He was “The Most Beautiful Man in the World.”

Paul Swan was the reincarnation of Hermes, people exclaimed, a Greek god walking among mortals. On his first trip to Greece, according to a newspaper account, a mob of both women and men followed the young American artist down the street to his hotel.

He felt he’d returned home in Greece, a half a world away from the farm near Crab Orchard, Neb., where he grew up the oldest of 10 kids; where he avoided chores whenever he could and covered his skin in burlap when he couldn’t to avoid the blistering sun; where he sketched the beauty of the movement of horses and humans and clouds but couldn’t wait to move on to the bigger world, away from his father and strict Methodist mother.

At 15, he bolted. First to Tecumseh, where he lived with another family while going to high school. Then to Lincoln, where he decorated windows at Herpolsheimer’s department store. Then to Chicago, where he drew fashion illustrations and studied art. Then to New York.

Then to the world.

In the early 1920s, Isadora Duncan, the dancer, called to him as he made his way to the dance floor one night at a ball in Paris, according to a new book on him: “The Most Beautiful Man in the World: Paul Swan, from Wilde to Warhol.”

“O, beautiful youth, come here to me! Where have you come from? Arcady? Who are you? Why haven’t I seen you before?”

“I’m Paul Swan,” he told her as she caught his hand.

“Oh well, that explains you; you are from Arcady, from my beloved Greece. I’ve read often about you.”

He danced beautifully, often portraying figures from Greek mythology. In Paris, he danced nude and was a sensation.

He painted and sculpted many famous people. Charles Lindbergh. Benito Mussolini. Ballerinas. Actors. Writers. A pope. … He did so beautifully, making his subjects appear more beautiful than they really were, with long fingers and necks like swans. He was a beautiful lover, people said, to both women and men. He once had an affair with a famous courtesan in Paris.

The book on Paul Swan includes many quotes from his unpublished memoir:

Together in her apartment, they lay on Cabanel’s lush black-and-white velour divan, “contemplating the physical beauty of our persons.” … This was his justification. Shouldn’t they consummate the affair as an artistic, orgasmic, and, according to his account, athletic tribute to their perfect, “beautiful” union?

He saw beauty in perfection, the aesthetic of classical Greece.

He saw beauty in men, too. He hid his bisexuality from the public — probably knowing the world would not accept a bisexual Hermes — but maybe not from his understanding wife.

“I’m just a normal man,” he once told a reporter, according to the book. “I have two daughters. Now, why do people think a male dancer is a sissy?”

He and his wife had a beautiful bond, and two beautiful girls. She loved him unconditionally and let him live the life he wanted, one she knew was inspired by movement.

New York. London. Hollywood for silent films. Back to Europe many times. Back to Crab Orchard only when he had to, when a family member was dying or when he needed money.

His favorite sister, Harriet Swan Spence, loved him unconditionally, too. She would arrange for him to paint portraits in Nebraska for money. (His heiress wife happily supported him. But, for some reason, Swan felt his family should, too.) He painted portraits of Nebraska governors. He sculpted a bust of Willa Cather. He painted portraits for brother Dallas, who became a successful businessman and a major bankroller and private critic. Paul always painted Dallas as very stern.

His family didn’t know what to make of him. His mother thought he was going to hell. He thought she was tragic for giving up her own love of art to become a farmwife and birth so many babies.

He once sculpted one of his brothers, had him pose lying on a rock all day. He put his own face on it.

As he aged, he painted his own face.

One August day in 1949, on a visit home to Crab Orchard, Harriet’s 9-year-old granddaughter walked into an upstairs bedroom. It was the best bedroom in the house, overlooking her grandmother’s flowers and the wide Nebraska horizon. Her grandmother usually let her sleep there. But she’d given the room to Paul, by then in his 60s but looking much younger.

He was home to paint the little girl’s portrait for money.

The little girl didn’t know her great uncle was a great artist, or “The Most Beautiful Man in the World.”

She walked into the bedroom and saw his makeup spread out on her dresser. She was surprised he wore makeup. He must have applied it very carefully, she thought, because she couldn’t tell he wore it.

She wondered why he wore it.

*** 

The portrait of the 9-year-old girl leans against a couch in Jane Spence Peters’ living room in south Lincoln.

She’s still unpacking from a recent move. She’s about to hang the large painting on a bare wall behind the couch, along with the charcoal pencil drawing of the same girl, wearing a yellow dress, no smile.

She is 67 now, about the age her great-uncle was when he painted her against her will.

She laughs, looking over at the portrait.

“That was done in my grandmother’s front room. He had me look at a vase on a bookcase all day long, and he’d get angry if I changed at all, because I’d change the lines and expression. At the end of the day, he just wiped the whole canvas out, and I was just beside myself. He said, ‘We’ll do it all again tomorrow.’”

The next day, he did the charcoal drawing until he figured out what was wrong.

“He said, ‘I got it!’ And we went in and he painted that portrait.”

He gave her thick hair and eyebrows — Swan family characteristics, she says. But she’s pretty sure her neck was not that long.

When the portrait was finished, she saw him in a different way.

“He danced for me. Grandmother asked him to dance for me. I had never seen a ballet before, and he did a ballet dance for me in the front room. I was fascinated. I didn’t know people could dance like that.

“He was very good to me.”

He wrote her notes, drawing a swan when he signed his name. The “S” was a swan.

As kids, Paul and Harriet would make costumes and put on makeup and use the corncrib for a theater. Though her grandmother loved Paul so much and they were both artists, Jane says,  Harriet didn’t see their mother the way Paul did. She saw their mother’s devotion to God and her 10 babies as a beautiful thing, not a flaw.

You either loved Paul, Jane says, or you didn’t. He was egotistical, narcissistic. But he backed it up with talent and heart.

“My grandfather disliked him.”

She pauses a moment, staring at a spot on the wall above the fireplace.

“I think he thought a man needed to make a living and take care of his family, and didn’t think a man should make a living as an artist.”

Jane kept a scrapbook of Paul. The scrapbook is filled with copies of newspaper clippings and dance programs and photos of him and his art.

She thumbs through it, stopping at a magazine cover Paul painted of a beautiful woman holding her child. The woman is Olivia, she explains, wife of Dallas Swan, the rich, stern brother who bankrolled him.

“This is a side to Paul … he was very much in love with her. And so, when he was in New York City, when he saw her and Dallas, it had to have been difficult.”

Dallas thought it was nuts for Paul to keep dancing, which paid little compared with his paintings. Paul kept dancing because it was like breathing. He danced to stay alive.

In 1965, when Paul was well into his 80s and almost forgotten by the world, Andy Warhol made him the subject of several films. In one, Paul recreates a dance from his youth. He wears thick eyeliner. He stuffs his pants with socks. Warhol didn’t try to make him appear beautiful.

The film could be viewed in different ways — as an unflinching look at a man who keeps moving toward his goals to create art despite his deteriorating body, or as a caricature of a man who can’t accept he’s no longer beautiful.

Jane thinks Warhol made her great-uncle look bad. She thinks he took advantage of an old man, and she thinks Warhol missed the theme of Paul’s life — his passionate pursuit of beauty no matter what.

Two writers contacted her a few years ago. They said they wanted to write a book on Paul Swan; they found him fascinating. She helped them with what she could.

She could tell they viewed him the way she did, as a complex man who tried to leave the world more beautiful.

* * *

Think Johnny Depp.

Maybe he’s the modern equivalent of Paul Swan for beauty and charisma and a chameleon quality, says Janis Londraville, who, along with her husband, Richard, wrote the book on Swan.

Or think Orlando Bloom for the face. But then add world-class talent in sculpting and painting and dancing, as well as acting, and you realize the world has produced few Paul Swans.

“To have somebody like that go through life with such great force and determination, never giving up. How does this guy from a farm in Crab Orchard do this? He just walked off the farm and said, ‘I’m going to do it. And it wasn’t always easy for him.’”

The book, published by the University of Nebraska Press, is selling well, she says in a phone interview from New York, then laughs.

But not in Nebraska.

Paul never did feel at home in Nebraska, she says. “He was so, so different from everybody in his family. It was as if he was from Pluto.”

It was as if the art drove him, she says, and he was just a vehicle through which all of his talent traveled.

“You know how some artists go from Realism to Abstraction to Cubism? Well, he went by foot. Rather than changing his art, he kept changing his venues.”

He died in 1972. A brother brought his ashes back to the Crab Orchard cemetery and buried them, in a coffee can, beside the graves of his father and mother and sisters and brothers.

A large monument marks the family plot, on a hill above the town. Sculpted into the pink granite, “SWAN.”

Paul’s small stone says his name, when he was born and when he died. Nothing about what happened in between.

Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.