Carl Van Vechten

The Photography of Carl Van Vechten

Born at Cedar Rapids, Iowa in June of 1880, Carl Van Vechten was an American accomplished photographer, author, critic, and ardent supporter of Harlem Renaissance artists and writers. He was the youngest child of prominent banker Charles Duane Van Vechten and Ada Amanda Fitch, a talented musician who founded the Cedar Rapids Public Library. A passionate follower of music and theater from an early age, Van Vechten left Cedar Rapids after graduating high school to pursue his interests and advance his education in Chicago.

Van Vechten entered the University of Chicago in 1899 where he studied a variety of topics including music, art and opera. Developing an interest in writing, he contributed work to the “University of Chicago Weekly”. After graduating from the university in 1903, Van Vechten accepted the position of columnist for the “Chicago American”, a growing afternoon edition newspaper. During this period, he began his experiments in photography, a passion for which he later gained widespread recognition.

After moving to New York City in 1906, Carl Van Vechten was hired by “The New York Times” as an assistant to its music critic. This position allowed him to continue his interest in opera through travels to Europe. In 1908, Van Vechten became the newspaper’s Paris correspondent and, upon his return to the United States in 1909, became the first American critic of modern dance. He later became the drama critic for the “New York Times” during 1913 and 1914. During a 1913 musical premiere in Paris, Van Vechten met and became a life-long friend and champion of American author and poet Gertrude Stein. Upon her death in 1946, he became her literary executor and assisted in the printing of her unpublished writings.

Having finished with writing both fiction and critical, Van Vechten at the age of fifty began photographing his large circle of friends with a 35 mm Leica camera, given to him by the Mexican painter, ethnologist and art historian Miguel Covarrubias. Van Vechten’s earlier career as a New York Times writer and his theater connections through his actress wife, Fania Marinoff, provided him access to new and established artists as well as cultural figures of the time. Van Vechten’s photographic portfolio became a collection of America’s cultural icons of the early to middle 1900s.

Carl Van Vechten’s portraits were usually busts or half-length poses in front of backdrops. Although he employed an assistant for lighting setups, Van Vechten was skilled in the techniques of photographic development. The subjects of his portraits included such notables as playwright Eugene O”Neill, novelist and poet Gertrude Stein, actress Anna May Wong, social activist Langston Hughes, actress and singer Pearl Bailey, and many others. Van Vechten’s photographs were exhibited at New York City’s luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman in 1933, the Museum of the City of New York in 1942, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1951, and at annual Leica Exhibitions between 1934 and 1936.

Van Vechten strongly felt that his documentary photographic work of the mid-1900s should be available for scholarly research. During his lifetime, he donated his collection of manuscripts, letters, clippings and photographs to several university libraries. The Museum of the City of New York houses an extensive collection of over two-thousand images. In 1966, the United States Library of Congress acquired a collection of fourteen-hundred photographs that had been the property of Saul Mauriber. Originally a busboy at the Stage Door Canteen during World War II, Mauriber was Van Vechten’s photographic assistant for twenty years; he organized the collection and later became the photographic executor for Van Vechten’s estate.

As an author, Carl Van Vechten published several volumes of essays on a variety of subjects between 1915 and 1920, during which time he acted as an informal literary scout for the newly formed publisher Alfred A. Knopf. The publisher printed seven novels by Van Vechten between 1922 and 1930, including the 1922 “Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works”, a fictionalized autobiographical work built around the Harlem Renaissance, and the 1930 “Parties: Scenes from Contemporary New York Life”, a satirical portrait of upper-bohemian New Yorkers and Harlem jazz clubs.

Active in both writing and photography in his latter years, Carl Van Vechten died in December of 1964 at the age of eighty-four in New York City. His ashes were scattered over the Shakespeare Garden in the city’s Central Park. Van Vechten’s personal papers, a collection of nineteen-hundred Kodachrome slides, and his series “Living Portraits: Color Photographs of African Americans from 1939 to 1964” are housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. His work is also housed in Tennessee’s Fisk University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, among others.

Notes: While in Europe in 1907, Carl Van Vechten married Anna Snyder, his long time friend from Cedar Rapids. Their marriage lasted for five years; the divorce was finalized in 1912. Two years later, he married American-Russian actress and dancer Fania Marinoff. This marriage lasted for fifty years during which the couple played a prominent role in the Harlem Renaissance. After a successful fifty year career, Marinoff died from pneumonia at the age of eighty-one in November of 1971.

From the beginning of their relationship, Fania Marinoff was aware of Van Vechten’s romantic and sexual relationships with men. Most notable of these was his relationship with Richmond journalist Mark Lutz, who was introduced to Van Vechten at a 1931 party hosted by Hunter Stagg, editor of “The Reviewer” literary magazine. Lutz became a model for Van Vechten’s early photographic work and would maintain a close relationship until Van Vechten’s death. Upon Mark Lutz’s death in 1968, all his correspondence with Van Vechten, some ten-thousand letters, were destroyed as per his wishes. His collection of photographs by Van Vechten were donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A November 2023 article by Anne McCrery for the Library of Virginia’s “The Uncommon Wealth”, entitled “Authors of All Four Sexes” examines Hunter Stagg, his friendship with Van Vechten and Lutz, and the literary renaissance of Richmond, Virginia: https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2023/11/22/hunter-stagg/

The Elisa Rolle/ Queerplaces website has a biographical article on Carl Van Vechten that includes a collection of his portrait photographs gathered by Tony Scupham-Bilton: http://www.elisarolle.com/queerplaces/a-b-ce/Carl%20Van%20Vechten.html

Top Insert Image: Mark Lutz, “Carl Van Vechten, Villa Curonia, Florence, Italy”, 1935, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Vincent Price”, 1939, Bromide Print, Marquette University, Wisconsin,

Third Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “Mark Lutz, Rhinebeck, New York”, July 1936, Gelatin Silver Print, 35.3 x 27.9 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Fourth Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “James Earl Jones”, May 1961, Vintage Gelatin Silver Print, 34.5 x 24 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Carl Van Vechten, “John Gielgud”, 1936, Vintage Print, 25.3 x 18 cm, Estate of Carl Van Vechten, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Stéphane Bouquet: “Because the Rain is Stopping”

Photographers Unknown, Because the Rain is Stopping

from The Next Loves: I

His look and it took maybe 3
hellos / seconds
only his head underneath the blue hoodie
he takes off
because the rain is stopping look here’s
the planner’s confirmation and
someone’s holding an imaginary map of the conversation we’ll say
that and that
the streets will be all orderly
if I stay close inside
the zones he surveys
but it isn’t easy
imagining that the table and the lamp and the evening
sound like his breathlessness when he uncovers me and cleans

from The Next Loves: V

Red t-shirt and husky voice
we do yoga together much less strong
than I am but so much more beautiful
at the end in savasana when we’re supposed to become
one of those vibrations in the air and the ritual bell
sets us
almost behind absence I can only
think like an animal to live oh oh
oh that long slime desire
stretched out 2 meters away if I
rolled over on him really would that from now on be the only
hope of slowing
because of the sweetness in your bones
the quickness of death against which I recite a rose
is a rose is a rose is a rose

Stéphane Bouquet, The Next Loves, 2019, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Born at Paris in October of 1968, Stéphane Bouquet is a French author and translator, film critic and screenwriter, poet, actor and choreographer. The son of a French nurse and an American military man, his work covers a wide range of genres, disciplines and literary traditions.

Stéphane Bouquet earned his Master of Arts in the field of Economics at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris. He is an established translator of poets from the New York School, a group of experimental painters and associated poets who lived and worked in the downtown area of Manhattan in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1949, painter Robert Motherwell had coined the name “New York School” for this group. Members included, among others, painters Larry Rivers, Hedda Sterne, and Alfred L. Copley as well as poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Paul Blackburn, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara.

Bouquet’s work, both literary and formally innovative, covers a wide range of formats from intricate sonnets and lengthly sequential poems to prose reflections and dramatic compositions that explore personal relationships and contemporary urban life. Influenced by American poets Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, Bouquet incorporates the spoken language of daily life and gay sexuality into his poems. He takes the energy from the poetry of the New York School and blends it with older forms of poetic attitudes from France and Europe to form a personalized approach to life’s details, accidents, and desires.

Stéphane Bouquet is the author of eight collections of poetry as well as a book of essays on poems, the 2018 “La Cité de Paroles (The City of Words)”. Two of these collections have been translated into English by poet Lindsay Turner: the 2019 “The Next Loves”, a collection of frank, sometimes rueful, love poems that trace the intimacy in contemporary gay life: and the 2023 “Common Life”, three poems, a play and three short stories of everyday queer life, politics, and social gatherings. Bouquet has also published three books on film history: the 2008 “Sergei Eisenstein”, Soviet pioneer in the theory and practice of film montage; the history of American filmmaker “Gus van Sant” in 2009, and the 2012 “Clint Fucking Eastwood”, an analysis of the popularity of Eastwood’s films in France .

As a screenwriter, Bouquet wrote twenty screenplays for feature films, non-fiction films and short films. Of these, he is best known for the 1998 comedy “1999” which he co-wrote with actor and comedian Franck Amiack; the 2000 comedy “Hors Jeu (Out of the Game)” directed by Bouquet and co-written with Amiack; the 2009 comedy short “Nuts” written and directed by Bouquet; and the 2024 television film “The First Eternal” written by Bouquet and now in pre-production. Bouquet also directed Palanquée Films’s 2013 “Douce Nuit (Silent Night)” and UniFrance’s 2009 “Gauche Droite (Left Right)” and 2013 “Maman est Là (Mom is Here)”.

Having a long-standing interest in performance arts, Stéphane Bouquet has given workshops for choreographers at the Centre National de la Danse in Paris and, for stage directors and actors, classes at Switzerland’s La Manufacture in Lausanna. He is a recipient of a 2003 Prix de Rome and a 2007 Mission Stendhal Award, a literary award promoted by the Institut François d’Italie and the French Embassy in Italy to reward the best translators of contemporary French literature to Italian.

Bouquet’s literary work has been featured in France and internationally at festivals, residencies, and events, including the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair and the 2018 Toronto Festival of Authors.

Notes: A 2024 research article by poet and translator Lindsay Turner, entitled “Translating Utopia: Stéphane Bouquet’s Queer Futurities” can be found at Duke University Press’s Romantic Review website: https://read.dukeupress.edu/romanic-review/article-abstract/115/1/134/387783/Translating-UtopiaStephane-Bouquet-s-Queer?redirectedFrom=fulltext

For the Poetry Society of America, Lindsay Turner wrote a short article, entitled “Visiting Poet: Lindsay Turner on Stéphane Bouquet”, that discussed Bouquet’s 2019 “The Next Loves” poetic collection which she had translated into English: https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/visiting-poet/bouquet

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s “Full Stop” literary review has an article by writer John Steen on Stéphane Bouquet’s “The Next Loves” at: https://www.full-stop.net/2019/10/16/reviews/john-steen/the-next-loves-stephane-bouquet/

An English translation by Lindsay Turner of Stéphane Bouquet’s poem “As an Excuse” can be found at Louisiana State University’s online literary and arts journal “NDR” produced by graduate students in its MFA Program of Creative Writing: http://ndrmag.org/translations/2020/05/as-an-excuse/

Second Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “Common Life”, February 2023, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Stéphane Bouquet, “The Next Loves”, September 2019, Translation by Lindsay Turner, Nightboat Books, Brooklyn, New York

Peter Glenville: Film History Series

Photographer Unknown, “Peter Glenville”, Date Unknown, Publicity Shot, Gelatin Silver Print

Born Peter Patrick Brabazon Browne at Hampstead, London in October of 1913, Peter Glenville was a British actor and distinguished director of both theater and film. He was born into the Irish-Catholic theatrical family of Shaun Glenville (née John Brown), one of the prominent comedic pantomime performers of British music halls, and Dorothy Ward, an English pantomime actress of a successful fifty-two year career.

While his parents’ act toured England’s theaters, Peter Glenville attended some of the country’s preeminent boarding schools, including the Jesuit-operated Stonyhurst College, a structured institution that encouraged both excellence and devotion in its students. Excelling in music, religious doctrine and his academic studies, Glenville played on the college’s rugby team, sang in the choir, and was president of its debating society. Drawn to the theater from an early age, he performed his first theatrical role in the school’s 1923 production of “The Last Practice”.

In 1932, Glenville entered Christ Church College, Oxford, as a law student; however, he spent most of his time in its theater department. Glenville became a member of the Oxford Union, the university’s debating society, and the youngest president to have served on the prestigious Oxford University Dramatic Society, the OUDS. After his time at Oxford, Glenville relocated to London where he began his acting career. He joined the leading Shakespearean company and performed at Stratford-upon-Avon’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and London’s Old Vic, the Royal Victoria Hall.

During the years of World War II, Peter Glenville remained in London during the Blitz bombings to perform at West End theaters opposite such stars as Vivien Leigh. He appeared in various leading roles in such productions as Edgar Wallace’s Chicago-gangland play “On the Spot” in London’s West End, and Mary Hayley Bell’s horror thriller “Duet for Two Hands” at London’s Lyric Theatre. Glenville, in addition to his acting, started overseeing performances and was eventually appointed Director of the Royal Victoria Hall.

Established as a prominent West End director by the mid-1940s, Glenville worked with such notable writers as Tennessee Williams, Jean-Paul Sartre, Graham Greene, and Terence Rattigan. In 1945, he met theatrical producer Hardy William “Bill” Smith who became both his professional and intimate life partner. In 1949, Glenville and Smith relocated from London to New York City where they continued their work in theater; Smith would produce his partner’s plays in both London and New York. Glenville made his New York directorial debut in October of 1949 with Terence Rattigan’s “The Browning Version” at the Coronet Theatre. In London and Manchester, he later directed Rattigan’s 1954 two one-act plays, collectively entitled “Separate Tables”, that starred Margaret Leighton and Eric Portman.

Peter Glenville followed his debut with several notable productions on Broadway and in Europe. From 1949 to 1973, he directed twenty-one Broadway productions. Among these are playwright William Archibald’s 1950 “The Innocents” based on “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James; Broadhurst Theatre’s 1951 production of “Romeo and Juliet” that featured Olivia de Havilland’s Broadway debut; Bridget Boland’s 1954 “The Prisoner” with Alec Guinness, staged at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theater and London’s Globe Theater; and Michael and Fay Kanin’s 1959 “Rashomon”. Performed at New York’s Music Box Theatre, “Rashomon” received three Tony Award nominations, one of which was Best Direction for Glenville.

In 1959, Grenville’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” was presented as a musical entitled “Take Me Along”. For his performance as Sid Davis, Jackie Gleason received the Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical. Glenville directed the first production in English of Jean Anouilh’s 1959 “Becket or the Honour of God” in 1960. Starring Lawrence Olivier and Anthony Quinn, this play was nominated for five Tony Awards and won four, including Best Play and Best Actor for Anthony Quinn. Glenville continued his Broadway success with other award-winning musicals, comedies and serious dramas.

In the prime of his career, Peter Glenville began to work in the Hollywood film industry with many of the studios’ major stars. His first film with Columbia Pictures and BD Film Corporation was the 1955 psychological thriller “The Prisoner” with Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins. Glenville stayed with Columbia Pictures for his second film, the the 1958 “Me and the Colonel”, a Golden Globe winning comedy with Danny Kaye. In addition to his directorial work, Glenville had an uncredited acting role in this production. His 1961 drama “Summer and Smoke” for Paramount Pictures received five nominations for the Academy Awards; Glenville was also nominated for a Directors Guild of America Award and the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion.

Glenville directed four more films for various studios, among which were the 1966 British comedy “Hotel Paradiso” for Metro Goldwyn Mayer that starred Alec Guinness and Gina Lollabrigida, and the 1967 American political drama “The Comedians”, an all-star production, although poorly received, that featured Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Lillian Gish, Peter Ustinov and upcoming actors Cicely Tyson and James Earl Jones. Most notable of Glenville’s films was the 1964 British historical drama “Becket”, an adaptation of Anouilh’s 1959 play that starred Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud. Released by Paramount Pictures, the film was well received at the box office and earned multiple Academy Award nominations, winning the Best Screenplay. This film also won awards from the British Film Academy and British Society of Cinematographers, among others.

Following a Broadway production of Tennessee William’s “Out Cry” in 1973, Peter Glenville retired from active theatrical and film work due to the change in cinema towards violence and method acting. He and “Bill” Smith eventually moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where they developed a notable estate. They spent their final years entertaining their longtime friends and major political figures including heads of State and former Presidents. Peter Glenville died on the third of June in 1996 in New York City from a heart attack at the age of eighty-two.

Notes: Hardy William Smith was born in England on the first of December in 1916 and served in the United States Navy during World War II. After his discharge from service, he remained in England and began a career in the London theater. In 1945, Smith met Peter Grenville and began their long relationship. According to records, Smith resided in New York City and later at White Plains, New York, most probably after Glenville’s death in 1999. Hardy William Smith passed away on the third of October in 2001 at the age of eighty-four. His body is interred at the Gates of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.

Smith was Grenville’s directorial assistant on his 1951 Broadway production of “Romeo and Juliet” at the Broadhurst Theatre. He also produced three other Broadway shows for Grenville: playwright Ugo Betti’s 1955 drama “Island of Goats” at the Fulton Theatre; Feydeau and Desvallierès’s 1957 comedy “Hotel Paradiso” at the Henry Miller’s Theatre; and Michael and Fay Kanin’s 1959 crime drama “Rashomon” at the Music Box Theatre.

The Peter Glenville Foundation’s online site is located at: https://peterglenville.org

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is the repository of Peter Glenville’s correspondence, business records, clippings, appointment books and personal records that span the years from 1914 to 2001. A complete inventory of his papers can be found at: https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadid=00395

Second Insert Photo: Photographer Unknown, “Richard Burton, Peter Glenville, Elizabeth Taylor”, 1967, Film Set of “The Comedians”, Cinematography Henri Decaē, Metro Goldwyn Mayer

Third Insert Image: Peter Glenville, “Becket”, 1964, Film Poster, Cinematography Geoffrey Unsworth, Paramount Pictures

Fourth Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Peter Glenville and Peter O’Toole”, 1963-64, “Becket” Film Set, Cinematography Geoffrey Unsworth, Paramount Pictures

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Peter Glenville”, 1963-64, “Becket” Film Set, Cinematography Geoffrey Unsworth, Paramount Pictures