Carl Van Vechten  (1880 - 1964)

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A Bibliography of the Work of Carl Van Vechten by Bruce Kellner

This model bibliography should be included in the collections of all academic libraries and in any others that serve readers interested in the literary and artistic movements of the 1920s and 1930s. Since Van Vechten was particularly interested in the American Negro, all libraries with that emphasis will want to own the book. This detailed guide provides a method of examining an active and important period through one of its most prolific commentators.  

Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance : A Critical Assessment (Studies in African American History and Culture) by Leon Coleman

This book evaluates Carl Van Vechten's contribution to the Harlem Renaissance by presenting hitherto unexamined documentary evidence. The author draws on correspondence, manuscripts, personal memorabilia, and published materials to examine the origins and development of the period in the 1920s which was termed the "New Negro Renaissance."
In the later years of the 1920s, as a result of the success of his novel, Nigger Heaven, Carl Van Vechten received extensive publicity associating him with Harlem and with the Harlem Renaissance. The vehement controversy which the book aroused among African American critics and the black press, who attacked it, and the African American authors and friends of Van Vechten who defended it, obscured the true extent of Van Vechten's role in the Harlem Renaissance. This study sheds light on the Van Vechten controversy which has continued to the present day.

Library of Congress

The Carl Van Vechten Photographs Collection at the Library of Congress consists of 1,395 photographs taken by American photographer Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) between 1932 and 1964. The bulk of the collection consists of portrait photographs of celebrities, including many figures from the Harlem Renaissance. A much smaller portion of the collection is an assortment of American landscapes. 

Carl Van Vechten Biography

Library of Congress

Excerpt:

.....During World War II, Van Vechten volunteered at the Stage Door Canteen. Top-notch entertainers frequently performed there for servicemen. Saul Mauriber, one of the busboys under Van Vechten's supervision, began working as his photographic assistant and remained in this capacity for twenty years. Mauriber was also responsible for organizing Van Vechten's photographs and eventually became the photographic executor for Van Vechten's estate.

.....Van Vechten's photographs have been widely exhibited and frequently used as illustrations in books and magazines. He felt very strongly that his collection of manuscripts, letters, clippings, programs, and photographs, many pertaining to creative blacks, should be available for scholarly research. With this in mind, during his lifetime, he presented various parts of his collection to several university libraries. The Library of Congress acquired its collection of approximately 1,400 photographs in 1966 from Saul Mauriber...

Inspectin' and Collecting:  The Scene of Carl Van Vechten

By Beth A. McCoy

Excerpt:

...by identifying Van Vechten on a matrix of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, again the terms through which both Stein (lesbian, female, Jew, white) and, particularly, Van Vechten (bisexual, male, gay, Nordic, white) are often filtered. The implicit question posed by the chain of looks might be phrased as "What is it about Van Vechten that so drew Stein's attention?" or, perhaps more basically: "What is Van Vechten?" No matter what the phrasing, the question is never answered, and the scene ends in a sort of closed system: the reader's irreducible contemplation of Stein looking at Van Vechten, caught himself in the act of looking at something else. Stein's writing posits Van Vechten as the visual residence of a wanted yet unknowable knowledge and thus as the object of interpretive desire, an object that, somehow bound up in questions of race and sexuality, neither returns the questing look with which it is approached nor yields knowledge or certainty about difference (a "they" apart from a "we"), its location, or its meaning...

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