Carl Van Vechten Portraits

Exhibition : March 2 – May 6, 2006

Salvador Dali, 1934

Berenice Abbott, 1937

Marlon Brando, 1948

Gertrude Stein, 1934

Ella Fitzgerald, 1940

Eugene O’Neill, 1933

From the introduction to the exhibition catalogue :

And this, I think, is one of the nicest ways to see Van Vechten’s photographs – as parties. At a party, one person leads to the next – in each individual photograph there is the constant sense of the social scene, almost as if the party is going on in another room and Van Vechten and the subject have just stepped in here for a minute so that they can make themselves heard. It’s this quality that makes the collected body of work absolutely unlike that of any other photographer I know – it is a world of hundreds upon hundreds of relationships, of people who were neighbors and friends and artistic collaborators, who signed one another’s petitions, and smashed furniture at one another’s parties and cheered for one another’s achievements. You could begin with almost any photograph in this catalogue, or in the whole exhibition, and trace your way through the lives of almost everyone included.

— Rachel Cohen, author of A Chance Meeting