Alice T. Friedman presents "Queer Moderns"

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ABOUT THE BOOK

A richly illustrated history of the glittering world of queer artistic life in the 1920s and ’30s

In Queer Moderns, Alice Friedman tells the fascinating story of the queer avant-garde of the 1920s and ’30s in New York, Paris, and Venice, as seen through the eyes of Max Ewing (1903–1934), a young musician, photographer, and man-about-town who, although virtually unknown today, moved in extraordinary circles. In his photographs and letters, we meet the rising stars of modern art, music, dance, and literature and enter a world of interracial friendship, “queer space,” and experimentation that shone brightly before being swept away by the Depression. It is a remarkable story that reveals that the history of modernism is more queer and more Black than previously recognized.

In the 1920s, Ewing became part of an international coterie of artists led by Carl Van Vechten and Muriel Draper. In Europe, he was entertained by Gertrude Stein, met Stravinsky, and took a road trip with Romaine Brooks and Natalie Barney. In 1928, in a closet in his apartment, Ewing created the Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits, an installation of photos of his favorite celebrities—Black and white, clothed and nude. For his Carnival of Venice, he took portraits of more than a hundred friends—including Paul Robeson, Berenice Abbott, Isamu Noguchi, Agnes de Mille, and E. E. Cummings—posed in front of a backdrop of Saint Mark’s Square.

Like a character from a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ewing joined the party and then died tragically, unable to accept the end of his era or the lost dream of a new way of living. His story sheds new light on modernism and an artistic milieu that was ahead of its time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alice T. Friedman is the Grace Slack McNeil Professor Emerita of American Art at Wellesley College and founding co-director of its Architecture Program.

She is interested in building an interdisciplinary, feminist approach to architecture through research, teaching, and public education.

Her books include American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture and Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Cultural History.

ABOUT THE INTERLOCUTOR

Paul Fisher is a biographer and cultural historian who has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, Boston University, and Harvard, and is currently Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. An expert on Henry James and John Singer Sargent, he has lectured widely and has participated in exhibitions at the Gardner Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Tate Britain in London. His books include Artful Itineraries: European Art and American Careers in High Culture, 1865-1920 (2000), House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (2008), and, most recently, The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World (2022), which was nominated for a Biographers International Organization Plutarch Prize and was named a Times Literary Supplement and New Yorker book of the year.