just jolly
James
Smalls The Homoerotic Photography of
Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2006)
Since
I have brought up the subject of Carl Van Vechten’s celebrity photographs,
including their positive and controversial effects, I suppose I should also
speak, briefly, on another body of Van Vechten’s work, not shown publically—except
to a few close private friends—during the writer’s life time, but left to
Yale’s Beineke Library, closed to the public until 25 years after the
photographer’s death. For a full and academically adept discussion of this
topic, I refer the reader to the book mentioned above, which was recently loaned
to me after a brunch with Bob Holmes (former head of music rights at Columbia
Pictures) and his companion Dave. The books' author, James Smalls, visited our home
for a brunch, along with several other scholars, in 1998 in connection with the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s show Rhapsodies
in Black: Art in the Harlem Renaissance, which my companion Howard Fox,
coordinated. At the time, Smalls had just begun working on the homoerotic art,
and had only recently seen the photographs and collages at Yale University for
the first time (see the note to the essay on Richard Bruce Nugent in My Year 2008: In the Gap).
Although I have never seen this collection
in person, it appears given what Smalls reproduces in his book and what Edward
White describes, that although the collection—which includes numerous collages
and other related materials, may be rather large—its nude subjects are fairly
limited to a pair of male black and white models, whom Van Vechten paid to pose
several times, in the studio and outside in nature.

Using theoretical discussions by many of the
well known late 20th-century critical theorists and psychologists,
Smalls assesses Van Vechten’s art in the context of all the issues it might
suggest, including Black essentialism by white society, fetishism, sadomasochism,
and pre-Stonewall homosexual aestheticism. It is clear that one might, indeed,
“accuse” Van Vechten of any of these positions if he so wanted to. But the
question on which Smalls finally focuses is based on the difference between who
is viewing and through what lens, and what Van Vechten, who did not intend them
for public viewing, meant them to be. Smalls argues, in the end:
I believe that these
photographic scenarios were born out of Van
Vechten’s urgent social
desire to legitimate and satisfy his fixation
on black culture and to
simultaneously appease the need to vent
homoerotic desires. As such,
they were extremely significant for
defining and maintaining Van Vechten’s
psychological link to a
public
social life. By focusing in on the homoerotic and on racial
distinction within a highly artificial and
contrived atmosphere of
harmonious solemnity and implied
sadomasochistic acts, images
such as these heighten a sense of white
capitulation in racial co-
operation between the races. The social
and the erotic/sexual are
effectively linked to fantasy. In
pushing the theme of utopic in-
terracial harmony in ritualizes
gestures and mock settings, Van
Vechten’s photographs succeed at
playing on a conflicted fusion
of power, fear, and desire.
Although I might not want to argue with
Smalls’ reasoned conclusions, I do feel that the concept that Van Vechten did
not publically show these did not necessarily mean he did not want them,
eventually or even contemporaneously, want to be seen by others. In giving them
to Yale and expressing, as I quote above, “Yale May Not Think So, but It’ll Be
Just Jolly,” Van Vechten very much knew that, at least ultimately, they would be seen and evaluated. One must
also remember that Van Vechten came from a generation in which, by publically
showing them, he might have created not only a great deal of bad press and
public consternation, but might even have been arrested, destroying his career
far more significantly than did his publishing of Nigger Heaven. Certainly the egoist in Van Vechten might have loved
to show this body of work—if only things had been different or had he lived
beyond Stonewall into the sexual openness of our own times.
The
collages and other ephemera, moreover, appear, at least in the few examples
I’ve seen, to be far more outrageously campy and provocative than the more
serious-minded interactions between his Black and white models. These works not
only include outrageous depictions of gay “products” to provide pleasure (title
New York’s Biggest Date!), iconic gay
symbols such as St. Sebastien, new definitions of what he describes as “a gay
family,” and even pedophilic depictions of a “Teen Sex Club” (Things for Children To Do). I am not
suggesting that Van Vechten ever acted out any such sexual implications, but he
certainly delighted in their possibilities, and took the time to amuse himself
in creating such visual-linguistic constructions. If nothing else, these works
confirm Van Vecten’s intense desire just to “have fun,” to challenge every
cultural taboo he encountered. This spoiled child, unlike the Amberson boy in Orson
Welles’ great film and Booth Tarkington’s novel, was spared any “comeuppance.”
Los Angeles,
April 6, 2014