THE RELEVANT QUEER: Carl Van Vechten, Writer, Photographer, Journalist and Patron to the Arts in the Harlem Renaissance

“Is a little experience too much to pay for learning to know oneself?”

TRQ: Carl Van Vechten, Born June 17, 1880

Writer, photographer, and journalist Carl Van Vechten was born on June 17, 1880. He established his reputation for supporting the arts, writing reviews for prestigious publications like The New York Times and Vanity Fair, and his controversial fiction that exoticized Black culture in America. 

Van Vechten was born into a wealthy family in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His father was a banker who started a school for Black children in Mississippi, and his mother was a talented musician. 

After he graduated from Washington High School in 1898, Van Vechten enrolled at the University of Chicago to study art and music. He developed a particular interest in ragtime and other forms of African American music. Van Vechten also wrote for the University of Chicago Weekly newspaper. 

In 1903 Van Vechten graduated from college and started work as a columnist for the Chicago American. After Hearst fired him three years later over his complicated writing style, Van Vechten moved to New York City to review music at The New York Times. 

In 1907, he took a leave of absence from the newspaper to travel through Europe. While in England, he married childhood friend Anna Snyder. In 1909, Van Vechten returned to N.Y.T. as America’s first modern dance critic where he reviewed the avant-garde work and performances by Isadora Duncan and Anna Pavlova. 

In 1912, Van Vechten and Snyder divorced. After a premiere in Paris in 1913, Van Vechten met Gertrude Stein. The two became lifelong friends. In 1914, he married Fania Marinoff, a Russian actress. The couple were known for socialising with Black people both at home and public gatherings. He continued having affairs with men, including one of his photographic models, Mark Lutz. 

Through the 1920s, Van Vechten socialised with leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance in clubs and restaurants in Harlem. Controversial and flamboyant, he often sought the company of young Black men. 

Controversies would escalate in 1926, following an article for Crisis in which he warned Black Americans to draw on their own culture and not “continue to make a gift of it to white authors who will exploit it until not a drop of vitality remains.” 

That year he published the novel Nigger Heaven (1926) and carried out the exact exploitative act he’d warned about in the article. With its racial slur as a shockingly offensive title and its sensationalistic story set in Harlem, the book met with instant backlash. 

While Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson came to Van Vechten’s defence for his use of realism, leaders like Countee Cullen and Black readers joined W. E. B. Du Bois in deriding the novel as “an affront to the hospitality of black folk and the intelligence of white.” 

In 1927, he received his family inheritance, which provided financial freedom. After the Great Depression hit in 1929, the Harlem Renaissance faded and very few people were in the mood to spend lavishly in the once lively nightclubs. 

Van Vechten turned to photography in the early 1930s at the suggestion of Miguel Covarrubias, a Vanity Fair colleague. Van Vechten began shooting his social acquaintances. Many of them were leading members of the Harlem Renaissance. The Library of Congress now houses 1,400 of his portraits, which include Du Bois, Sammy Davis Jr., Diahann Carroll, Bessie Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Alfred Knopf. 

He continued his patronage of Black American art and funded exhibitions of Black American art in New York. He served as Chairman of the Fine Arts Commission of Fisk University, a Black educational institution that which awarded him an honorary degree in 1955. At Yale he established the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters and the Anna Marble-Pollock Collection of Books about Cats. 

Van Vechten’s photographs have been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. 

Van Vechten died on December 22, 1964 in New York City. 

About the Authors

Troy Wise is currently a PhD student at UAL Central St Martins and teaches fashion and graphic design at London College of Contemporary Arts. His background is in marketing and is founder and co-editor of Image Amplified. He lives in, and is continually fascinated by, the city of London.

Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central St Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries. He currently holds two MA’s and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co-editor at Image Amplified since its start, he lives in London, is fascinated by history and is motivated by continuing to learn and explore. 

Sources:

Britannica

Encyclopedia

GLBTQ Archive

New Yorker

Yale Archives