Van Vechten, Making Taste, Spotting Talent and His Portraits of Prominent Chinese

The photographer Carl Van Vechten is very much in the air again at the moment thanks to a new biography The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America by Edward White. Van Vechten, a man who knew just about everyone and mixed in cosmopolitan, multi-racial Bohemian circles in the inter-war years, is long overdue a major bio. Van Vechten was a great champion of people that interested him (Gertrude Stein, Bessie Smith, Langston Hughes, Chester Himes etc) and an inveterate salon attendee. As a photographer he shot pretty much anyone who was anyone in New York. Of course Van Vechten took some pictures of well known and celebrity Chinese at the time – most famously he took a clutch of pictures of Anna May Wong (several below), Mai Mai Sze (the artist daughter of the Chinese diplomat Alfred Sze – see my post on her here) and China’s great man of letters and style Lin Yutang….

Anna May Wong as Turandot in 1937

 and Anna May Wong again

And Anna May Wong in what became a quite scandalous androgynous portrait from 1932

Mai Mai Sze

Lin Yutang