Creative Americans: Portraits by Carl Van Vechten, 1932-1964

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Go directly to the collection, Creative Americans: Portraits by Carl Van Vechten, 1932-1964, in American Memory, or view a Summary of Resources related to the collection.

Creative Americans: Portraits by Van Vechten, 1932-1964 affords a variety of projects that will hone students' skills in the language arts and help them to understand the relationships between language arts and the visual and performing arts. Students may explore questions of authorship by creating their own portraits and by studying biography. They can learn about the profession of criticism and try writing their own critical pieces, or practice their creative writing skills by using a portrait as inspiration for a character sketch. The collection also provides the basis for a project which can be used to assess reading comprehension and to help students understand the relationship between literature and drama.

Portrait of Gilbert Seldes, 1932.		In addition to being a photographer, Carl Van Vechten was also a published novelist and arts critic. Students can learn about the profession of criticism and write a critical piece of their own. They can start with an account of Van Vechten's career in the collection's biography. Ask them to consider if and how Van Vechten's career as a critic is reflected in his portraits. They may also view Van Vechten's portraits of critics, H.L. Mencken, Gilbert Seldes, and Malcolm Cowley and find out more about each of these individuals through research. Ask your students to consider the similarities and differences between these critics and their writings. What were the subjects of these writers' criticism? Did their criticisms tend to be negative or positive, sarcastic or sincere? What did these critics accomplish through their writing and what purposes did they serve? What is the role of a critic in society?
Working with an example from their research or from current-day periodicals, students can write a critical piece of their own. Whether they write a review of a local production, new movie, or newly released CD, or write a social criticism, they can practice making a persuasive argument, using irony, sarcasm, and humor.

Character Sketch and Short Story

Students can use any portrait from this collection as the starting point for a character sketch, especially the portraits of people who are not celebrities. They can use the details of a portrait, from the person's appearance, expression, name, and setting, to the date and caption, to create the details of a believable and compelling fictional character. If students enjoy this activity, they may want to develop their character sketches into short stories.

Portrait of Ramon Blancos, Havana, Cuba, 1951.     Portrait of Alma Morgenthau, 1933.

Biography and Biographical Fiction

Portraits of famous individuals in this collection provide starting points for projects related to biography. Students can choose a famous person from the collection and read a biography of that individual. Have them consider the relationship between history and biography with the following questions:

What did you learn about history by reading this biography? This may include events, political, social, and artistic movements, and cultural trends. To what extent is your subject and his or her life representative of common experiences and historical trends? How did the person you read about contribute to American history and culture? How might American history and culture have been different without this person's contribution? How did the time in which this person lived impact and influence him or her? Would you say that this person was a product of his or her time? If so, in what ways?

Portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe, New York, 1936.

Students may write their own abbreviated biography of this person based on the biography they chose and any other additional resources. In this way, they may consider questions of authorship and representation such as What main ideas do I want to express about this person and his or her life? What information needs to be included? What can be left out? How can I be creative and interpretive while remaining objective? How can I express credibility? How does my selection and organization of information about my subject affect the way my reader may perceive that subject?

		Biography has often provided the inspiration for creative works in fiction and film. Examples in film include Amadeus, directed by Milos Forman, Nixon, directed by Oliver North, Elizabeth, directed by Shekhar Kapur, The Miracle Worker directed by Penn Arthur, and Out of Africa, directed by Sydney Pollack. Students can compare one of these works with a correlative biography, or they can write their own piece of short fiction based upon biography. Students can imagine the details of an event or period in a person's life as described or alluded to in a biography. Points in a biography that are lacking in detail or information provide a natural starting point for this exercise.
Portrait of Isak Dinesen (The Baroness Blixen), 1959.

Portraits

Students can also explore questions of authorship by making their own photographic portraits. Have them decide who they want to make a portrait of and why. Do they want to record a person's appearance for posterity's sake, or do they want to convey something in particular about the person? How does a photographer make his or her portrait express the qualities or essence of an individual that are invisible? Students may want to take a whole roll of film of the same person, or they may want to try photographing a variety of people. The class can share their portraits with each other and with others by displaying them in an exhibition. Ask each student to choose one picture and to write a brief paragraph about it with the artist's name, and a title and date, to accompany the photograph on the wall.

Teachers can foster their classes' comprehension of any work of fiction, its characters, setting, and plot, by asking students to imagine that they were going to present it as a play and to make costume and set designs for the production. For examples, students can browse Van Vechten's photographs and refer to costume sketches from "The Play that Electrified Harlem" in The New Deal Stage. Literary comprehension can also be strengthened and assessed by asking students to turn a portion of the text into a dramatic scene by writing a screenplay with dialog and stage directions. These exercises will also help students to understand the differences between fiction and drama and will encourage them to read imaginatively.

Portrait of Hugh Laing and Muriel Bentley, in Shadow of the Wind, 1948.