A sensitive discussion will ensue for anyone who names Carl Van Vechten a “father” of the Harlem Renaissance. Although married to Russian actress Fania Marinoff, Van Vechten never had children. Nevertheless, he was a patron and active supporter of many young artists and writers, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston,
In her second piece for “Eminent Biography” Emily Bernard, author of Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White, explores the relationships of Carl Van Vechten and the many women who circled through his interracial and inter-artistic world of the Harlem Renaissance. After all, it is
The friendships that formed the conversations of the Harlem Renaissance and the complex ideas of the relationships between art and race were the vein of black literary life of the early twentieth century. As editor of the volume of letters, Remember Me to Harlem: The Correspondence of Langston Hughes and
Born in 1886, John Graham was a progressive promoter of surrealism, cubism, and abstraction, as well as a mentor and confidant to the likes of Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning (the four artists collectively called themselves the Four Musketeers in the ‘30s). Last week, an exhibition entitled
It’s hard to imagine what American art today would look like without Alfred Steiglitz. A photographer in his own right, Steiglitz was also the gallery owner who first exhibited Rodin and Picasso in the United States, the husband who championed Georgia O’Keeffe as the first truly American modernist, and the
Born November 15, 1887, Georgia O’Keeffe lived 98 years to become one of the most well known and celebrated American artists of the twentieth century. But to her husband Alfred Stieglitz, the man who had first brought her work to New York, she was “Sweetestheart”, and he was “Dearest Duck.”
Yesterday on NPR’s Morning Edition, Susan Stamberg interviewed Sarah Greenough on her new book of letter correspondence: My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933. Unlike new 21st-century ways of sending love notes such as texts and Facebook messages, which seem only to escalate
The Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago was a giant in the world of shopping. Standing in the middle of the building in the central court, you looked up several stories to a huge, gorgeous Tiffany’s Favrile glass ceiling. You kept circling around back for another free sample of Frango
The Goodreads giveaway for My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933 may have passed, but the story of the letters is only now beginning to unfold as we approach the June 21 publication of the volume. In just over 30 years, Stieglitz and
The Steins were not the only Jewish American family interested in collecting the strikingly profound works of the Modernist era; in fact, they were friends with Baltimore sisters Claribel and Etta Cone, who visited the expats and were captivated by the Parisian art of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. The