Word: vechten
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...work as a photographer she shrewdly distributed to the large American museums that could be counted on to secure his reputation. But a sizable part of his art collection O'Keeffe deposited in a less predictable place. At the urging of a friend, the Harlem Renaissance writer Carl Van Vechten, she gave 97 works to Fisk University, the historically black school in Nashville. And she threw in a few of her own. One of those was Radiator Building-- Night, New York, 1927, a painting we now recognize as a key moment in her career...
...Black puritans have been trying to ban the word since the 1920s when the white hipster Carl Van Vechten published the book Nigger Heaven. They continued their war through attacks on Redd Foxx, blaxploitation and Donald Goines. But all their efforts have been rewarded with gangsta rap, an art form that has made nigger arguably the most well-known racial or ethnic slur on the planet...
...introduction to the chronologically-arranged letters, Bernard sets forth a number of tacit lines of argument for which the letters serve as narrative evidence. One such argument consists of a demand for a reevaluation of Van Vechten's place within American literary history. Van Vechten, whose literary reputation came under fire during his own time (it has since suffered an even worse fate--oblivion), was a white writer, literary gate-keeper and a "dedicated and serious patron of black art and letters." He spent much of his time frequenting Harlem's famous cabarets and hosting legendary parties where struggling black...
...complex relationship between these two men that emerges from the letters raises more questions that it answers. It does not, however, permit a thoughtless dismissal of Van Vechten into the historical periphery. Instead we see a man dedicated to and intensely interested in the promotion of black art and, Bernard argues, devoted to using art as a way of challenging racial barriers. Bernard would thus place Van Vechten within the literary vanguard of Larsen, Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, all of whom defended Van Vechten from his harshest critics. These letters reveal that Van Vechten was the first line...
...restoration of Van Vechten within the world of American letters, although a helpful contribution to our conception of the ways in which literary history unfolds, is by no means the only theme of this book. This collection is first and foremost a biography of a friendship spanning four decades. Bernard's introductions to each section and helpful explanatory paragraphs help keep her story moving in a brisk and nearly suspenseful manner. Her careful annotations (which are thoughtfully formatted at the end of each letter instead of at the end of the book or at the end of each chapter) breathe...