extensive restoration of the pool mural. The action was followed by other Chanler projects. In 2010, Coe Hall Planting Fields Arboretum State Historic Park on Long Island commissioned artist Polly Wood-Holland to recreate Chanler’s lost 1921 mural of tropical birds and foliage. Then the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in Manhattan performed restoration on their own deteriorating Chanler ceiling and fireplace at the former studio of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Earlier this year, that space opened for its first regular public tours (as covered on Hyperallergic). Each of these initiatives has reminded the art community and wider world of Chanler’s strange work.

Discovering the Fantastic is the first thorough book on Chanler’s career since his death in 1930. The attention from these restoration campaigns, as wellas the centennial of the Armory Show in 2013, helped spark the reemergence of Chanler’s art in the public eye. During his life, he was a very public figure, born into the Astor family, with ancestors donning old New York names like Winthrop and Stuyvesant. He had a couple of disastrous marriages, covered extensively by the press, and posing for a portrait in his studio became the stuff of legend.

Betsy Fahlman, professor of art history at Arizona State University, cites in her book essay the portrait sitting of photographer Carl Van Vechten in April of 1928, a scene of absurdist debauchery that would surely make Salvador Dalí jealous.

After a lunch featuring “bowls of succulent rice and curry and huge pitchers of Bronx cocktails,” Van Vechten steps up on