a waitress or a group of laughing children playing on a street corner. The old collecting instincts were channeled into a new medium, striving to capture and contain the gaiety of life in its innumerable tiny manifestations. It was another thread that connected Van Vechten the photographer to his previous iterations as novelist, essayist, critic, and reporter. A young Lincoln Kirstein joined the periphery of the jeunes gens assortis in the early 1930s and said Van Vechten’s commitment to “elegance in the ordinary” provided vital inspiration for his own work with George Balanchine that led to the establishment of the School of American Ballet in Connecticut in 1934 and in time to the New York City Ballet. It was through Van Vechten, Kirstein said, that he “first saw an American ballet had to have more to do with sport and jazz than cz
ars and ballerinas.”
Kirstein also impressed Van Vechten, who said Kirstein’s work as a patron of the arts in New York was as important as the activities of the great Renaissance princes of Italy. Young, handsome, charismatic, wealthy, and gay, Kirstein was almost the Platonic ideal of a Van Vechten photographic subject, and Van Vechten took some excellent portraits of him that drew out much of Kirstein’s ambition and intense complexity. The best of these were shot in 1933, by which time Van Vechten had already compiled an impressive gallery of America’s key artistic figures. But at the center of Van Vechten’s catalog of excellence there was one gaping hole: Gertrude Stein. Since the end of the 1931 he had sent Stein repeated evidence of his camera skills in the form of postcard prints, but by the fall of 1933 he had yet to shoot her. He was desperate to do so and to have Stein recognize his prowess as a portrait artist. In May 1933 he pleaded with her to come to the United States, where he would photograph both her and Alice Toklas, promising that she would be overjoyed at the results. “I do nothing but make photographs now and they are good.” With Steinesque repetition he included passages virtually identical to those in letters to her throughout 1932 and 1933. His persistence was partially motivated by a nagging sense that in recent years his place in Stein’s court had been diminished. In 1914, when he wrote “How to Read Gertrude Stein” for The Trend and secured the publication of Tender Buttons, he was unrivaled as Stein’s leading American supporter. In the interim, others had moved her profile forward. In 1923 Jo Davidson enshrined her as Buddha in his famous statue, and Man Ray photographed her extensively throughout that decade. Robert McAlmon risked financial ruin in 1925 by publishing Making of Americans, a book that Van Vechten had failed to publish through Knopf, and most recently Edmund Wilson dedicated a whole chapter to Stein in his highly acclaimed book on American literature Axel’s Castle. The encroachment of these figures on territory he had staked out during the First World War stirred his natural feelings of covetousness.
His friendship with Stein was never in jeopardy. Ernest Hemingway had it right when he said that Stein “only gave real loyalty to people who were inferior to her.” There is no question that Stein thought Van Vechten fitted into that category, unthreatening and biddable. Though they had corresponded avidly for twenty years, Stein showed minimal interest in Van Vechten’s writing, which she thought entertaining but not true literature, especially not his bestselling novels. From any other friend Van Vechten would not have tolerated such open indifference to his achievements. From Stein he accepted it unquestioningly. He still regarded her as the brightest star in his galaxy of brilliant people; being a member of her inner circle was proof enough for him that she recognized his specialness. What grated him was the prospect that the wider world might not appreciate the closeness of their bond.
When Stein registered a literary hit in the United States during the summer of 1933, Van Vechten felt both elated for her success and bitterly jealous that he had played no direct part in it. The work that catapulted Stein into the mainstream was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The book, ostensibly the life story of Stein’s partner, was filled with juicy gossip about the European and American stars of the Left Bank, giving an inside look at the years of artistic foment before, during, and after the war. Written in a much more accessible style than her previous efforts, it was such a critical and commercial success that Time made Stein its cover star in September 1933, confirmation that she was at last a mainstream literary phenomenon. It was a huge moment for Stein and her supporters, a vindication of their persistent support. Van Vechten was bothered that the photograph used on the magazine’s front cover was not taken by him, but by the twenty-seven-year-old George Platt Lynes, Stein’s new favorite boy. A few weeks after the Time cover, Van Vechten wrote Stein pressing his credentials once again, hoping for some praise in return. Seeing other photographers’ shots of her gave him “a tinge of jealousy,” he said, with an almost audible pout. “You’ve seen very few pictures taken by me. When you do, I think you’ll be very surprised.” Physically unable to contain his desire to bind his name to her success, when he wrote Stein about an introduction he had been asked to write for a reprint of her book Three Lives, he referred to it pointedly as “OUR Three Lives.” Bursting to gain some public recognition for Stein’s sudden ascension, Van Vechten espied the perfect opportunity when Four Saints in Three Acts, an opera with an all-black cast, written by Stein and the composer Virgil Thomson, made its premiere in Hartford, Connecticut, on February 7, 1934.
He arrived at the opening night in the mode of Stein’s official representative. “I am getting very excited,” Stein wrote him from Paris two days before the premiere, saying she was glad that Van Vechten would be acting as her eyes and ears. It was a role Van Vechten took with conspicuous seriousness. Before the curtains parted, he stalked up and down the aisles of the auditorium three times, surveying the scene as if conducting some vital task, making a mental list of all the celebrated people in attendance, and allowing his own presence to be known. Eventually he took his seat for one of the most extraordinary nights at the theater he had ever experienced.
The performance began with a near-empty stage and a drumroll. Slowly the saints made their entrance, and the scene was infused with color. Black men and women in tunics and robes of red, blue, purple, yellow, and green filled the stage, assembling themselves in shapes, fusing, then separating. The setting was supposed to be medieval Spain, but it was clear from the beginning that this was a world detached from geography and history, existing nowhere but in the imaginations of its creators. At one point seminaked angels dressed in loincloths danced the Charleston. Tinsel habits, golden halos, and cellophane roses drifted in and out of sight. The audience was baffled but transfixed. Every word of Stein’s libretto was carefully enunciated—“pigeons on the grass alas”; “Leave later gaily the troubadour plays his guitar”—but its meaning floated off high over the heads of the those in the auditorium, as freely as helium balloons released into fresh air. When the curtain came down, there was rapturous applause.
To Van Vechten and many others in the audience this had been more than a gripping night at the theater: it was the fulfillment of a prophecy; a colloquial, multiethnic spectacle of color and unconventionality that could only have been produced in the United States and written by their great messianic figure. “I haven’t seen a crowd more excited since Sacre du Printemps,” Van Vechten wrote Stein the following day. For twenty years he had been making allusions to the audience reaction at that historic production, but this occasion merited the comparison more than any other. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, for example, was apparently so overcome at the finale that he ran up and down the aisle, tearing wildly at his fine-tailored evening clothes, while others were left gasping in tears.
Within twenty-four hours Van Vechten had written an introduction for the libretto, which Random House would publish before the month was out. In it he told the story of how Four Saints in Three Acts came to be and found himself a place at the heart of the narrative. He let his readers know that it was at his apartment that Virgil Thomson had given the opera its first American performance back in 1929. More significantly, he also implied that it was his influence that gave Thomson the idea to cast black actors because it was he who had taken Thomson to a performance of Run, Little Chillun, a choral play with an African-American cast, at the Lyric Theatre in 1933—though Thomson maintained his inspiration was derived from elsewhere. When the opera opened on Broadway soon after, Van Vechten similarly ensured that his name was associated with the occasion, the point at which American high modernism punched through to the mainstream. For the program he reprised his role as a gatekeeper to Stein’s work with an introductory article entitled “How I Listen to Four Saints in Three Acts,” echoing his first Stein apologia, “How to Read Gertrude Stein,” written twenty-one years earlier.
The work that Van Vechten had done years ago in promoting Stein as a musical artist whose prose should be valued for its sound
rather than its meaning was vindicated with Four Saints in Three Acts. But now that she was a bestseller and a Broadway hit, his old role of intermediary between Stein and a bewildered and hostile American public seemed redundant. To remain relevant to her cult, he had to adopt a new strategy. That summer he headed for France to take Stein’s picture for the first time. He photographed her as if this would be his one and only chance to do so, shooting several dozen frames in a range of poses and backgrounds at her home in Bilignin: reclining on a deck chair; petting her dogs; sitting on a garden wall with Toklas. The sheer volume of pictures he took suggests he was here to imprison memories rather than make art, to “document,” as he would say. None of the images were particularly satisfying and certainly no better than the ones taken by Man Ray and George Platt Lynes, the two photographers he was keen to displace as Stein’s favorites. He was less technically skilled than either of them, and outside the tightly controlled environment of his studio Van Vechten’s photography often appears generic and amateurish, the personality of his subjects diffusing into the ether. While at Bilignin, however, he did press his belief that the time was ripe for Stein to return to the United States. With her on his home turf he was sure he would be able to achieve something remarkable.
Stein arrived in New York on October 24 for a short lecture series, one that Van Vechten had helped arrange. Having worked so long for public recognition, Stein felt unusually vulnerable on this return from exile, frightened that audiences would be unsympathetic. As Van Vechten had suspected it would be, the tour was actually an immense success. What had originally been planned as a fleeting promotional visit turned into an epic seven-month homecoming parade. Without Van Vechten’s assistance, it might have been very different. He nursed and encouraged Stein through her early lectures, building her confidence and dispelling her nerves. On her first night back in the country she dined at his apartment, where he delighted her with copies of the New York papers, her arrival splashed across them all. A few days later, to help her prepare for her first lecture, “Plays and What They Are,” at the Museum of Modern Art, Van Vechten arranged for a test run in front of a small sympathetic audience in Manhattan, held at the apartment of Elizabeth Alexander, a friend of Prentiss Taylor’s and the widow of the painter John W. Alexander. A week after that, on November 7, Stein and Toklas took their first airplane ride when they flew from New York to Chicago to see a performance of Four Saints in Three Acts. Van Vechten joined them, promising to hold their hands should they get scared.