"Figures, Poses, and Glances" – gallery guide and essays

J.C. Leyendecker: Figures, Poses, and Glances

By Clark Silva

Fantasies and Realities in J.C.

By Bryan C. Keene

J.C. Leyendecker: Figures, Poses, and Glances

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No American illustrator has been so popular, revered, then forgotten, and ignored than Joseph Christian Leyendecker. Between 1896 and his death in 1951, Leyendecker painted more than 400 magazine covers (including 323 covers for The Saturday Evening Post), advertising illustrations, and American advertising’s first juggernaut sex symbolthe Arrow Collar Man. Leyendecker’s work is full of bright colors and expressive solid brush strokes that capture the energy of the Jazz Age. This titan of American illustration also had a secret. J.C Leyendecker was gay. Along with his images of Mother’s Day flowers, Santa Clauses, New Year’s babies, and burgeoning Americana, Leyendecker created a swath of queer art - plastered over the covers and pages of American magazines - hidden in plain sight. It is an astonishing accomplishment that his work did not irk the interest of turn-of-thecentury censors given his portrayals of Adonislike athletes in homoerotic portraits, which were intimate, centered on homosocial spaces, and depicted “invisible women”. 1 These powerful images of queer space, love, and desire would be the first major commercial advertising behemoth in America and the harbinger of queer influence on mainstream culture in the United States that continues to this day.

Leyendecker’s zenith of illustration fell between the boom of the Gilded Age and the crash of the Great Depression. From 1900 to 1929, the United States went through an economic and social transformation. The industrial expansion allowed for the creation of new corporations, which needed new venues for mar keting and 1 Emmanuel Cooper. The Sexual Perspective (London and New York: Routledge.,1994) pgs. 131 -133

advertisement. Magazines became the de facto means of communication, with the likes of Harper’s, Fortune , and The Saturday Evening Post becoming the criers of American commerce and culture. After arriving in New York City in 1900, Leyendecker was hired by Collier’s magazine to produce cover illustrations. Having gained notoriety for his Collier’s covers, he would go on to work for The Saturday Evening Post , men’s clothiers Kuppenheimer & Co., and Cluett Peabody & Company. The latter of which, he would create the iconic “Arrow Collar Man” advertisements. The Saturday Evening Post would be Leyendecker’s most prominent and longest-running client; it would only be with a conservative regime change at the magazine in 1941 that he would cease producing covers. After the cultural sundering of WWII, tastes in American illustration during the 1940s and 1950s became more conservative and restrictive, leading Leyendecker’s expressive, eclectic, and eccentric style to fall out of favor. Leyendecker would soon be forgotten as images of sentimental Americana, created by his protégé Norman Rockwell, took over the American consciousness. He passed away in 1951, having spent the last years of his life as a recluse. His dying wish was for his partner Charles Beach to destroy as much as possible - sketches, original paintings, letters, and journals - out of fear of revealing his homosexuality in a culture that was becoming more oppressively draconian.

Aside from the numerous covers of The Saturday Evening Post , J.C. Leyendecker’s significant influence on American advertising and commercial

culture was the creation of the Arrow Collar Man in 1905. Stylish, sophisticated, debonair, and athletic with a strong brow and chin - this visual concept would become the first sex symbol and advertising giant in the United States. The image would become the masculine icon of the Jazz Age, predecessor to the likes of the Marlboro Man and other branding figures in the decades after the 1930s. An interesting factor behind the image was none other than Leyendecker’s life partner and lover, Charles Beach. Described by Rockwell as “tall, powerfully built, and extraordinarily handsome,” 2 Beach came to Leyendecker’s studio in the early 1900s to be a model for some of his earliest illustrations. When Leyendecker approached the heads of Cluett Peabody & Company to create an advertising image for their shirt collars, he used Beach as the model. Beach rarely left Leyendecker’s side through their almost fifty-year relationship - first as

a model for paintings, then as a business and life partner. Charles Beach would die one year after Leyendecker in 1952.

An important thing to keep in mind when viewing “pre-liberation” art (queer art and culture before the Gay Liberation movements in the 1970s) is the concept of coding. As homosexuality became increasingly oppressed at the start of the modern era (the beginning of the Renaissance circa 1400s), queer artists had to hide, or code, homosexual and homoerotic subject matter 3 Their personal experiences and desires had to be hidden within the accepted mainstream imagery. This would manifest itself during the Renaissance and Neoclassical periods (1600s to mid-1800s) in the religious and classical subject matter that queer artists chose to paint. Images of Saint Sebastian with his muscular body tied taut against the trunk of a large tree and pierced

2 Norman Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator (Garden City, NY: Harry N Abrams, Incorporated., 1988) pp. 167

3 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (London: Thames & Hudson., 1997) pp. 26

SClark Silva, Curator, M.A. Candidate in Art History (’23), CSU Fullerton

(Fig. 1) Speed God Mercury illustration for the cover of Collier’s Magazine, January 19, 1907, [Image from Private Collection]

by arrows would be a classic image of queer coding. Renaissance artists like Donatello would sexually charge images of male nudes in religious or classical subjects. Many of the same-sex love affairs of Greek and Roman gods would also be a signifier of queer coding, buried within the context of honoring Classical mythologies. A queer artist like Leyendecker would have to code his work as well. With the dawn of mass advertising in the early 20th century, queer artists like Leyendecker camouflaged their homoerotic and homosocial artworks within marketing advertisements. Queer audiences could read the subtext of these illustrations, while heterosexual audiences could be attracted to the sophistication and strength that the images projected. They would see the glances of same-sex desire; straight audiences would see posh suits and displays of style.

Leyendecker’s queer-coded illustrations entail a large body of work over many different types. Figures, Poses, and Glances focuses on three: The Classical Male, The Arrow Collar Man and Homosocial Spaces , and The Invisible Woman . “Classical Male” focuses on Leyendecker’s early work of queering classical-inspired advertising.

The homosocial involves the Arrow Collar Man advertisements, which featured Beach and intimate portrayals of scenes of groups of men. The third category, “The Invisible Woman,” displays an interesting trope in Leyendecker’s group scenes which includes a sole female who is only arbitrarily inserted or is entirely ignored by the male subjects. A final section, Expanding the Narratives , looks to the expanding understanding of queer identity in the early 20 th century and asks if more of Leyendecker’s work can be seen as reflecting on these new considerations.

The Classical Male

The works in this grouping are the most apparent in their queerness. Images of sparsely clad young men, muscles firm and glistening, grace many of Leyendecker’s cover work. From 1897 to 1898, Leyendecker and his brother Frank studied art in Paris. The Leyendecker brothers were surrounded by posters and advertisements, many created by one of their instructors, Alphonse Mucha. Like many artists of the era, Mucha used sensual depictions of the female body to sell everything from soap to coffee to absinthe. The Art Nouveau and Neoclassical styles of the

late 19th and early 20th centuries drew heavily on female classical modeling, often coyly revealing naked flesh. While the female form was more subdued in American commercial art, illustrators like Charles Dana Gibson and Howard Chandler Christy still made women the object of desire in their work. Women were both the object and conduit of desire in advertising. Late 19th and early 20th century advertising reflected a consuming male gaze.

Leyendecker was instrumental in morphing the male body and male gaze from an outside consumer to illustrated object. His early work switched female bodies for males, often as scantily clad as their female counterparts. These male bodies kept many of the hallmarks of “Mucha-esque” Classical female illustrations – revealing costuming, pensive glances, and soft, gentile hands. Leyendecker’s early queering of the gaze and coding was illustrated in classical antiquity on the January 1907 cover of Collier’s . He depicts “The Speed God” Mercury, whose muscular, toned, and naked body (except for a strategically placed robe) sitting upon a fuming race car. Mercury’s eyes peak to the viewer over his extended arm, grasping the caduceus staff - a change in perception occurs

when the subjects of the picture look out and make eye contact with the audience. The image is no longer a separate scene; the viewer is brought in and made a part of the image. Advertising would employ this trope enumerable times in magazines and newspapers. In the instance of Leyendecker’s Collier’s cover, Mercury’s inviting glance welcomes viewers into the scene. These three images not only showcase the sexualization and homoeroticism of physical bodies and outward gazes but also subvert expectations by substituting male bodies in the place of traditionally female ones. These images allow heterosexual audiences to view them in their casts of antiquity, while homosexual viewers can view them through bodies of sexual desire or aspiration.

The Arrow Collar Man and Homosocial Spaces

Homosocial queer art places desire in a nonsexual context, as opposed to homoerotic art, by illustrating shared intimate spaces and activities among men 4 . These depictions of homosocial spaces are most used in the Arrow Collar advertisements. The exhibition at MUZEO focuses on a selection of homosocial ads that act as a stand-in for the photographs, letters, diaries,

4 Abigail Solomon-Godeau Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (London: Thames & Hudson.,1997) pp. 47-60

(Fig. 3) Arrow Collar and Cluett Shirt printed advertisement, c.1910, [Image courtesy of The Haggin Museum]

(Fig. 2) Arrow Collar printed advertisement, April 3, 1921, [Image from Private Collection]

and other intimate ephemera from the life of Leyendecker and Beach lost to us. Leyendecker’s first Arrow Collar illustrations were of Charles Beach. Through their years together, Leyendecker repeatedly used Beach as a model (Fig. 2) The Arrow Collar advertisements, displayed together in Figures, Poses, and Glances , show us Charles Beach through the years. Outside of the portraits of Beach as the Arrow Collar Man, the images of male couples displayed to act as windows into Leyendecker and Beach’s shared lives. What on the surface portrays men in casual settings can be viewed as scenes from the domestic life of Leyendecker and Beach.

The Invisible Woman

The images under this topic are the least acute of the different homoerotic/homosocial images and only reveal themselves after careful examination. These images play into the trope of the “beard,” a woman who functioned as the front to her male counterpart’s homosexuality. A woman who acted as a beard allowed homosexual men to hide behind a heteronormative relationship. These “invisible women,” so called because they neither elicit reactions from nor actively engage with

the male subjects of the paintings, act as beards for the homosexually-charged composition in the images.

The “Invisible Women” illustrations require viewers to follow the eyelines of each figure to see how they ignore the women in the picture. One of the most famous of these images is an Arrow Collar advertisement, Arrow Advertisement with Collie (Fig. 3) shows two men holding golf clubs with a woman petting a collie dog. While the woman plays with the dog, the two men share a concentrated glance at each other. Hidden within these large scenes is homosexual desire; remove the woman from these images and what remains are stolen glances and deep longing.

Leyendecker’s double-spread illustrations for Kuppenheimer clothes also present classic examples of this peculiar trope. In Depend on Kuppenheimer Value (Fig. 4) , three men in impeccable suits stand around a woman jockey and her horse. While the woman smiles at the man on the far right, he stares at the man in the middle. In response, the man in the middle stares back at him. The man on the far left also stares at the man

on the far right – though his expression appears to be disdainful. Is he jealous of the contact between the two other men? This same game of “follow the eyeline” plays out in ads, Kuppenheimer Individuality (Fig. 5) and New Patterns for Young Men (Fig. 6).

The absolute blasé expressions of the men in these advertisements are comical, considering the near nakedness of the women in these illustrations.

The discourse around homosexuality, queerness, and gender fluidity has been predicated on the belief that all queer people were explicitly persecuted throughout history. Only after the Stonewall riots of 1969 did queer people emerge as a cultural and political force. Much of this narrative was created by queer activists seeking to justify and expand political power in the face of oppressive conservative forces in the middle and latter part of the 20th century5. While it would be appropriate to make distinctions between an “out” queer culture, identity, and lived experience forged in the decades after Stonewall, it would be amiss to wipe out the myriad ways that queer people have lived before the riots in New York City. Queer identity (which includes every part of the LGBTQ+

experience) has ebbed and flowed, expanded, and contracted throughout history. In New York City (where Leyendecker lived and worked), queer identity and expression existed broadly and in full public view. In addition to instances of cisgender, same-sex desire, and relationships, there existed categories of “inverts,” people that appropriated gender expressions to their interpretations.

Expanding the Narrative Much of what has been written about Leyendecker’s homosexuality and the coding of his work revolves around discussions of queerness through a binary established during the middle of the 20th century. At the heels of historical events such as World War II and the Holocaust, psychiatrists began categorizing all sexual deviancy into singular, binary categories to reassess societal norms and roles (“invert” and “bisexual” were stylings known before World War II). You were either gay or straight. Homosexual or heterosexual. Normal or Other. In the section, Expanding the Narrative , the exhibition reevaluates Leyendecker’s illustrations and lends to ask if we can see new interpretations.

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(Fig. 5) Kuppenheimer Individuality printed advertisement, March 23, 1929, [Images courtesy of The Haggin Museum] (Fig. 4) Depend on Kuppenheimer printed advertisement from The Saturday Evening Post, September 22, 1928, [Images from Private Collection]

Before the traditional nomenclature of “gay,” “straight,” “homosexual,” and “heterosexual,” a variety of words were used to describe those on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. For those who did not conform to traditional male gender identity, invert became the popular word. Also used, primarily out of fashion today (or accepted as anti-gay vulgarities), are fairy, pansy, daisy, buttercup, etc., were used6. Understanding how the full expression of gender and queer identity was expressed is essential to understand Leyendecker’s queer work in its fullest form.

With an understanding of the language used during the Jazz Age, we can look again at a myriad set of Leyendecker images, specifically many of the covers for The Saturday Evening Post . Knowing these words and their basis in expressing or identifying queerness through the language of flowers, a new interpretation of many covers presents itself. The word “fairy7” also plays an important role in interpretation. Fairies, or particularly images of fairy wings, may be used by Leyendecker to declare the gender fluidity and queerness of the characters adorning his covers. They were designed as butterfly

Fantasies and Realities in J.C. Leyendecker’s Illustrations

Bryan C. Keene (he/él/they/elle), Assistant Professor of Art History, Riverside City College

wings and functioned to view these characters who are going through or have come out of a transition or change. Leyendecker’s illustrations reflect on inverts, bisexuals, and impersonators that transition between the cis- and trans-gender, similar to the lifecycle of a butterfly. The butterfly is the true self of the species. The caterpillar exists to transform – it is not the final form. Leyendecker’s fairies, with their butterfly wings, represent a queered version of the self of the individuals depicted.

It is no small matter that someone so instrumental in American culture was homosexual. As contemporary society looks to broaden our understanding of the influence of a diverse range of people on American history and culture, it is important to champion the contributions of historically marginalized people. Queer people have played a significant part in both the history and artistic and cultural life of the United States. As younger generations look for representation, spotlighting the major cultural influences contributed by queer people puts them into a historical context– a tradition of queer people playing a substantial role in American society.

6 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 2019) pp. 47 – 63.

7 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 2019) pp. 47 – 63.

The art of J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951) offers glimpses into fantasies and realities of history and identity in the United States during the first half of the 1900s. Those same themes also emerge in scholarship and museum presentations of his work today.1 Many of Leyendecker’s iconic images appeared as covers and fashion advertisements in the multi-million-circulation magazine The Saturday Evening Post . Some illustrations became easily marketed posters or were repurposed by other publishers while a few have been reprinted since his lifetime. His style has inspired generations of artists, from his mentee Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) to the production designers of Marvel’s animated series What If…? (2021-present). Leyendecker’s biography is often heralded as a hidden history of homosexuality—one that queers, or disrupts and unsettles, the seemingly compulsory heterosexual account of human couplings in art and American society. 2 In order to advance an understanding of Leyendecker’s life and legacy, this short essay focuses on the artist’s construction of race through the white, Indigenous, and Black figures that appear in a case studies of both historicizing and contemporary imagery. Rather than ending with a conclusion, I offer a vision for queer horizons in Leyendecker scholarship. I write as an educator, curator, scholar of the Middle Ages, Hispanic am grateful to Clark Silva and Jennifer Frias for inviting me to contribute this essay and for encouraging me to investigate the themes herein. Thanks are also due to Kelly Chidester for assistance in organizing the In Conversation talk and to all those at the Begovich Gallery and Muzeo Museum and Cultural Center for making the program possible. I first found a love for Leyendecker in the art and writing of Mario Elías Jaroud; thank you for your friendship and inspiration. To Mark, Xander, and Éowyn: you are my light, joy, and hope.

S sindividual, non-binary person, and parent. This positionality situates my views and I hope the first-person narration will open a dialogue with the reader and future investigations to the topics addressed.

Medievalisms and Currents of Modern Life in America

Across Leyendecker’s artistic career, themes of American holiday traditions and celebrations comingled with historicizing scenes evocative of European medieval and premodern art. Part of this inspiration likely came from his family members: His elder brother Adolph (1869-1938) designed stained glass windows and younger brother Francis (Frank) Xavier (1876-1924) was also an illustrator. Another source was time he and Frank spent in Paris training at the Académie Julian (1896-1898) under the tutelage of the Art Nouveau graphic artist Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939). Working during what scholars have termed the Golden Age of Illustration (18501925), Leyendecker’s American artistic spheres included the contemporary scenes in Chicago (1882-1896; 1898-1900) and New York (19001951), specifically individuals such as Howard Pyle (1853-1911), Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966), and N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945). The Middle Ages became a go-to source of inspiration for many of

1 For overviews of Leyendecker’s career, see Norman Rockwell, My Adventures as an Illustrator. Garden City: Doubleday, 1960; Michael Schau, J.C. Leyendecker New York: Watson-Guptill, 1974; Laurence S. Cutler and Judy Goffman Cutler, J.C. Leyendecker: American Imagist New York: Abrams, 2008; Clark Silva essay herein.

2 For Leyendecker’s relationships and sexuality, see Richard Martin, “Fundamental Icon: J.C. Leyendecker’s Male Underwear Imagery,” Textile and Text (1992): 19-32; Richard Martin, “Gay Blades: Homoerotic Content in J.C. Leyendecker’s Gillette Advertising Images,” The Journal of American Culture 18:2 (1995): 75-82; Richard Martin, “J. C. Leyendecker and the Homoerotic Invention of Men’s Fashioen Icons, 1910-1930,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 21 (1996): 453-470; Jennifer A. Greenhill, “How to Make It as a Mainstream Magazine Illustrator; or, J.C. Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell Go to War,” Winterthur Portfolio, 52:4 (2018): 209-252; Ryan White, Coded: The Hidden Love of J.C. Leyendecker. Imagine Documentaries, 2021.

(Fig. 6) New Patterns for Young Me printed advertisement, c.1930, [Image from Private Collection]

these creatives. These medievalisms more often mirror the moment of creation than of any point during the thousand-year period between 5001500 that scholars call the Middle Ages.3 We can therefore examine the commentaries on modern life through historical fantasy in Leyendecker’s art, keeping in mind that this view of Leyendecker is also informed by my scholarship as a medievalist and understanding of the urgencies of the present moment.

We witness a draw to the Middle Ages in Leyendecker’s children’s book illustrations ( Ridolfo and Gismonda [1906] and The Crimson Conquest

[1907]), a poster for The Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis (1914), a brochure for his hometown of New Rochelle in New York (1938), clothing advertisements for House of Kuppenheimer, and magazine covers for various publishers. Taking the Saint Louis poster as one example, we can unpack the relationship between history and fantasy in Leyendecker’s art and in the white American popular imagination (Fig. 7). The Pageant staged by Thomas Wood Stevens (1880-1942) was described in an accompanying book published by artistic director Percy MacKaye (1875-1956), who also outlined the vision that he and Joseph

Lindon Smith (1863-1950) had for The Masque. “White man’s civilization” and “the racial and human forces of millions of their fellow citizens,” in the author’s words, are set against “the Red Race” from the Mississippian mound builders of Cahokia (with symbols of the Maya and Mexica peoples) to the time of the American Civil War, with the stereotypical inclusion of African American / Black or Asian peoples in costume appearing as “Africa,” “Oceanic Islands,” and (Indigenous) “Australia.”4 Leyendecker’s poster centers on Saint Louis (1214-1270) at the prow of a ship with an Amerindian chief standing against an architectural monument at left while the nautical vessel’s crew at right is attired in clothing vaguely from the 1500s. Here past, present, and future are compressed through image and performance. The whitewashed rhetoric is clear.

For Leyendecker, medievalizing subjects appealed all year round on several of his 322 covers for The Post and on one for Woman’s Home Companion (from 1898). He also created figural compositions reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel nudes for Collier’s and the Literary Digest. Finely dressed maidens appear at Christmas, New Year’s babies can be knights or victims of knights, highranking court ladies kneel at Easter and parade in springtime, and chivalric episodes of romance make promises for an amorous summer. The Post covers that Leyendecker created for December 1926, 1927, and 1928 recall altarpieces dedicated to the Virgin and Child. These re-appeared as part of Donald Culross Peattie’s piece on the gifts of the biblical magi or wisemen, “Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh,” in the magazine’s November/December 1992 issue, demonstrating their timeless appeal. 5

Leyendecker treated the subject of the three kings who brought gifts to the Christ child on a cover for Success magazine (1900): three rulers— Black, white, and Brown—each kneel against an art nouveau architectural backdrop (Fig. 8a) . The inclusion of people of color in this subject of Christian art emerged gradually in the 1200s

and after 1450 at least one king appeared as a Black man. 6 Leyendecker’s painting was later reproduced on the December 1921 cover of The Crisis , founded in 1910 by W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) as a civil rights magazine and official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (Fig. 8b)

The pivotal decade of the 1920s propelled both Leyendecker’s career and the Harlem Renaissance of New York’s African American culture. Much could be said by comparing the textual and visual contents of the respective publications in terms of race relations in the United States at the time, but that is the subject for another venue. Well into the 1940s, The Crisis included a European painting with the Black magus on its December covers for Christmas or January covers for the Feast of the Three Kings (Epiphany) on the 6th. Leyendecker’s only other treatment of the magi are a sketch of the trio that would become a decorative detail on the cape sleeve of his Modern Madonna for the December 1922 cover of The Post.

Leyendecker’s final three covers for The Post best demonstrate the medieval/modern divide in history and visual culture. In January 1941, Leyendecker presented a knight’s armored hand—used frequently since before World War I as a symbol for the German Empire—clutching the diaper of a screaming baby. 7 The next year, a baby with a government issue beret holds a musket, which originated in the 1500s, and balances on a globe with a sticker over the Americas that reads, “No Trespassing”—an ironic visual with lots of room for a postcolonial or decolonial interpretation. And finally, in January 1943, Leyendecker’s baby wields a WWI-era bayonet to shatter the swastika of the Third Reich. While I admit to reading more into these covers that Leyendecker possibly intended, I do so to draw attention to the struggle today by medievalists against white supremacists who misappropriate medieval imagery to advance racist and prejudicial ideologies.

(New York: Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1914), xi-xvii.

5 Donald Culross Peattie, “Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh,” The Saturday Evening Post (November/December 1992): 56-61.

6 For an account of the magi visual tradition and related bibliography, see Kristen Collins and Bryan C. Keene, Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art. Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2023.

7 Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance, and Medievalism in Britain and Germany 1914-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

3 For more on medievalisms, see Larisa Grollemond and Bryan C. Keene, The Fantasy of the Middle Ages: An Epic Journey through Imaginary Medieval Worlds. Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2022.

4 Percy MacKaye, Saint Louis: A Civic Masque

(Fig. 7) J.C. Leyendecker, Poster for The Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis, May 1914, printed advertisement. St. Louis, Missouri History Museum [Image: Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Poster-_The_ Pageant_and_Masque_of_St._Louis,_Forest_Park,_May_28-31,_1914.jpg ]

Critical Race Contexts for Fashion Advertisements

Of the over 2,000 covers for The Post in circulation during the forty years of Leyendecker’s employment, only forty-eight featured people of color—Black, Asian, Indigenous, or Latinx—in any context. Leyendecker created fifteen of those covers, by far the largest number produced by the artists undertaking that work. His figures were nearly always Black and shown in one instance (his first non-white subject) as an illustration for a racist short story called “Twisted Foot” (1909) and more often in service roles or working-class settings. By comparison, Leyendecker’s New Year’s babies inspired similar treatments for other magazines, including The Crisis , which included Black babies and children on their covers as early as 1913. By contrast, many of the ads in The Post and other magazines that catered primarily to white audiences perpetuated racist prejudices through harmful imagery: Cream of Wheat and Aunt Jemima breakfast products of Black Americans; Prince Albert Tabacco and Mistair Heating of Native Americans; and celluloid collars of Asian Americans (specifically those of Chinese descent).8 Viewing Leyendecker in this broader cultural context expands a view of his art that is otherwise heavily focused on his sexuality. Afterall, the most complete auto-biographical note about the artist happened to feature in The Post opposite an ad for “modern” cellophane, in which a Black female house staff hands a wrapped poultry to a white woman. We are able to view Leyendecker today through the same adjacency and juxtapositions about race as many have viewed him for the last century.

An Arrow Shirts ad in The Post’s 10 February 1934 issue situates a Leyendecker painting of a fashionably dressed couple on a staircase across from a headline that proclaims, “The power that won millions of friends for Charlie Chan… made Arrow America’s favorite shirt.” Chan was a fictional Chinese detective from Honolulu, Hawai’i

who appeared in novels by American novelist Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933) from 1925-1932 and portrayed on screen from 1926 by SwedishAmerican actor Warner Oland (1879-1938) and later by the American Sidney Toler (1874-1947), among various others. The Post ad features a black-and-white image of the character based on a watercolor painting, the washes of which contrast with the recognizable broad, linear brushstrokes and high contrast lighting effects of Leyendecker’s picture (apparent even in the magazine’s grisaille). In the original Leyendecker canvas, the pair face the opposite direction; they are actor Brian Donlevy (1901-1972) and Phyllis Frederic (1906-1991). Both Chan and the popularly dubbed “Arrow Collar man” were fantasies of the white American imagination in the early twentieth century: the former attempted to counter stereotypes about people of Asian descent known now as the racist “Yellow Peril,” however the portrayal in yellowface perpetuated condescending prejudices for decades; and the latter had become an icon of white male youth and beauty precisely because of Leyendecker’s campaign creations for the brand beginning in 1905. As elegant as Donlevy was, the primary Arrow model that captivated artist and audiences was in fact Charles A. Beach (18861952), Leyendecker’s ideal man, studio manager, and life partner.

The Post ad under consideration draws further connections between characters of literary fiction, the Arrow brand, and the magazine itself. “For the Post is an American institution. It is unique in its power to make nationally known ‘characters’ of the people in its fiction—and to give national character to any worthy product of service in its advertising,” declares the marketing blurb. The text continues on the facing page that the millions of Post readers must be as familiar with the Arrow Collar man as the following: Mr. Tutt, a lawyer in stories by Arthur Train (1875-1945); Florian Slappey, a Black detective developed by white writer Octavus Roy Cohen (1891-1959); and Cappy Ricks, the titular character of a 1921 film set across the Pacific

8 On racism and advertising, see Eric Jefferson Segal, “Realizing Whiteness in U.S. Visual Culture: The Popular Illustrations of J.C. Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell, and the Saturday Evening Post, 1917-1945,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2002; Michael J. Murphy, “Orthopedic Manhood: Detachable Shirt Collars and the Reconstruction of the White Male Body in America, ca. 1880-1910,” Dress: Costume Society of America, 32 (2005): 75-95; Robyn Philips-Pendelton and Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, eds. Imprinted: Illustrating Race (Stockbridge, MA: Norman Rockwell Museum, 2022), 14-33 (Robyn Philips-Pendelton, “Race and Perception in Illustration”) and 62-83 (Michele H. Bogart, “Artwork and the Cream of Wheat Campaign, c. 1895-1930).

Ocean (specifically Samoa) and based on the Post stories by Peter B. Kyne (1880-1957) and a play by Edward Rose (1862-1939). From the silver screen to the printed page, these fantasies of adventure and mystery situate race and place at the forefront of entertainment and pastimes. The ad also features the logo of the National Recovery Administration, formed in 1933 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945; in office from 1933-1945), and supported by magazines, advertisers, and Hollywood studios – all of which were key forces of culture at the time, as today.

The various references in this single ad would have been seen in relation to the overall myriad content of The Post with its news, short stories, opinion pieces, marketing images, and more. A stark and disturbing contrast can be drawn with the “A Bear Hunt” by the celebrated American writer William Faulkner (1897-1962), whose name was proclaimed on the magazine’s cover. The tale is told by a fictious sewing machine agent named

Suratt, who recounts an ancestral Mississippian mound site (referred to in the story as a remnant of the Chickasaw tribe). At the start, we learn of the white supremacist actions of Provine, an itinerant salesman, toward Black and Indigenous peoples. Faulkner writes that Provine and two other men raided a picnic at a Black church and, “held the cigar ends to the popular celluloid collars of the day, leaving each victim’s neck ringed with an abrupt and faint and painless ring of carbon.” Celluloid collars were an economical American alternative to the more expensive Chinese cotton collars. Here again text and image reveal unmanicured realities of the day: the illustrations by George Brehm (1878-1966) depict Provine wearing a wrinkled shirt with attached color and carrying a suitcase (we learn it is filled with whisky in pint bottles) at left and the brutal attack on Black parishioners at right. As we can see, the comparative contexts of shirt collars here and in the Arrow ad deepen an understanding about how class, race, and dress fashion were linked.

(Fig. 8a-b) J.C. Leyendecker’s three magi on the covers of Success (1900) and The Crisis, (December 1921). [Images: Public Domain] https://repository.library.brown.edu/iiif/image/bdr:514025/full/,800/0/default.jpg

Queer Futures for Leyendecker Scholarship: Personal Reflections

When I first encountered the art of J.C. Leyendecker, I admit to being immediately taken by the queer coded figures, poses, and glances. Scholarship, exhibitions, and documentaries on the subject continue to inspire my love of Leyendecker. Arts writer Maura Reilly’s manifesto, Curatorial Activism , calls on the field of museum curation to challenge heterocentrism. 9 Projects on Leyendecker certainly do that. In addition, educator and consultant Mike Murawski encourages changemakers in museums to interrupt white dominant culture; together with LaTanya Autry they remind us that museums are not neutral. 10 As Clark Silva has convincingly demonstrated in this first exhibition devoted to Leyendecker’s sexuality, the artist created paragon’s of American identity that could also be

read as expressions of queer desire. This Muzeo presentation does the work the museum field needs today.

Looking ahead from the subtle revolutionary strides Leyendecker made for the LGBTQIA2+ communities, I have been thinking about how the fine and performing arts of his day embraced gender expansive and sexually wide-ranging potential readings, despite attempts at censorship, incarceration, erasure, and death. But opposition was fierce and sustained. From 1879-1898, The Post ran columns dedicated to “femininities” and “masculinities,” a combination of quips, quotes, and quotidian matters that worked to create a gender binary. Gilbert Seldes’ 1929 article for The Post , “The Art Bogy,” outlined his views on gender, which specifically criticized the “effeminate” art world of Europe and the United States that alienated “the American business man.”11 Incidentally the story’s illustration shows Mona Lisa in 1504 and as a flapper in 1929, while

the facing page advertises La Salle, a product of General Motors, with an automobile stopped to admire the Schloss Eltz (built in the 1100s). And E.F. Benson’s novel The Freaks of Mayfair (1916) parodied an “effete” art collector and socialite the author calls, disparagingly, “Aunt Georgie.” Yet the male homosocial possibilities in representation were vast, from ads for undergarments, athleticwear, and formal attire to soap, tobacco, and plumbing (Fig. 9a-b) 12 Leyendecker mastered the art of

coded expression and desire, approaches still all too familiar to queer and trans folx around the world today. As Syrian-Cuban-American artist, photographer, and writer Mario Elías Jaroud notes, Leyendecker “inconspicuously inspired millions and informed the way goods are marketed to us every single day.”

13 Jaroud’s own self-portrait as J.C. Leyendecker with Charles Beach offers a poignant vision for a queer future (Fig. 10). For us to see our future, we must know we have a past.

9 Maura Reilly, Curatorial Activism: Toward an Ethics of Curating. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018.

10 Mike Murawski, Museums as Agents of Change: A Guide to Becoming a Changemaker New York: Roman and Littlefield, 2021.

11 Gilbert Seldes, “The Art Bogy,” The Saturday Evening Post (12 January 1929), 33, 129, 133.

12 David Boyce, “Coded Desire in 1920’s Advertising,” The Gay & Lesbian Review 7:1 (2000): 26-29.

13 Mario Elías Jaroud. Queering the Male Gaze (Berkeley: Edition One Books, 2020), 114.

(Fig. 10) Mario Elías Jaroud (@kindasupermario), Self-Portraits Inspired by J.C. Leyendecker, 2019 [Image courtesy of the artist]

(Fig. 9a-b) Ivory Soap advertisements featuring athletes and soldiers, 1917 [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

About Clark Silva

Clark Silva was born and raised in San Diego, California, and is currently a Master of Art candidate in Art History at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF). He has curated select exhibitions such as Malta: Art, Architecture and the Expressions of a People with Trish Campbell, Exhibition Coordinator and Lecturer at CSUF, LEGEND: 200 Years of Sleepy Hollow at MUZEO Museum & Cultural Center (Anaheim, CA), and Playing to Win: Sports Art from the Hilbert Collection at the Hilbert Museum of California Art (Orange, CA).

About Bryan C. Keene

Bryan C. Keene (he/él/they/elle) teaches at Riverside City College, where he advocates for LGBTQIA2+ student success and is a curator who promotes equity for the display of premodern art. Professor Keene conceived award-winning exhibitions, digital and social media initiatives, international partnerships, and multiple publications as a member of the Manuscripts Department at the Getty. Scholarly works include Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts (2019); New Horizons in Trecento Italian Art (edited with Karl Whittington, 2021); The Fantasy of the Middle Ages: An Epic Journey through Imaginary Medieval Worlds (with Larisa Grollemond; 2022); Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art (edited with Kristen Collins; 2023). Keene received a Ph.D. from The Courtauld Institute of Art and has held leadership and service roles in the International Center of Medieval Art, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Association of Art Museum Curators.

nAbout the exhibition

The Nicholas and Lee Begovich Gallery at CSU Fullerton, in partnership with MUZEO Museum and Cultural Center, presents Figures, Poses, and Glances: Coded Illustrations of J.C. Leyendecker . It features the work of one of the most prolific artists of the Golden Age of American Illustration. Known for his covers of the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s Magazine, Fortune magazines, and countless advertisements for Arrow Collars and Kuppenheimer clothes, Leyendecker intertwined queer culture and identity throughout his work. Center to his illustrations is Charles Beach, the eminent American advertising mascot of the Arrow Collar shirts and Leyendecker’s life partner. His coded images of burly university rowers, gentile sophisticates, and classical models with secret readability were consumed by the mainstream that congruently conveyed homosexual desire. From re-gendering fashion, sidelong gestures, and the use of female decoy figures, the exhibition explores the impetus of inclusive expression and representation while defining the image of the early 20 th century American man.

Acknowledgements

Figures, Poses, and Glances: Coded Illustrations of J.C. Leyendecker is organized by CSUF Nicholas + Lee Begovich Gallery and is curated by Clark Silva, M.A. candidate in Art History (‘23). Support for the exhibition is made possible through the Art Alliance, Associated Students, Inc. Instructional Related Activities, the College of the Art, the Department of Visual Arts, the Michael Haile Funny Money Fund, and MUZEO Museum and Cultural Center. Special thanks to The Haggin Museum and The Saturday Evening Post.

Cover image: Re-interpretation of Charles Beach as the Arrow Collar Man (2022) by Dylan Bonner