By the time artist Paul Swan died in 1972, he'd lived about a half-dozen lives, some of them bathed in glory, others steeped in humiliation. In Paris he won medals at the Beaux-Arts Salons. In New York he exhibited with Robert Henri and Maurice Prendergast. In Greece, the press hailed him as the most beloved foreigner since Lord Byron. Much later, he became Marcel Duchamp's favorite ghoul and fell victim to Andy Warhol's eye for the grotesque.
Swan was an American painter/ sculptor/ dancer/ actor/ writer and publicity hound famous for a time as "The Most Beautiful Man in the World." Despite a prolific career and a lifetime of critical acclaim, he's long since fallen off art's historical map, his own work so completely forgotten that he's best known, to those who have heard of him at all, as the star of Warhol's Paul Swan and Camp.
Now his obscurity is lifting. A Pulitzer Prize-nominated biography by Janis and Richard Londraville of Venice, Fla. appeared in February, and last year the Ringling Museum acquired the biggest collection of Paul Swan work and memorabilia anywhere. The flurry of activity is giving us a new look at a man who embodies multiple currents in American cultural history.
The Most Beautiful Man in the World: Paul Swan, from Wilde to Warhol (University of Nebraska; $29.95) chronicles Swan's rise from the black sheep of a devout Nebraska home to a pop culture icon in the 1920s and '30s, and traces the long decline that left him vainly trying to recapture his youth. It's this latter Swan whom Warhol records, an octogenarian caked with makeup, performing half-nude the dances that had brought him fame a half-century before.
For a full hour, Warhol's camera stalks the decayed old man bumbling through dances and costume changes. It's merciless. But in the biography, Swan's first major close-up since then, he catches a major break. The Londravilles have a healthy appreciation for Warhol's corrosive vision, but they also train a sympathetic eye on a man who absolutely refused to give up. What made Swan a camp icon, after all, was the majesty of perseverance meeting with abject failure. And they make you suspect Swan wasn't as unaware as Warhol makes out — one of their chapter headings is this Swan quote: "What more tragic than to behold an old Narcissus still fondly gazing into his reflection pool, seeing no change."
"He could float across the room even at 85 years old," says Janis Londraville at her home in Venice. "People said he was so powerful a presence, and I think what Warhol liked about him was a total commitment to his anachronistic art form. That was his world, and anybody who entered it got sucked in, too." The Londravilles' walls are covered with Swan's paintings, some gifts from Swan's descendants, others en route to a collector in Italy.
The husband-and-wife team, retired academics from SUNY-Potsdam, assemble a fleet narrative from a long and scattered life, tracking Swan over four continents and devoting equal attention to his work in painting, sculpture and dance. They cannily situate his life between its two aesthetic bookends — Oscar Wilde's dandyish Hellenism and Warhol's ironic pop — and show how even through two brutal wars Swan clung to a certain idea of Greece.
More than just than the story of an artist and his dubious oeuvre, The Most Beautiful Man in the World is a depiction of a queer man trying to make it in the 20th century. In a twisted way, Swan, thanks to Warhol, lived out Wilde's aspiration to make his life his greatest work of art: probably nothing in Swan's catalogue matches Warhol's film in pathos or execution. Whatever the quality of his art, Swan's life will remain valuable to an understanding of gender in the 20th century. His story, as the Londravilles tell it, is an intensely poignant drama of tensions between family and desire.
Swan had a sweet set-up, given the times. He married a lesbianish woman of independent means, parented children with her and enjoyed her unconditional support. Most of the time she let him live where he wanted and minded her business, but the Londravilles take pains to show that this wasn't just a marriage of convenience: Paul and his wife Helen shared a deep friendship, and Paul felt genuine remorse leaving Helen and his two girls for long years abroad.
At the same time, the biographers excavate personal details Swan himself sometimes buried. They draw heavily on Swan's unpublished autobiography (a "turgid" affair, says Jan), where he alludes to certain relationships, like a "seven-year tragedy," that remain mysteries. The Londravilles surmise that his hasty retreats from several cities were spurred by relationships with men. "I think people were catching up to him," says Richard. "We suspect it."
The couple relied on Swan's autobiography because, as Jan says, "We tried to let him tell as much of his story as we could." Luckily, plenty of material exists on Swan's relationship with Fred Bates, a much younger Brit who lived with him in Paris. The two kept a happy ménage until WWII broke out and Fred was killed working in a munitions factory. The story forms the book's emotional center. "I grew to love Fred," says Jan. "I cried and cried and cried the day I had to kill him." And Swan, to judge by his slow decline, never really recovered.
You're all the more grateful for the Londravilles' sympathetic handling of his emotional life when you read Emily Leider's preface. Leider almost willfully construes Helen as a wronged woman and Swan's relationships with men as little more than dirty quickies. The reality was much more complex for all concerned, and the Londravilles are at their best when they let it show through unencumbered, but less successful when they try to classify or explain Swan's sexuality. In the face of such a fluid life, all pat explanations fall short.
Since publication, the book has garnered critical praise — and a surprise phone call from John Waters. Now the Londravilles have hopes, however tentative, that Swan's story may once again make it to the screen, this time with the help of a camp prince much sweeter, after all, than Andy Warhol.
The Most Beautiful Man in the World has a few color photos, but you're left wanting to see more. Some of Swan's work comes off as kitsch, souvenirs of a time of "rose-lipt maidens and lightfoot lads" by an artist who refused to paint ugly people. Swan's critical success makes you wonder what his contemporaries saw and whether we can still see it now.
Much of Swan's work is in private collections, much lost or destroyed in war, and the work that belongs to the Ringling is currently in storage. But Sarasota will have the chance to see at least one work when the Ringling opens Encore! The Art of the Historic Asolo Theater on April 22. The exhibition, a showcase of the museum's extensive theater collection, features a self-portrait of Swan — as Narcissus.
This article appears in Apr 19-25, 2006.
