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A VINTAGE ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPH BY PHOTOGRAPHER CARL VAN VECHTEN OF ARTIST CARL MILES MEASURING APPROXIMATELY

8 X 10 INCHES

THE PHOTO HAS IS TITLED, STAMPED, DATED BY CARL VAN VECHTEN

Carl Milles was a Swedish sculptor. He was married to artist Olga Milles and brother to Ruth Milles and half-brother to the architect Evert Milles.

Carl Van Vechten was an American writer and artistic photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein. He gained fame as a writer, and notoriety as well, for his 1926 novel N****r Heaven.

–writer and photographer—was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to wealthy, educated parents (his father, Charles Van Vechten, was a prominent banker). He was culturally advan taged–his mother, Ada Amanda (Fitch) Van Vechten, almost single-handedly established the Cedar Rapids Public Library–and musically talented, and he could not wait to leave what he called "that unloved town" for better things.

At age 19, Van Vechten left to study at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1903. His first writing was "The Chaperone," a florid newspaper column for the Chicago American blending semiautobiographical gossip and criticism. After being fired for "lowering the tone of the Hearst papers," he moved to New York, where he wrote music criticism for the New York Times and was drama critic for the New York Press.

In 1907 he married a high school friend from Cedar Rapids, Anna Elizabeth Snyder, and divorced her in 1912. Under the direction of his social mentor, Mabel Dodge Luhan, he immersed himself in avant-garde art, attending ground-breaking premieres in New York and Paris, where he met Gertrude Stein.

In 1914 Van Vechten married Fania Marinoff, the love of his life. She was a Russian immigrant who had progressed from a pathetic childhood selling matches on the street to a celebrated career as an actress on Broadway. Carl and Fania quarreled nonstop, often over Carl's numerous homosexual affairs, but despite their differences, their stormy relationship lasted 50 years.

Collections of Van Vechten's early articles and reviews were published in seven volumes, and he wrote an essential book about cats (The Tiger in the House) that has never gone out of print. At age 40, Van Vechten created a work that was instantly recognized as new and important and established him as a novelist. In his book Peter Wiffle, autobiographical facts were artfully arranged into a fictional form that was a precursor to the style of Truman Capote. His new career lasted exactly 10 years, and produced seven novels. One of them, The Tat- tooed Countess, was a thinly disguised manipulation of his memories of adolescence in Cedar Rapids. The book was made into an unsuccessful movie starring Pola Negri.

At the height of his popularity during the Roaring Twenties, Van Vechten's new status allowed him to champion African American artists, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston. He was a central figure in the promotion of the Harlem Renaissance. His novel Nigger Heaven was an unapologetic story of dissolute behavior in a cultured Negro class, and it shocked hypocritical values in black and white readers alike. His final novel, Parties, chronicled episodes from the decadent, drunken, Prohibition era, when his personal excesses rivaled those of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

At age 50, at the height of the Great Depression, an uncle died in Cedar Rapids, leaving Van Vechten a fortune worth a couple of million dollars. Freed from the obligation to write for a living, he gave himself over to photography, a craft he practiced for the next 35 years. He was Gertrude Stein's literary agent, and he used his considerable resources to support writers and libraries of African American literature. His parties were legendary: George Gershwin would play the piano, Paul Robeson would sing, and afterward Van Vechten would have all-night photography sessions with luminaries such as Billy Holiday. He photographed every important black artist from Bill "Bojangles" Robinson to James Earl Jones. Like Andy Warhol after him, Van Vechten photographed celebrities and chorus boys in a photo booth portrait style. Most of his subjects were shot standing in front of art deco fabric swatches. He shot hundreds of exposures but usually made only one print from each negative. He experimented with color photography and reportedly died after a day in the darkroom at the age of 84.

Sources Collections of Carl Van Vechten's primary materials are held at the New York Public Library; Yale University's Beinecke Library, New Haven, Connecticut; and Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee. Many of his photographs are at the Museum of the City of New York, the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), and the University of New Mexico's Jonson Gallery in Albuquerque. Van Vechten wrote an autobiography, Sacred and Profane Memories (1932). For a bibliography of his writings and a full listing of his photographic portraits, see Bruce Kellner, A Bibliography of the Work of Carl Van Vechten (1980). Kellner also wrote a biography, Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades (1968). Other book-length studies include Hisao Kishimoto, Carl Van Vechten: The Man and His Role in the Harlem Renaissance (1983); and Edward Lueders, Carl Van Vechten (1965).''

Carl Van Vechten (June 17, 1880 – December 21, 1964) was an American writer and artistic photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.[1] He gained fame as a writer, and notoriety as well, for his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven. In his later years, he took up photography and took many portraits of notable people. Although he was married to women for most of his adult life, Van Vechten engaged in numerous homosexual affairs over his lifetime.

Carl Van Vechten, (born June 17, 1880, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, U.S.—died Dec. 21, 1964, New York City), U.S. novelist and music and drama critic, an influential figure in New York literary circles in the 1920s; he was an early enthusiast for the culture of U.S. blacks.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) portrait by Carl Van Vecht April 3, 1938. Writer, folklorist and anthropologist celebrated African American culture of the rural South.

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Van Vechten was graduated from the University of Chicago in 1903 and worked as assistant music critic for The New York Times (1906–08), then as that paper’s Paris correspondent. His elegant, sophisticated novels, Peter Whiffle, His Life and Works (1922), The Tattooed Countess (1924), and Nigger Heaven (1926), were very popular. He also wrote extensively on music and published an autobiography, Sacred and Profane Memories (1932), following which he vowed to write no more and to devote his time to photography. His extensive collection of books on black Americana, the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters, is now at Yale University. He also established the Carl Van Vechten Collection at the New York City Public Library and a collection of music and musical literature (music books) at Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn.

Contents

1 Life and career

2 Works

3 Archives and museum collections

4 Gallery

5 References

5.1 Notes

5.2 Bibliography

6 External links

Life and career

Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he was the youngest child of Charles Duane Van Vechten and Ada Amanda Van Vechten (née Fitch).[2]:14 [3] Both of his parents were well educated. His father was a wealthy and prominent banker. His mother established the Cedar Rapids Public Library and had great musical talent.[4] As a child, Van Vechten developed a passion for music and theatre.[5] He graduated from Washington High School in 1898.[6]

After high school, Van Vechten was eager to take the next steps in his life, but found it difficult to pursue his passions in Iowa. He described his hometown as "that unloved town". To advance his education, he decided in 1899 to study at the University of Chicago,[7][5] where he studied a variety of topics including music, art and opera. As a student, he became increasingly interested in writing and wrote for the college newspaper, the University of Chicago Weekly.

After graduating from college in 1903, Van Vechten accepted a job as a columnist for the Chicago American. In his column "The Chaperone", Van Vechten covered many different topics through a style of semi-autobiographical gossip and criticism.[5] During his time with the Chicago American, he was occasionally asked to include photographs with his column. This was the first time he was thought to have experimented with photography, which later became one of his greatest passions.[5] Van Vechten was fired from his position with the Chicago American because of what was described as an elaborate and complicated style of writing. Some described his contributions to the paper as "lowering the tone of the Hearst papers".[4] In 1906, he moved to New York City. He was hired as the assistant music critic at The New York Times.[8] His interest in opera had him take a leave of absence from the paper in 1907 to travel to Europe and explore opera.[1]

While in England, he married Anna Snyder, his long-time friend from Cedar Rapids. He returned to his job at The New York Times in 1909, where he became the first American critic of modern dance. Under the leadership of Van Vechten's social mentor Mabel Dodge Luhan, he became engrossed in avant-garde art. This was an innovative type of art which explores new styles or subject matters and is thought to be well ahead of other art in terms of technique, subject matter, and application. He began to frequently attend groundbreaking musical premieres at the time when Isadora Duncan, Anna Pavlova, and Loie Fuller were performing in New York City. He also attended premieres in Paris where he met American author and poet Gertrude Stein in 1913.[4] He became a devoted friend and champion of Stein and was considered to be one of Stein's most enthusiastic fans.[9] They continued corresponding for the remainder of Stein's life, and, at her death, she appointed Van Vechten her literary executor; he helped to bring into print her unpublished writings.[2]:306 A collection of the letters between Van Vechten and Stein has been published.[10]

Van Vechten wrote a piece called "How to Read Gertrude Stein" for the arts magazine The Trend. In his piece, Van Vechten attempted to demystify Stein and bring clarity to her works. Van Vechten came to the conclusion that Stein can be best understood when one has been guided through her work by an "expert insider". He writes that "special writers require special readers".[11]

The marriage to Anna Snyder ended in divorce in 1912, and he wed actress Fania Marinoff in 1914.[12] Van Vechten and Marinoff were known for ignoring the social separation of races during the times and for inviting blacks to their home for social gatherings. They were also known to attend public gatherings for black people and to visit black friends in their homes.

Van Vechten is depicted in Asbury Park South, 1920 painting by Jazz Age artist Florine Stettheimer. Amid a summer crowd in Asbury Park, the artist is under a green parasol, several of her friends are also recognizable. Van Vechten stands on the elevated structure left (black suit), Avery Hopwood (white suit, right side) talks with a woman in a yellow dress, and the Swiss painter Paul Thévanaz (red bathing suit) bends over a camera. Artist Marcel Duchamp (pink suit) walks with Van Vechten's wife, the actress Fania Marinoff. [13]

Although Van Vechten's marriage to his wife Fania Marinoff lasted for 50 years, they often had arguments about Van Vechten's affairs with men.[9] Van Vechten was known to have romantic and sexual relationships with men, especially Mark Lutz.[8] Lutz (1901–1968) grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and was introduced to Van Vechten by Hunter Stagg in New York in 1931. Lutz was a model for some of Van Vechten's earliest experiments with photography. The friendship lasted until Van Vechten's death. At Lutz's death, as per his wishes, the correspondence with Van Vechten, amounting to 10,000 letters, was destroyed. Lutz donated his collection of Van Vechten's photographs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.[14]

Several books of Van Vechten's essays on various subjects, such as music and literature, were published between 1915 and 1920, and Van Vechten also served as an informal scout for the newly formed Alfred A. Knopf.[15] Between 1922 and 1930 Knopf published seven novels by him, starting with Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works and ending with Parties.[16] His sexuality is most clearly reflected in his intensely homoerotic portraits of working-class men.

As an appreciator of the arts, Van Vechten was extremely intrigued by the explosion of creativity which was occurring in Harlem. He was drawn towards the tolerance of Harlem society and the excitement it generated among black writers and artists. He also felt most accepted there as a gay man.[17] Van Vechten promoted many of the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Ethel Waters, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston and Wallace Thurman. Van Vechten's controversial novel Nigger Heaven[7] was published in 1926. His essay "Negro Blues Singers" was published in Vanity Fair in 1926. Biographer Edward White suggests Van Vechten was convinced that negro culture was the essence of America.[2]

Van Vechten played a critical role in the Harlem Renaissance and helped to bring greater clarity to the African-American movement. However, for a long time he was also seen as a very controversial figure. In Van Vechten's early writings, he claimed that black people were born to be entertainers and sexually "free". In other words, he believed that black people should be free to explore their sexuality and singers should follow their natural talents such as jazz, spirituals and blues.[17] Van Vechten wrote about his experiences of attending a Bessie Smith concert at the Orpheum Theatre in Newark, New Jersey, in 1925.[18]

In Harlem, Van Vechten often attended opera and cabarets. He was credited for the surge in white interest in Harlem nightlife and culture as well as involved in helping well-respected writers such as Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen to find publishers for their early works.[19]

In 2001, Emily Bernard published "Remember Me to Harlem". This was a collection of letters which documented the long friendship between Van Vechten and Langston Hughes, who publicly defended Nigger Heaven.[17] Bernard's book Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White explores the messy and uncomfortable realities of race, and the complicated tangle of black and white in America.[17]

His older brother Ralph Van Vechten died on June 28, 1927; when Ralph's widow Fannie died in 1928, Van Vechten inherited $1 million invested in a trust fund, which was unaffected by the stock market crash of 1929 and provided financial support for Carl and Fania.[2]:242–244[20]

Van Vechten House and Studio, Manhattan, New York City, 2017

By the start of the 1930s and at the age of 50, Van Vechten was finished with writing and took up photography, using his apartment at 150 West 55th Street as a studio, where he photographed many notable people.[21][22]

After the 1930s Van Vechten published little writing, though he continued writing letters to many correspondents.

Van Vechten died in 1964 at the age of 84 in New York City. His ashes were scattered over the Shakespeare garden in Central Park.[23] He was the subject of a 1968 biography by Bruce Kellner, Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades,[24] as well as Edward White's 2014 biography, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.[2]

Works

At age 40, Van Vechten wrote the book Peter Whiffle, which established him as a respected novelist. This novel was recognized as contemporary and an important work to the collection of Harlem Renaissance history. In his novel, autobiographical facts were arranged into a fictional form. In addition to Peter Whiffle, Van Vechten wrote several other novels. One is The Tattooed Countess, a disguised manipulation of his memories of growing up in Cedar Rapids.[9] His book the Tiger in the House explores the quirks and qualities of Van Vechten's most beloved animal, the cat.[25]

One of his more controversial novels, Nigger Heaven, was received with both controversy and praise. Van Vechten called this book "my Negro novel". He intended for this novel to depict how African Americans were living in Harlem and not about the suffering of blacks in the South who were dealing with racism and lynchings. Although many encouraged Van Vechten to reconsider giving his novel such a controversial name, he could not resist having an incendiary title. Some worried that his title would take away from the content of the book. In one letter, his father wrote to him, "Whatever you may be compelled to say in the book," he wrote, "your present title will not be understood & I feel certain you should change it."[26]

Many black readers were divided over how the novel depicted African Americans. Some felt that it depicted black people as "alien and strange", and others valued the novel for its representation of African Americans as everyday people, with complexity and flaws just like typical White characters. The novel's supporters included Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein, who all defended the novel for bringing Harlem society and racial issues to the forefront of America.[27]

His supporters also sent him letters to voice their opinions of the novel. Alain Locke sent Van Vechten a letter from Berlin citing his novel Nigger Heaven and the excitement surrounding its release as his primary reason for making an imminent return home. Gertrude Stein sent Van Vechten a letter from France writing that the novel was the best thing he had ever written. Stein also played an important role in the development of the novel.[27]

Well-known critics of this novel included African-American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois and black novelist Wallace Thurman. Du Bois dismissed the novel as "cheap melodrama".[17] Decades after the book was published, literary critic and scholar Ralph Ellison remembered Van Vechten as a bad influence, an unpleasant character who "introduced a note of decadence into Afro-American literary matters which was not needed". In 1981, David Levering Lewis, historian and author of a classic study of the Harlem Renaissance, called Nigger Heaven a "colossal fraud", a seemingly uplifting book with a message that was overshadowed by "the throb of the tom-tom". He viewed Van Vechten as being driven by "a mixture of commercialism and patronizing sympathy".[26]

Music After the Great War (1915)

Music and Bad Manners (1916)

Interpreters and Interpretations (1917)

The Merry-Go-Round (1918)

The Music of Spain (1918)

In the Garret (1919)

The Tiger in the House (1920)

Lords of the Housetops (1921)

Peter Whiffle (1922)

The Blind Bow-Boy (1923)

The Tattooed Countess (1924)

Red (1925)

Firecrackers. A Realistic Novel (1925)

Excavations (1926)

Nigger Heaven (1926)

Spider Boy (1928)

Parties (1930)

Feathers (1930)

Sacred and Profane Memories (1932)

Posthumous

The Dance Writings of Carl Van Vechten (1974)

Source: A bibliography of the writings of Carl Van Vechten at the HathiTrust Digital Library

Archives and museum collections

Most of Van Vechten's personal papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. The Beinecke Library also holds a collection titled "Living Portraits: Carl Van Vechten's Color Photographs of African Americans, 1939–1964", a collection of 1,884 color Kodachrome slides.[28]

Saul Mauriber, after a photograph of Salvador Dalí by Halsman (1944), by Van Vechten

The Library of Congress has a collection of approximately 1,400 photographs which it acquired in 1966 from Saul Mauriber (May 21, 1915 – February 12, 2003). There is also a collection of Van Vechten's photographs in the Prentiss Taylor collection in the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, and a Van Vechten collection at Fisk University. The Museum of the City of New York's collection includes 2,174 of Carl Van Vechten's photographs. Brandeis University's department of Archives & Special Collections holds 1,689 Carl Van Vechten portraits.[29] Van Vechten also donated materials to Fisk University to form the George Gershwin Memorial Collection of Music and Musical Literature.[2]:284

The Philadelphia Museum of Art currently holds one of the largest collection of photographs by Van Vechten in the United States. The collection began in 1949 when Van Vechten made a gift of sixty of his photographs to the museum. In 1965, Mark Lutz made a gift to the museum of over 12,000 photographs by Van Vechten from his personal collection. Included in the collection are images from extensive portrait sessions with figures of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Zora Neale Hurston, and Cab Calloway; artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, and Frida Kahlo; and countless other actors, musicians, and cultural figures. Also included in the Mark Lutz gift is an extensive body of photographs Van Vechten took at the 1939 New York World's Fair as well as a large number of photographs depicting scenes across Western Europe and Northern Africa taken during Van Vechten's travels in 1935–1936.[30]

In 1980, concerned that Van Vechten's fragile 35 mm nitrate negatives were fast deteriorating, photographer Richard Benson, in conjunction with the Eakins Press Foundation, transformed 50 of the portraits into handmade gravure prints. The album 'O, Write My Name': American Portraits, Harlem Heroes was completed in 1983. That year, the National Endowment for the Arts transferred the Eakins Press Foundation's prototype albums to the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.[31]

The National Portrait Gallery, London, holds 17 of Van Vechten's portraits of leading creative talents of his era.[32]

More than 3,000 Van Vechten portraits, most of which come from the Library of Congress collection, are included in Wikimedia Commons. His public domain photographs illustrate countless Wikipedia entries on mid-century (mostly American) notables. See examples in the gallery below.

Carl Van Vechten Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Carl Van Vechten Papers Relating to African American Arts and Letters. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Guide to the Carl Van Vechten papers, 1833–1965. Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library.

Carl Van Vechten collection of papers, 1911–1964. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.

Carl Van Vechten theatre photographs, 1932–1943, held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Carl Van Vechten photographs, 1932–1964 at Brandeis University's Archives & Special Collections, contains 1,689 Van Vechten portraits.

Images by Carl Van Vechten in the Collections of the Museum of the City of New York[permanent dead link]

Living Portraits: Carl Van Vechten's Color Photographs of African Americans, 1939–1964, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, features a searchable database of 1,884 rare color Kodachrome slides

Portraits by Carl Van Vechten at the National Portrait Gallery, London

Creative Americans: Portraits by Carl Van Vechten at the Library of Congress

Carl Van Vechten's Portraits from the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University: over 9,000 black-and-white prints

Postcards from Manhattan: The Portrait Photography of Carl Van Vechten at Marquette University: hundreds of portrait postcards sent by Van Vechten to Wisconsin artist Karl Priebe from 1946 to 1956.

Guide to the Carl Van Vechten Photograph Collection 1932-1956 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center

Carl Milles (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈkɑːɭ ˈmɪ̂lːɛs] (About this soundlisten); 23 June 1875 – 19 September 1955) was a Swedish sculptor. He was married to artist Olga Milles (née Granner) and brother to Ruth Milles and half-brother to the architect Evert Milles. Carl Milles sculpted the Gustaf Vasa statue at the Stockholm Nordic Museum, the Poseidon statue in Gothenburg, the Orpheus group outside the Stockholm Concert Hall, and the Fountain of Faith in Falls Church, Virginia. His home near Stockholm, Millesgården, became his resting place and is now a museum.

Contents

1 Biography

2 Selected works

3 Gallery

4 Sources and references

5 See also

6 Notes

7 External links

Biography

He was born as Carl Wilhelm Emil Andersson, son of lieutenant August Emil Sebastian "Mille" Andersson (1843-1910) and his wife Walborg Alfhild Maria Tisell (1846-1879), at Lagga outside Uppsala in 1875. [1][2] In 1897 he made what he thought would be a temporary stop in Paris on his way to Chile, where he was due to manage a school of gymnastics. However, he remained in Paris, where he studied art, working in Auguste Rodin's studio and slowly gaining recognition as a sculptor. In 1904 he and Olga moved to Munich.

Two years later they settled in Sweden, buying property on Herserud Cliff on Lidingö, a large island near Stockholm. Millesgården was built there between 1906 and 1908 as the sculptor's private residence and workspace. It was turned into a foundation and donated to the Swedish people in 1936.

In 1931, American publisher George Gough Booth brought Milles to Cranbrook Educational Community, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, to serve as his sculptor in residence.[3] Part of Booth's arrangement with his principal artists was that they were expected to create major commissions outside the Cranbrook environment.[4]

Sculpture at Fort Christina

In 1938, for the 300th anniversary of the founding of New Sweden, the country commissioned a sculpture by Milles featuring a replica of the Kalmar Nyckel, the ship which originally brought the Swedish colonists to America. The sculpture is located at Fort Christina in Wilmington, Delaware, near the landing site where the colonists arrived in 1638.

In America he is best known for his fountains. Milles' fountain group The Wedding of the Waters in St. Louis symbolizes the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers merging just upstream. Commissioned in 1936 and unveiled in May 1940 to a crowd of about 3000 people, the fountain caused a local uproar because of its playful, irreverent, naked, and nearly cartoonish figures, and because Milles had conceived the group as a wedding party. Local officials insisted that the name be changed to The Meeting of the Waters.

Outside Detroit's Frank Murphy Hall of Justice is a Carl Milles statue, The Hand of God, which was sculpted in honor of Frank Murphy, Detroit Mayor, Michigan Governor, and United States Supreme Court Associate Justice. The statue was placed on a pedestal with the help of sculptor Marshall Fredericks. The statue was commissioned by the United Automobile Workers,[5] and paid for by individual donations from UAW members.[6] The Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, an annual award for research on entrepreneurship, consists of a replica statuette of The Hand of God and a prize of 100,000 euros.

Milles' sculptures sometimes offended American sensibilities, and he had a 'fig leaf' maker on retainer.[3]

Milles Indian head

Photographs of his sculptures, taken for a monograph on Milles, are now held in the Carl Milles Photograph Collection, c. 1938–1939, in the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Milles and his wife returned to Sweden in 1951, and lived in Millesgården every summer until Milles' death in 1955. They spent winters in Rome, where the American Academy had supplied them with a studio. Milles and his wife, Olga, who died in 1967 in Graz, Austria, are buried in a small stone chapel, designed by Milles, at Millesgården. Because Swedish law requires burial on sacred ground, it took the assistance of the then reigning Gustaf VI Adolf to allow this resting place.

Selected works

The Sunsinger, National Memorial Gardens, Falls Church, VA

Triton Blowing a Shell, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota

Two Dancers, Götaplatsen, Gothenburg

Aganippe Fountain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, 1951-1955 (at Brookgreen Gardens since 1982)

Aviator Monument, Karlaplan, Stockholm, 1931

Fountain of Faith, National Memorial Park cemetery, Falls Church, Virginia, 1939-1952 [7]

Gustav Vasa Statue, Nordic Museum, Stockholm, 1905-1907 (painted gypsum) and 1925 (painted oak)

Folkung Fountain, Old Square, Linköping, 1924–1927

Louis De Geer, Old Square, Norrköping, 1945

Sten Sture Monument, Uppsala, 1902–1925

Indian God of Peace, City Hall, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 1932–1936

Bronze doors, Finance Building, Pennsylvania State Capitol Complex, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 1938

Diana Fountain, Matchstick Palace, Stockholm, 1927–28

Europe and the Bull Fountain, Stora Torg, Halmstad, 1924–1926

Exterior sculpted decor of Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, 1903–1908

God on the Rainbow, Nacka, 1995 (by Marshall Fredericks, on a 1946 model by Milles for the Headquarters of the United Nations)

Greendale War Memorial for Veterans of All Wars, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1948

Man and Nature, lobby of 1 Rockefeller Plaza, Rockefeller Center, New York City, 1937–1941

Man and Pegasus, Castle Park, Malmö, 1949

Maritime Goddess, Helsingborg, 1921–1923

Meeting of the Waters, monumental fountain, St. Louis, Missouri, 1936–1940

Monument to Johannes Rudbeckius, Västerås, 1923

Numerous works at Cranbrook Educational Community, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, including Mermaids & Tritons Fountain, 1930, Sven Hedin on a Camel, 1932, Jonah and the Whale Fountain, 1932, Orpheus Fountain, 1936.[4]

On a Sunday Morning, monumental fountain, Ingalls Mall, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1939–1941

Orpheus Group, in front of Stockholm Concert Hall, 1926–1936

Playing Angels, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1950 (purchased by Fairmount Park Art Association in 1968; installed 1972)[8]

Poseidon Fountain, Götaplatsen, Gothenburg, 1925–1931

Saint Martin of Tours (William Volker Memorial Fountain), Kansas City, Missouri, 1950-1955

Sjöguden (Sea God), Skeppsbron, Stockholm, 1913

Spirit of Transportation, Detroit Civic Center, Detroit, Michigan, 1952

Sun Singer, Helgeandsholmen, Stockholm, 1926; replicas in Robert Allerton Park, Monticello, Illinois,[9][10] and National Memorial Gardens, Falls Church, Virginia

Swedish Tercentenary Monument, Fort Christina, Wilmington, Delaware, 1937–38

The Archer, in front of Liljevalchs konsthall, Stockholm, 1919

The Astronomer, 1939 New York World's Fair, Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, 1938-39 (plaster, destroyed at the Fair's end; later reproduced in smaller-scale bronze)

The Four Ages of Economic Exchange, Stockholms Enskilda Bank head office, Stockholm, 1915

The Hand of God, Eskilstuna, 1952-1954

Two Dancers, 1915, placed on Gothenburg's Götaplatsen in 1952

Two plaques on WWJ Building, Detroit, Michigan, 1936

Wall reliefs on Racine County Courthouse, Racine, Wisconsin, 1931

Gallery

Carl Milles sculptures

Poseidon, Gothenburg

Angels Playing Music, Millesgården, Stockholm

Wild Boar, Millesgården

Millesgården

Europa on the Bull, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

God Father, Nacka Strand, Nacka

Man and Pegasus, Millesgården

The Hand of God, Millesgården

Sources and references

Milles' Poseidon in Gothenburg, Sweden

Jonsson, Ann, « D’un mythe à l’autre : L’ 'Europe' de Carl Milles et sa symbolique en Suède », in D'Europe à l'Europe, II. Mythe et identité du XIXe s. à nos jours (colloque de Caen, 1999), éd. Rémy Poignault, Françoise Lecocq et Odile Wattel – de Croizant, Tours, Centre Piganiol, coll. Caesarodunum, n° XXXIII bis, 2000, p. 157-162.

Kvaran, Einar E., An Annoted Inventory of Outdoor Sculpture in Washtenaw County (Masters Thesis. 1989)

Liden, Elisabeth, Between Water and Heaven, Carl Milles Search for American Commissions, (Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, Sweden 1986)

Martenson, Gunilla, A Stockholm Sculpture Garden (New York Times, Dec. 27, 1987)

Nawrocki, Dennis and Thomas Holleman, Art in Detroit Public Places, (Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 1980)

Piland & Uguccioni, Fountains of Kansas City, (City of Fountains Foundation 1985)

Rogers, Meyric, Carl Milles, An Interpretation of His Work, (Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut 1940)

Taylor, Askew, Croze, et al., Milles At Cranbrook, (Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1961)

Westbrook, Adele and Anne Yarowsky, Design in America, The Cranbrook Vision 1925–1950, (Detroit Institute)

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) portrait by Carl Van Vecht April 3, 1938. Writer, folklorist and anthropologist celebrated African American culture of the rural South.

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Western literature, history of literatures in the languages of the Indo-European family, along with a small number of other languages whose cultures became closely associated with the West, from ancient times to the present.

Diverse as they are, European literatures, like European languages, are parts of a common heritage. Greek, Latin, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic, Celtic, and Romance languages are all members of the Indo-European family. (Finnish and Hungarian and Semitic languages of the eastern Mediterranean, such as Hebrew, are not Indo-European. Literatures in these languages are, however, closely associated with major Western literatures and are often included among them.) The common literary heritage is essentially that originating in ancient Greece and Rome. It was preserved, transformed, and spread by Christianity and thus transmitted to the vernacular languages of the European Continent, the Western Hemisphere, and other regions that were settled by Europeans. To the present day, this body of writing displays a unity in its main features that sets it apart from the literatures of the rest of the world. Such common characteristics are considered here.

For specific information about the major national literatures or literary traditions of the West, see such articles as American literature, English literature, German literature, Greek literature, Latin American literature, and Scandinavian literature. Various other Western literatures—including those in the Armenian, Bulgarian, Estonian, Lithuanian, and Romanian languages—are also treated in separate entries.

Ancient literature

The stark fact about ancient Western literature is that the greater part of it has perished. Some of it had been forgotten before it was possible to commit it to writing; fire, war, and the ravages of time have robbed posterity of most of the rest; and the restitutions that archaeologists and paleographers achieve from time to time are small. Yet surviving writings in Greek and far more in Latin have included those that on ancient testimony marked the heights reached by the creative imagination and intellect of the ancient world.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) portrait by Carl Van Vecht April 3, 1938. Writer, folklorist and anthropologist celebrated African American culture of the rural South.

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Five ancient civilizations—Babylon and Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the culture of the Israelites in Palestine—each came into contact with one or more of the others. The two most ancient, Assyro-Babylonia, with its broken clay tablets, and Egypt, with its rotted papyrus rolls, make no direct literary signal to the modern age; yet Babylon produced the first full code of laws and two epics of archetypal myth, which came to be echoed and re-echoed in distant lands, and Egypt’s mystical intuition of a supernatural world caught the imagination of the Greeks and Romans. Hebrew culture exerted its greatest literary influence on the West because of the place held by its early writings as the Old Testament of the Christian Bible; and this literature profoundly influenced Western consciousness through translation from about the time of St. Augustine onward into every vernacular language as well as into Latin. Until then, Judaism’s concentrated spirituality set it apart from the Greek and Roman world.

Though influenced by the religious myths of Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Egypt, Greek literature has no direct literary ancestry and appears self-originated. Roman writers looked to Greek precept for themes, treatment, and choice of verse and metre. Rome eventually passed the torch on to the early Middle Ages, by which time Greek had been subsumed under a wholly Latin tradition and was only rediscovered in its own right at the Renaissance—the “classical” tradition afterward becoming a threat to natural literary development, particularly when certain critics of the 17th century began to insist that the subjects and style of contemporary writing should conform with those employed by Greece and Rome.

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All of the chief kinds of literature—epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric, satire, history, biography, and prose narrative—were established by the Greeks and Romans, and later developments have for the most part been secondary extensions. The Greek epic of Homer was the model for the Latin of Virgil; the lyric fragments of Alcaeus and Sappho were echoed in the work of Catullus and Ovid; the history of Thucydides was succeeded by that of Livy and Tacitus; but the tragedy of the great Athenians of the 5th century BC had no worthy counterpart in Roman Seneca nor had the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle in those of any ancient Roman, for the practical Romans were not philosophers. Whereas Greek writers excelled in abstraction, the Romans had an unusually concrete vision and, as their art of portraiture shows, were intensely interested in human individuality.

In sum, the work of these writers and others and perhaps especially that of Greek authors expresses the imaginative and moral temper of Western man. It has helped to create his values and to hand on a tradition to distant generations. Homer’s epics extend their concern from the right treatment of strangers to behaviour in situations of deep involvement among rival heroes, their foes, and the overseeing gods; the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles are a sublime expression of man’s breakthrough into moral awareness of his situation. Among Roman authors an elevated Stoicism stressing the sense of duty is common to many, from Naevius, Ennius, and Cato to Virgil, Horace, and Seneca. A human ideal is to be seen in the savage satire of Juvenal and in Anacreon’s songs of love and wine, as it is in the philosophical thought of Plato and Aristotle. It is given voice by a chorus of Sophocles, “Wonders are many, but none is more wonderful than man, the power that crosses the white sea. . . .” The human ideal held up in Greek and Latin literature, formed after civilization had emerged from earlier centuries of barbarism, was to be transformed, before the ancient world came to its close, into the spiritual ideal of Judeo-Christianity, whose writers foreshadowed medieval literature.

Medieval literature

Medieval, “belonging to the Middle Ages,” is used here to refer to the literature of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean from as early as the establishment of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire about AD 300 for medieval Greek, from the period following upon the fall of Rome in 476 for medieval Latin, and from about the time of Charlemagne and the Carolingian Renaissance he fostered in France (c. 800) to the end of the 15th century for most written vernacular literatures.

Christianity and the church

The establishment of Christianity throughout the territories that had formed the Roman Empire meant that Europe was exposed to and tutored in the systematic approach to life, literature, and religion developed by the early Church Fathers. In the West, the fusion of Christian and classical philosophy formed the basis of the medieval habit of interpreting life symbolically. Through St. Augustine, Platonic and Christian thought were reconciled: the permanent and uniform order of the Greek universe was given Christian form; nature became sacramental, a symbolic revelation of spiritual truth. Classical literature was invested with this same symbolism; exegetical, or interpretative, methods first applied to the Scriptures were extended as a general principle to classical and secular writings. The allegorical or symbolic approach that found in Virgil a pre-Christian prophet and in the Aeneid a narrative of the soul’s journey through life to paradise (Rome) belonged to the same tradition as Dante’s allegorical conception of himself and his journey in The Divine Comedy.

The church not only established the purpose of literature but preserved it. St. Benedict’s monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy was established in 529, and other monastic centres of scholarship followed, particularly after the 6th- and 7th-century Irish missions to the Rhine and Great Britain and the Gothic missions up the Danube. These monasteries were able to preserve the only classical literature available in the West through times when Europe was being raided by Goths, Vandals, Franks, and, later, Norsemen in succession. The classical Latin authors so preserved and the Latin works that continued to be written predominated over vernacular works throughout most of the period. St. Augustine’s City of God, the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the Danish chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus, for example, were all written in Latin, as were most major works in the fields of philosophy, theology, history, and science.

Vernacular works and drama

The main literary values of the period are found in vernacular works. The pre-Christian literature of Europe belonged to an oral tradition that was reflected in the Poetic Edda and the sagas, or heroic epics, of Iceland, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and the German Song of Hildebrand. These belonged to a common Germanic alliterative tradition, but all were first recorded by Christian scribes at dates later than the historical events they relate, and the pagan elements they contain were fused with Christian thought and feeling. The mythology of Icelandic literature was echoed in every Germanic language and clearly stemmed from a common European source. Only the Scandinavian texts, however, give a coherent account of the stories and personalities involved. Numerous ballads in different countries also reflect an earlier native tradition of oral recitation. Among the best known of the many genres that arose in medieval vernacular literatures were the romance and the courtly love lyric, both of which combined elements from popular oral traditions with those of more scholarly or refined literature and both derived largely from France. The romance used classical or Arthurian sources in a poetic narrative that replaced the heroic epics of feudal society, such as The Song of Roland, with a chivalrous tale of knightly valour. In the romance, complex themes of love, loyalty, and personal integrity were united with a quest for spiritual truth, an amalgam that was represented in every major western European literature of the time. The love lyric has had a similarly heterogeneous background. The precise origins of courtly love are disputed, as is the influence of a popular love poetry tradition; it is clear, however, that the idealized lady and languishing suitor of the poets of southern and northern France were imitated or reinterpreted throughout Europe—in the Sicilian school of Italy, the minnesingers (love poets) of Germany, and in a Latin verse collection, Carmina Burana.

Medieval drama began in the religious ceremonies that took place in church on important dates in the Christian calendar. The dramatic quality of the religious service lent itself to elaboration that perhaps first took the form of gestures and mime and later developed into dramatic interpolations on events or figures in the religious service. This elaboration increased until drama became a secular affair performed on stages or carts in town streets or open spaces. The players were guild craftsmen or professional actors and were hired by towns to perform at local or religious festivals. Three types of play developed: the mystery, the miracle, and the morality. The titles and themes of medieval drama remained religious but their pieces’ titles can belie their humorous or farcical and sometimes bawdy nature. One of the best known morality plays was translated from Dutch to be known in English as Everyman. A large majority of medieval literature was anonymous and not easily dated. Some of the greatest figures—Dante, Chaucer, Petrarch, and Boccaccio—came late in the period, and their work convincingly demonstrates the transitional nature of the best of medieval literature, for, in being master commentators of the medieval scene, they simultaneously announced the great themes and forms of Renaissance literature.

The Renaissance

The name Renaissance (“Rebirth”) is given to the historical period in Europe that succeeded the Middle Ages. The awakening of a new spirit of intellectual and artistic inquiry, which was the dominant feature of this political, religious, and philosophical phenomenon, was essentially a revival of the spirit of ancient Greece and Rome; in literature this meant a new interest in and analysis of the great classical writers. Scholars searched for and translated “lost” ancient texts, whose dissemination was much helped by developments in printing in Europe from about 1450.

Art and literature in the Renaissance reached a level unattained in any previous period. The age was marked by three principal characteristics: first, the new interest in learning, mirrored by the classical scholars known as humanists and instrumental in providing suitable classical models for the new writers; second, the new form of Christianity, initiated by the Protestant Reformation led by Martin Luther, which drew men’s attention to the individual and his inner experiences and stimulated a response in Catholic countries summarized by the term Counter-Reformation; third, the voyages of the great explorers that culminated in Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America in 1492 and that had far-reaching consequences on the countries that developed overseas empires, as well as on the imaginations and consciences of the most gifted writers of the day.

To these may be added many other factors, such as the developments in science and astronomy and the political condition of Italy in the late 15th century. The new freedom and spirit of inquiry in the Italian city-states had been a factor in encouraging the great precursors of the Renaissance in Italy, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The flowering of the Renaissance in France appeared both in the poetry of the poets making up the group known as the Pléiade and in the reflective essays of Michel de Montaigne, while Spain at this time produced its greatest novelist, Miguel de Cervantes. Another figure who stood out above his contemporaries was the Portuguese epic poet Luís Camões, while drama flourished in both Spain and Portugal, being represented at its best by Lope de Vega and Gil Vicente. In England, too, drama dominated the age, a blend of Renaissance learning and native tradition lending extraordinary vitality to works of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, and others, while Shakespeare, England’s greatest dramatic and poetic talent, massively spanned the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th.

In the 16th century the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus typified the development of humanism, which embodied the spirit of critical inquiry, regard for classical learning, intolerance of superstition, and high respect for men as God’s most intricate creation. An aspect of the influence of the Protestant Reformation on literature was the number of great translations of the Bible, including an early one by Erasmus, into vernacular languages during this period, setting new standards for prose writing. The impetus of the Renaissance carried well into the 17th century, when John Milton reflected the spirit of Christian humanism.

The 17th century

Challenging the accepted

The 17th century was a period of unceasing disturbance and violent storms, no less in literature than in politics and society. The Renaissance had prepared a receptive environment essential to the dissemination of the ideas of the new science and philosophy. The great question of the century, which confronted serious writers from Donne to Dryden, was Michel de Montaigne’s “What do I know?” or, in expanded terms, the ascertainment of the grounds and relations of knowledge, faith, reason, and authority in religion, metaphysics, ethics, politics, economics, and natural science.

The questioning attitude that characterized the period is seen in the works of its great scientists and philosophers: Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) and Pascal’s Pensées (written 1657–58) in France; Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605) and Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) in England. The importance of these works has lain in their application of a skeptical, rationalist mode of thought not only to scientific problems but to political and theological controversy and general problems of understanding and perception. This fundamental challenge to both thought and language had profound repercussions in man’s picture of himself and was reflected in what T.S. Eliot described as “the dissociation of sensibility,” which Eliot claimed took root in England after the Civil War, whereby, in contrast to the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers who could “devour any kind of experience,” later poets in English could not think and feel in a unified way.