Carl Van Vechten

The collection of silver gelatin photographs by Carl Van Vechten at the Hammond Museum includes 495 portraits taken during the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's of artists, writers, dancers, politicians, sports figures and anyone Mr. Van Vechten thought was interesting. The prints were donated to the Museum in 1963 by Mr. Saul Mauriber, a life long friend and executor of Mr. Van Vechten's estate. Alvin Ailey - 1955 Ella Fitzgerald - 1940 Carl Van Vechten began his career as music and theater critic, and as a writer. At the age of 52 he declared he would never publish another word and he devoted himself to what had become a long-term hobby: photographic portraiture. He never charged his subjects for a portrait, only occasionally requesting a fee from a magazine who wished to reproduce a photo. He was able to get people to pose for him because having your photograph taken by Carl Van Vechten was a sure sign that you were "somebody." Gertrude Stein wrote in one of her last memos from Paris that: "I always wanted to historical, that was just the way it was. Carl Van Vechten was one of the first to assure that I would be." Gertrude Stein - 1935 James Earl Jones - 1961 Edward Steichen is quoted in Mr. Van Vechten's obituary in the New York Times (December 22, 1964) as saying, "Mr. Van Vechten's photography was darned good. He had a good opportunity to do the kind of work he was interested in, and he did it very well." What he was interested in was portraits of artists, writers, dancers and potential celebrities. He was proud of the fact that he photographed everyone from "Matisse to Noguchi." He was also interested in the world of African-American artists and performers whom he photographed for posterity. He is one of two famous chroniclers of the Harlem Renaissance (Van der Zee) being the other. His New York Times obituary says: He was in a way, one of the first civil rights exponents. He discovered Harlem night life about 1920, and was credited with taking white intellectuals there from midtown… His interest in {African-American culture} developed into a passionate collecting of items pertaining to the Negro contribution to American life – photos, manuscripts by Negro authors, 400 early phonograph records by Negro musicians, letters and the like, and this became the basis of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, which he gave to Yale University." Sir John Gielgud - 1936 Marlon Brando - 1948 Please note: the examples above are not all part of the Hammond Museum's permanent collection.