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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.