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J(oseph) C(hristian) Leyendecker
(March 23, 1874 - July 25, 1951) Germany - U.S.A.

Leyendecker

Illustrator

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LeyendeckerThe son of German immigrants, he was born in Montabaur, Germany, to a family of Netherlandic extraction. The family immigrated to the United States in 1882, and settled in Chicago. From early childhood, Leyendecker drew images on any available surface, a tendency that his parents encouraged. As they were unable to afford private art lessons for their son, he was apprenticed at fifteen to a Chicago engraver, with whom he began his career by designing advertisements and book illustrations.

During these years, Leyendecker also took night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, and later at the Académie Julian, Paris. Between 1890 and 1951 he had a successful career illustrating American books, magazines and commercial advertising. Leyendecker's imagery walked a careful line of acceptable male-looking, inciting desire among male consumers for men's fashions while containing the threat of sexual desire implicit at their looking at male models.

LeyendeckerBy 1914, J. C. Leyendecker had accrued enough wealth to build an estate in New Rochelle, New York, where he lived with his brother, his sister Augusta, and his lover Charles Beach (1886-1952).

Leyendecker met Beach in 1903, when the young model from Cleveland first posed for him. The artist was impressed not only with Beach's handsome face and physique, but also with his ability to hold poses for extended lengths of time.

Their relationship lasted until Leyendecker's death. Over the next thirty years, Beach's image as the "Arrow Man," as well as Leyendecker's other representations of him, became one of the most widely circulated visual icons in mainstream American culture. In this capacity, Beach became the symbol of American prosperity, sophistication, manliness, and style.

For forty-nine years, Beach functioned as Leyendecker's model, lover, cook, and business manager. The household was extremely careful in maintaining a strict, even secretive, privacy.

Leyendecker

While product sales attest to the success of Leyendecker's imagery, there remain a surprising degree of homoeroticism in his work. The ironic height of Leyendecker's coded imagery must be that the artist's model for the celebrated "Arrow Collar Man" was his lover Charles Beach.

The last years of J. C. Leyendecker's life were overshadowed by financial concerns, as he had spent as lavishly as he earned at the height of his career. By the 1940s, the major magazines increasingly supplanted artist's cover illustrations with photographs. As a result, Beach and Augusta sold many of Leyendecker's art works, which now bring hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction, for a pittance.

Leyendecker died at his home in New Rochelle. Beach followed him in death within months.

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Source: excerpts from: Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History, from Antiquity to WWII, Routledge, London, 2001
and: an article by Patricia Juliana Smith

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