Max Ewing

Max Ewing (April 7, 1903–June 16, 1934) was an American composer, pianist, photographer, novelist, and sculptor whose Broadway credits include the Grand Street Follies of 1924 and the Grand Street Follies of 1929. Born in Pioneer, Ohio, to John and Clara Ewing, proprietors of a dry-goods store, he demonstrated an early aptitude for performance and the arts, staging plays at home for which he designed both sets and costumes, and pursuing piano with enough dedication that his parents funded formal lessons and arranged trips to concerts and theatrical productions in Toledo and Detroit.

Ewing enrolled at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1920, studying music, psychology, and literature. During his time there he encountered the work of critic and author Carl Van Vechten, publishing an appreciative review in the Michigan Daily News that was subsequently reprinted in the Detroit Free Press. The two began a correspondence, and Van Vechten persuaded Ewing to leave college and commit himself to music and writing. Ewing relocated to New York City in September 1923, settling into a room at 152 East 22nd Street in Manhattan, where he was free to practice piano at any hour. He studied the instrument with Alexander Siloti, a Russian pianist and Juilliard professor, and through Van Vechten gained access to the city's avant-garde social circles. At socialite Louise Hellstrom's weekly gatherings he met figures including composer Edgard Varèse, artist Joseph Stella, publisher Jane Heap, and artist Robert Winthrop Chanler, who painted portraits of Ewing in 1925 and 1928.

Among the most consequential relationships Ewing formed in New York was with writer and saloniste Muriel Draper, who became his closest companion and a recurring subject of his photography and sculpture. He attended the opera, theater, and concerts with Draper regularly and later produced a series of sculptures of her likeness, including elaborate full-figure mixed-media works completed in the summer of 1930. Gallerist Julien Levy included two of these sculptures in his 1932 Surréalisme exhibition, where they were shown alongside works by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and George Platt Lynes.

In 1926, Ewing traveled through Europe, beginning in Paris, where he attended salons at the home of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas on two occasions. He formed a close friendship with composer George Antheil and agreed to perform the demanding piano part in a 1927 Carnegie Hall concert of Antheil's Ballet Mécanique. The physical demands of the piece resulted in a permanent finger injury that ended his aspirations as a concert pianist. Returning to New York in 1927, he moved into a studio in the Life Building at 19 West 31st Street. That same year he met photographer George Platt Lynes at one of Draper's salons, beginning a lasting friendship. Through Van Vechten he also became acquainted with writer Langston Hughes, singer Taylor Gordon, and arts patron A'Lelia Walker, and he attended gatherings at the Dark Tower, keeping close ties to the cultural life of the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1928, Ewing mounted an ongoing exhibition in the walk-in closet of his studio, privately catalogued as The Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits. The display included magazine and newspaper clippings, inscribed celebrity photographs, images by Berenice Abbott and others, and photographs of nude and seminude men including boxers Kid Chocolate and Max Schmeling and bodybuilder Tony Sansone. He produced a numbered catalogue of the exhibition for friends to use in identifying subjects, which included portraits of Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Taylor Gordon, Sergei Diaghilev, and Carl Van Vechten. The exhibition evolved continuously from 1928 to 1933 as Ewing added and rearranged images.

Beginning in April 1932 and continuing through January 1933, Ewing produced a photographic series titled The Carnival of Venice, comprising Kodak photographs of friends and acquaintances posed before a window shade painted with a scene of the Piazza San Marco. Subjects included Lincoln Kirstein, George Platt Lynes, Berenice Abbott, model Marion Morehouse, and artist Isamu Noguchi. Ewing created more than one hundred portraits over the ten-month period and organized them into albums, including a large volume of forty-eight portraits called The Carnival of Venice and four smaller albums titled Les Amants de Venise and The International Festival of Venice. Julien Levy presented a one-day exhibition of the series at his gallery on January 26, 1933, with a catalog introduction by writer Gilbert Seldes. Critic Henry McBride, reviewing the show in the New York Sun, described Ewing as subtle in his selection of sitters and in drawing out their self-expression while posing.

In 1929, Ewing was introduced to Ettie, Carrie, and Florine Stettheimer, an introduction that brought him into the upper reaches of the New York art world. He is depicted in Florine Stettheimer's painting The Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue, completed between 1931 and 1932. Ewing's letters to his parents, written as frequently as four times per week over a decade, document his social and artistic life and reflect a relative openness with his family about his sexuality from an early age. After his death on June 16, 1934, his photographs and papers were collected by Carl Van Vechten and donated to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where the Max Ewing archive preserves the record of his life and work across multiple artistic disciplines.