GLR November-December 2025

BOOKS

A Collector of Artists and Artifacts

I FIRST LEARNED of Max Ewing while researching gay photographer George Platt Lynes. Ewing makes several appearances in the Lynes nar rative, 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,

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 ex tended conversation.” Thus began a men torship in which Van Vechten charmed

A LLEN E LLENZWEIG

QUEER MODERNS Max Ewing’s Jazz Age New York by Alice T. Friedman Princeton University Press 280 pages, $49.95

Ewing with his deep cultivation in the arts. In those early meet ings, Van Vechten assured Ewing that he would introduce him to anyone he wished to know and promised to have Ewing in vited “ 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

bodybuilders, and models who caught his eye. In his Galleryof Extraordinary Portraits (1928–33), Ewing collected newspa per 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 exhi bition—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

Harlem Renaissance figures in cluding 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, confirm ing 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 in troducing Surrealism at his eponymous gallery, Philip John son as an architect and contribu tor 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 Gurdji eff, 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, pro ducing a series of small, sculpted portrait busts of her and several

on the map of Jazz Age mod ernists, he certainly hadn’t started that way. Alice T. Friedman’s well-researched and amply illus trated study of Ewing and his times, Queer Moderns: Max Ewing’s Jazz Age New York , in forms us that he was born in 1903 and raised in tiny Pioneer, Ohio. His parents supported his visions of a more sophisticated life—tol erating his staging of at-home theatricals and shielding him from the “prejudices of school friends and neighbors.” They were socially ambitious and pros perous 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 “conge nial” circle of friends who staged plays and performed popular Allen Ellenzweig is the author of George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye (Oxford Univ. Press, 2021). November–December 2025

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