GLR November-December 2025

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, in cluding 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 com punction 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 in cluded 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 A Special Appreciation And an invitation to join the $100k Club! The G&LR Board extends its heartfelt thanks to James Lynn Williams for two generous gifts this year, bringing his total to $100,000 (since 2021).

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 enthu siasms 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 other wise. 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 provok ing “her many anxieties and fears” as the Depression was deep ening 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 maga zines 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 suf fered from the lack of her husband’s emotional and financial support. Her health failing, Clara pressed Ewing to return to Pi oneer, 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 lan guage 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 compan ion in New York and posed for him in stages of undress. He vis ited Ewing in Hollywood and wrote him afterward: “Why I Became so attached to you is more than I can explain But with out 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 per suaded 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 “un done 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.

Jim donates in the name of his late husband, Charles S. Longcope Jr. He would like to invite other supporters to join the G&LR $100k Club!

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TheG & LR

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