“Life is so damned hard, so damned hard… It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can’t be hurt ever any more. That’s the last and worst thing it does.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Our current era of instant information and transparency makes it refreshingly uncommon to find so little confirmed info on an artist who once dominated the American landscape as much as J.C. Leyendecker did in the first half of the 20th century. His work was regularly featured on ‘The Saturday Evening Post’ and in advertisements for Arrow, Gillette, Ivory Soap, Kuppenheimer and Kellogg’s. He was an inspiration and occasional mentor for Norman Rockwell, and if you’re aware of Rockwell’s signature style, you know Leyendecker’s, as the influence was that strong. Ensuing years, however, have given the prominence and glory to the latter, who also played the public publicity game far better than Leyendecker would or could.
Part of that has been attributed to his likely sexuality – I say likely because there is no official confirmation that Leyendecker was gay, though his unmarried lifestyle, and the fact that he lived with his long-time model and studio manager Charles Beach for almost fifty years, along with some decidedly homoerotic undertones to a lot of his work, makes it pretty clear whose team he was on. At the time being gay was still the love that dare not speak its name, and Leyendecker never publicly came out, nor did it seem to be his natural state to be open and public about much of anything – he preferred to stay at home and do his work.
That work, seen in small part here, is a glorious testament to his talent and artistic prowess, and depicts an America that was once written about by F. Scott Fitzgerald (whose books have occasionally employed an image by Leyendecker for their covers). Lovely words and lovely images for a country, and an artist, whose lives were not always lovely.
“And that taught me you can’t have anything, you can’t have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it – but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
“He thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
“There’s only one lesson to be learned from life anyway…. That there’s no lesson to be learned from life.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
