In Queer Moderns, Alice Friedman tells the fascinating story of the queer avant-garde of the 1920s and 鈥�30s in New York, Paris, and Venice, as seen through the eyes of Max Ewing (1903鈥�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, 鈥渜ueer space,鈥� 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鈥擝lack and white, clothed and nude. For his Carnival of Venice, he took portraits of more than a hundred friends鈥攊ncluding Paul Robeson, Berenice Abbott, Isamu Noguchi, Agnes de Mille, and E. E. Cummings鈥攑osed in front of a backdrop of Saint Mark鈥檚 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.
Alice T. Friedman is the Grace Slack McNeil Professor Emerita of American Art at Wellesley College and founding codirector of its Architecture Program. 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.
"A vibrant portrait of queer bohemia. . . . Friedman’s appreciative biography vividly conveys the spirited ambience of the interracial, international community of queer outsiders and intellectuals among whom, for his short life, Ewing thrived."鈥�Kirkus Reviews
“Queer Moderns gives us a portrait of the inimitable Max Ewing as well as a portal into New York at a moment when artists lived their lives against the backdrop of a vital, thrilling metropolis that fueled the engines of their visions. In prose that sparkles as much as it informs, Alice Friedman has written a book that is a cause for celebration and a reminder that it is in the details of human experience that we find the deepest meaning, and the most colorful stories.”—Emily Bernard, editor of Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten
“Rippling with gossip, hyperbole, and youthful aspiration, Max Ewing’s letters describe his inventive practices of forging connections between people and their representations—before mail art or the algorithm. In her sensitive account of Ewing’s dream of a queer modern life, Alice Friedman redraws the map of Jazz Age New York, complicating the relations among its countless known and unknowable protagonists and, astonishingly, reconstructing the queer interiors they fashioned as spaces of intimate convocation.”—Nick Mauss, coauthor of Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa
“A compelling portrait of Max Ewing as an ambitious artist and socialite in search of the spaces and circles in which to fully express his unconventional desires, both erotic and creative. Alice Friedman impressively unpacks Ewing’s correspondence, art, and travel, and movingly retraces his steps.”—Stephen Vider, author of The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II
“Queer Moderns provides intimate views of queer life in New York City during the 1920s and 1930s, showing the dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexuality that men and women in that milieu navigated. This is a field-defining work.”—Kevin D. Murphy, coauthor of Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism
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