The artist-as-celebrity: Picturing artistic fame in “Vanity Fair”, “Vogue”, and “Harper\u27s Bazaar” magazines, 1921–1951

During the second quarter of the twentieth century, artists became increasingly prominent subjects of mass-culture imagery. On the pages of the highly regarded culture magazine, Vanity Fair, and the era\u27s two leading fashion periodicals, Vogue and Harper\u27s Bazaar, caricatures and photographs published from the 1920s through the early 1950s developed a distinctive visual vocabulary for picturing artists\u27 personas, incorporating them into the burgeoning celebrity culture of modern America. Forming a sizable and significant body of imagery of what I call the “artist-as-celebrity” that has yet to be examined in the scholarship, these images take as their subject the artist\u27s fashionable fame itself. The artist-as-celebrity first found visual representation during the post-World War I “caricature craze”. Caricature portraits integrated elements of the artist\u27s work with his or her physical attributes and reputation, creating a “likeness” of his or her public personality. This representational strategy further developed in fashion photographs with works of art and in lifestyle photographs of artists in their homes and studios. Visually and conceptually portraying the artist in terms of three constituent aspects of celebrity identity—appearing as an emblematic icon, possessing fashionable glamour, and conducting an elite yet humanized lifestyle—these images helped shape artistic identity in interwar and postwar American culture. Published decades before Andy Warhol\u27s explorations of fame and identity in his art and life, this imagery of the artist-as-celebrity paved the way for the later portrayals and art practices of such artists as Jeff Koons, Julian Schnabel, and Damien Hirst. This dissertation—which includes a systematic survey of all images of artists published in Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Harper\u27s Bazaar from 1921 to 1951—examines images picturing and created by such artists as Cecil Beaton, Brassaï, Miguel Covarrubias, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Edward Steichen, revealing the extent to which art and celebrity culture were already enmeshed and actively impacting artistic identity by the second quarter of the twentieth century