QUEER MODERNS
Max Ewing’s Jazz Age New York
by Alice T. Friedman
Princeton University Press
280 pages, $49.95
I FIRST LEARNED of Max Ewing while researching gay photographer George Platt Lynes. Ewing makes several appearances in the Lynes narrative, both as a young man who moved alongside Lynes in New York’s bohemian circles and as a fellow artist. Ewing used portrait photos to create his own pantheon of artists, movie stars, personalities, and handsome young men—actors, dancers, bodybuilders, and models who caught his eye. In his Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits (1928–33), Ewing collected newspaper and magazine celebrity portraits along with beefcake shots that he tacked floor-to-ceiling in the walk-in closet of his New York apartment. Favored friends were invited to view the exhibition—and in some cases to see themselves immortalized. He printed a catalog and a supplement that documented some 300 personalities on view and included photos by Lynes, Berenice Abbott, Cecil Beaton, and Carl Van Vechten.
If this camp folly put Ewing on the map of Jazz Age modernists, he certainly hadn’t started that way. Alice T. Friedman’s well-researched and amply illustrated study of Ewing and his times, Queer Moderns: Max Ewing’s Jazz Age New York, informs us that he was born in 1903 and raised in tiny Pioneer, Ohio. His parents supported his visions of a more sophisticated life—tolerating his staging of at-home theatricals and shielding him from the “prejudices of school friends and neighbors.” They were socially ambitious and prosperous enough to afford Max’s piano lessons, concert tickets, and trips to the theater. Despite the Depression, they provided Max with “a generous allowance … paying for his comfortable living quarters at college and in New York and supporting his taste for fashionable clothes.”
He attended the University of Michigan and found a “congenial” circle of friends who staged plays and performed popular music. Yet he was “restless” in Ann Arbor and became a devoted follower of critic, novelist, and later photographer Carl Van Vechten. He introduced himself by letter and informed Van Vechten that he would be coming to New York to study piano. Van Vechten responded, inviting Ewing to “visit his home in New York for a more extended conversation.” Thus began a mentorship in which Van Vechten charmed Ewing with his deep cultivation in the arts. In those early meetings, Van Vechten assured Ewing that he would introduce him to anyone he wished to know and promised to have Ewing invited “everywhere.”
Friedman’s densely researched study of the formal salons and informal “circles” that enhanced Ewing’s artistic and social standing provides an account of the lively cross-pollination of the period’s sexually, racially, and creatively adventuresome artists. Van Vechten and his wife, actress Fania Marinoff, hosted Harlem Renaissance figures including writers Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen and performers like gay cabaret singer Jimmie Daniels and Bahamian dancer Paul Meeres. In an evening, Van Vechten might lead a band of queer white sophisticates uptown to Harlem’s nightspots, confirming historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s assessment that in those years “Harlem was surely as gay as it was Black.”
The Upper East Side salon of Kirk and Constance Askew was anchored by art-minded Harvard men of note: Julien Levy for introducing Surrealism at his eponymous gallery, Philip Johnson as an architect and contributor to the city skyline, and Lincoln Kirstein, a champion of classical ballet. Meanwhile, eccentric salon hostess Muriel Draper entertained intellectuals, artists, and disciples of Russian mystic George Gurdjieff, along with the occasional aristocrat, working-class laborer, and socialist. Sexual interests crossed the spectrum. Ewing revered the voluble Draper and fell entirely under her spell, producing a series of small, sculpted portrait busts of her and several full-body figurines as well.
Artist Florine Stettheimer and her sisters Ettie and Carrie hosted at their Alwyn Court apartment the leading “American and European avant-garde artists, writers, and musicians, including many of Van Vechten’s and Draper’s friends.” Florine painted singular New York scenes whose prancing elongated figures were immediately identifiable—they included painter Charles Demuth; photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his wife, painter Georgia O’Keeffe; sui generis artist Marcel Duchamp; and composer Virgil Thomson. Though members of New York’s Jewish haute bourgeoisie, the Stettheimers had no compunction about fraternizing with artists of minority sexual tastes. Ewing became a regular “consort and confidant” in their elegant home.
Ewing’s pursuit of cultural nabobs set him stalking far afield; in 1926–27 he traveled to Paris, Villefranche, and Venice. With Van Vechten’s letter of introduction, he met Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and their minions. In short order, Ewing also entranced the leaders of Sapphic Paris: Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks. While being chauffeur-driven with Brooks to the south of France in her “huge car,” he detoured to Villefranche to visit American writer Glenway Wescott, then living with his lover Monroe Wheeler. Ewing nursed a fan’s crush on Wescott that had a sexual component, but when Wescott and Wheeler came to New York in 1927, Ewing’s fellow social climber, Lynes, horned in on the expatriate couple and glommed onto Wheeler, effectively turning the duo into a trio for some fifteen years.
Photographers Lynes and Van Vechten probably influenced Ewing’s next important project. By 1929–30, Ewing took up a Kodak camera with more than an amateur’s enthusiasm but less than a professional’s discernment. Eventually, he took “over a hundred images produced between April 1932 and January 1933 that he titled The Carnival of Venice.” These were individual portraits set before a window shade depicting Venice’s Grand Canal looking toward the Piazza San Marco. His models included everyone who was anyone in the intersecting circles he frequented: Paul Robeson costumed as Othello; Kirstein in the stance of a Venetian gondolier; Levy and his beautiful wife, Joella; Wescott’s handsome younger brother, Lloyd; a turbaned Draper; young sculptor Isamu Noguchi; and on and on. For a single day in January 1933, the Julien Levy Gallery exhibited a selection of the portraits. The visiting public surely mirrored many figures on the gallery walls, for those who have arrived socially like nothing so much as confirmation.
Friedman has delved deeply into Ewing’s archives at Yale and read his voluminous correspondence, especially his “long, gossipy letters” to his beloved mother Clara, with whom he shared his adventures in making himself known to those in the know—most especially Draper. A seductress of talented younger men who were sexually pliable, like Kirstein, who was among her conquests, Draper found in Ewing a ready admirer, escort, confidant, and “constant companion.” This relationship doesn’t seem to have become horizontal, but Ewing’s epistolary enthusiasms include both men and women. While Friedman claims that he avoids declaring his homosexuality outright, his fervent responses to the masculine allure of gents he meets argue otherwise. In Paris, he meets with an American friend he describes as “about the handsomest spectacle the world contains,” with whom he went to the opera and a “Montmartre men’s nightclub,” where they “made a most magnificent entrance.”
Friedman announces Ewing’s early death by suicide in the book’s opening pages, and her final chapter explains the forces that plagued him. His father died in April 1932, taxing his mother’s mental equilibrium and physical health and provoking “her many anxieties and fears” as the Depression was deepening and war in Europe seemed likelier. Ewing’s piano “career” had been cut short by a lingering finger injury; his move to Hollywood in 1933 after reviewing movies for magazines and drafting treatments for screenplays did not pan out. Correspondence between mother and son grew increasingly strained as Clara chided him for profligate expenditures and suffered from the lack of her husband’s emotional and financial support. Her health failing, Clara pressed Ewing to return to Pioneer, surely the last place he wished to settle, even briefly. Yet he was living in “the lower depths of Ohio” by early 1934. His letters to friends frankly addressed his isolation and depression, especially following Clara’s death that April. He received replies from some intimates who tried to raise his spirits, but Draper was slow to respond and did so in the no-nonsense language that admits no weakness and insists on action: “If you would just do something … wash the dishes or cook a dinner … you would find a certain energy coming back to you.”
One friend did put himself out to help Ewing. Professional boxer and ex-Marine Jack Pollock had been his close companion in New York and posed for him in stages of undress. He visited Ewing in Hollywood and wrote him afterward: “Why I Became so attached to you is more than I can explain But without a doubt you are the Best person I have ever known.” Later, Pollock traveled to Pioneer to help pull Ewing together after Clara’s death. They were an unusual pair, and neighbors took note. Pollock felt helpless to cheer Ewing up and eventually persuaded him to ride back to New York. En route, they “stopped for lunch and to fill up the car.” Left alone in a café, Ewing walked to the “steep bank of the nearby Susquehanna River,” where he removed his clothes, folded them neatly, “plunged into the water,” and drowned. Friedman writes that Pollock was “undone by the tragedy” and arrived at Draper’s to find her usual “assortment of friends and hangers-on. No one was mourning for Max Ewing. … The parade had moved on and other people had taken his place.”
Thankfully, Van Vechten worked with family members to preserve Ewing’s letters, scrapbooks, and photographic prints that document his achievements in an age of social and sexual experimentation more robust than is typically supposed.
Allen Ellenzweig is the author of George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye (Oxford Univ. Press, 2021).
