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Passionate Images: The World of Carl Van Vechten
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10075 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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4 / 1993 |
1,698 Words |
| Author
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John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
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It's a wild party worthy of the jazz age. There they are: composer George Gershwin, poet Jean Cocteau, boxer Joe Louis, writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Good companions all. The Passionate Observer: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten--seventy-six portraits culled from the Hallmark Photographic collection--is the first major retrospective of one of this century's most remarkable amateur photographers.
"Van Vechten was a dandy in the strict sense of the word," say's curator Keith Davis, director of fine arts programs at Hallmark and author of the exhibition book The Passionate Observer, as he guides this author through the display. The black-and-white images, the largest measuring eleven inches by fourteen inches, are simple black frames tastefully arranged on the walls of three display rooms. Each portrait has an acompanying card providing background information on the subject. "Van Vechten was an upper-class bohemian who was independently wealthy," Davis explains. "In his heyday, in the 1920s through the 1940s, he was quite well known, a gifted man of many parts--a critic, novelist, patron of the arts, photographer, and bon vivant. You might say he devoted his whole life to the pursuit of happiness."
Joining us in the display rooms is Bruce Kellner, author of Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades (1968), the definitive biography, as well as several other books about Van Vechten. Kellner enjoyed a privileged friendship with Van Vechten during the last decade of his life. Now an emeritus professor of English at Millersville University in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Kellner has come to Kansas City to participate in a Van Vechten symposium. "Folks who come here to see Gershwin and Billie Holiday will leave with a fascination for Van Vechten himself," says Kellner. "He was a trip! His friends said he was no vacation from the real business of life and art. By that they meant he was always busy with the real pleasures of life and art!" Even in his youth in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the 1880s Van Vechten was a center of attention, affecting a derby, high callers, and, as Kellner observes "the tightest trousers in town." Later at the University of Chicago he spent more time socializing than studying, and as a dance and theater critic for the New York Times, he seemed to roam the salons of the fashionable and the cabarets of Harlem more then the news beat.
Yet, this was his beat; and characteristically, Van Vechten didn't miss a thing. He was as equally at home writing about subjects like Isadora Duacan, the notorious 1913 New York Armory Show, and the newfangled movies, as he was interviewing the sculptor Rodin, the Wright brothers, and
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