Florine Stettheimer
Florine Stettheimer was an American modernist painter, feminist, theatrical designer, poet, and salonnière.
Stettheimer developed a feminine, theatrical painting style depicting her friends, family, and experiences in New York City. She made the first feminist nude self-portrait and paintings depicting controversies of race and sexuality. She and her sisters hosted a salon that attracted members of the avant-garde. In the mid-1930s, Stettheimer created the stage designs and costumes for Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's avant-garde opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. She is best known for her four monumental works illustrating what she considered New York City's "Cathedrals": Broadway, Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, and New York's three major art museums.
During her lifetime, Stettheimer exhibited her paintings at more than 40 museum exhibitions and salons in New York and Paris. In 1938, when the Museum of Modern Art sent the first American art exhibition to Europe, Stettheimer and Georgia O'Keeffe were the only women whose work was included. Following her death in 1944, her friend Marcel Duchamp curated a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946. It was the museum's first retrospective exhibition of work by a woman artist. After her death, Stettheimer's paintings were donated to museums throughout the United States. In addition to her many paintings and costume and set designs, Stettheimer designed custom frames for her paintings and matching furniture, and wrote humorous, often biting poetry. A book of her poetry, Crystal Flowers, was published privately and posthumously by her sister Ettie Stettheimer in 1949.
Early life and education
Florine Stettheimer was born in Rochester, New York, on August 19, 1871. Her mother, Rosetta Walter, was one of nine daughters from a wealthy German-Jewish family in New York. Stettheimer's father, Joseph, had five children with Rosetta Walter but deserted his family for Australia. Stettheimer grew up between New York City and Europe, in a matriarchal family. By the time Stettheimer was ten, Rosetta and her five children spent part of every year in Europe. By the early 1890s, two of Rosetta's children, Stella and Walter, had married and left the household. Caroline, the next eldest, Florine, and Henrietta, the youngest, formed a close bond with their mother until she died in 1935.Stettheimer demonstrated artistic talent as a child. From 1881 to 1886, when she was ten to fifteen, she attended Stuttgart's Priesersches Institut, a girls' boarding school. She took private art instruction with the director, Sophie von Prieser. The Stettheimers lived in Berlin from 1887 to 1889, where Stettheimer continued taking private drawing lessons. Regularly traveling through Europe with her mother, Carrie, and Ettie, Stettheimer taught herself art history by visiting museums and art galleries in Italy, France, Spain, and Germany. She studied the Old Masters, and critiqued their work in her diaries, and she continued to take private art lessons in media such as casein.
In 1892, Stettheimer enrolled in a four-year program at the Art Students League in New York, a school modeled on the private art schools of Paris. While in Germany, she learned the style of German academic painting. At the Art Students League, she studied with teachers such as Kenyon Cox, Harry Siddons Mowbray, and James Carroll Beckwith, who had studied French academic painting in Paris. By graduation, she had mastered painting realistic, traditional, academic portraiture and nudes in both of the primary European styles.
Returning to Europe, Stettheimer visited museum collections, contemporary salon exhibitions, and artists' studios. She saw the work of the Cubists, Cézanne, Manet, van Gogh, Morisot, and Matisse years before the Armory Show, the first large exhibition of modern art in America. With varying success, she tried her hand at a variety of media and styles, from Symbolism and Fauvism to Pointillism, resulting in a series of works that are reminiscent of Matisse's Luxe, Calme et Volupté.
Early opera set designs
The performances of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris in 1912 were a key influence on Stettheimer's painting. Captivated with the staging and choreography of the Ballets Russes, she created the libretto, costumes, and sets for an opera of her own: Orphée des Quat'z Arts. She based the libretto on the annual art students' Bal des Quat'z'Arts. The resulting maquettes, with their costumed characters made from intricately sewn and beaded materials, display theatrical, active, dance-like movements and individualized personalities that prefigure her mature paintings that emerged in 1917. While working on Orphée, she still painted conventional landscapes and portraits.Many of the female figures in Orphée wore a newly-invented transparent material: cellophane. The use of cellophane became the hallmark of her interior design, and, two decades later, the stage sets for the opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Orphée des Quat'z Arts has never been staged. The libretto was published in its entirety in biographer Barbara Bloemink's The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer and the 2010 reissue of Crystal Flowers.
Return to New York and the Stettheimer salon
In 1914, the Stettheimers were stranded in Bern, Switzerland, by the outbreak of World War I, and eventually boarded a ship for New York. On returning to New York harbor, Stettheimer decided to reject her traditional academic training and create a new painting style, capturing the immediate, expressive emotions she felt on seeing the sights, sounds, and people of 20th-century New York City. The four Stettheimer women moved into an apartment on West 76th Street in Manhattan, where they began holding salons, inviting recent expatriate artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, and Francis Picabia, as well as members of Alfred Stieglitz's circle, such as Marsden Hartley and Georgia O'Keeffe, and other musicians, writers, poets, dancers, and members of New York's avant-garde.A unique aspect of the Stettheimer salon was that their numerous gay, bisexual, and lesbian friends and acquaintances did not need to disguise their sexual orientation at the gatherings as they did at other salons, despite the fact that non-heterosexual relationships were illegal in New York at the time. Stettheimer often previewed her newest paintings to her friends at her salons, as in her painting Soirée, prior to sending them to exhibitions. Stettheimer's older sister Carrie created special cocktails and dishes, such as feather soup, for the salons. During the summers, the Stettheimers often held day-long, salon-like parties for friends at rented summer houses. Stettheimer painted a number of these gatherings of her family members and friends enjoying outdoor festivities, including Sunday Afternoon in the Country.
Mature painting style
During her lifetime Stettheimer had only one solo exhibition, at Knoedler in 1916. It was organized by painter Albert Sterner's wife, Marie Sterner, one of the first women gallerists in America, who worked at Knoedler and acted as an intermediary between the artist and the gallery. The show consisted of a number of the artist's early Matisse-derivative works, painted with bright, pure colors, thick impasto, and heavy contours. When nothing sold, she was, as her friend the art critic Henry McBride noted, "vaguely dissatisfied." In the year that followed, Stettheimer's style evolved to an idiosyncratic visual language, rejecting both traditional formalism and modernist abstraction. Stettheimer transformed her painting style by returning to the miniaturized, theatrical, colorful influence of her designs for Orphee des Quat'z Arts. In Stettheimer's mature work, each canvas is arranged like a stage, filled with easily identifiable family members, friends, and acquaintances. Her use of what Duchamp called multiplication virtuelle was highly sophisticated, with roots in the Ballets Russes and the ideas of Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust about time and memory.In all her paintings but the portraits, Stettheimer filled her painting with bright, often unmixed, primary colors against a flat white background, often using various media. Many contain numerous small, highly detailed, humorous touches. Among the distinctive features of her paintings is the biting humor evident in many compositions' small narrative details, like the small altar boy trying to peek under the bride's gown in Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue''. Stettheimer also filled her compositions with visual performances of individually recognizable figures, arranged around actual prominent locations and detailed, accurately rendered, well-known architecture.
The 1920s
The 1920s were Stettheimer's most prolific period. She painted a number of individual portraits of male friends and herself and family. Like her literary contemporaries Proust and Gertrude Stein, instead of trying to reproduce what the sitter looked like, Stettheimer's portraits reveal their sitter's personality through illustrating a mixture of their habits, vocations, accomplishments, and contexts. In her Portrait of Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy, for example, she included images of a number of his "readymades," as well as his feminine alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. Barbara Bloemink has proposed that Duchamp based his persona as Rrose Sélavy in the well-known 1920-21 photography by Man Ray on Stettheimer. The artist also painted individual portraits of her sisters and her mother, and a self-portrait in which she is wearing an artist's beret, transparent cellophane-wrapped sheath, and red-winged cape and is floating upward towards the sun.Stettheimer also painted several monumental works dealing with controversial subjects, such as Asbury Park South, which shows African-Americans enjoying a well-known, segregated New Jersey beach. The painting is remarkable in that it is among the earliest work by a white American artist to paint black figures with the same non-caricatured features as the Caucasian figures. In Lake Placid, Stettheimer painted herself and friends of various religions enjoying a day at Lake Placid, a site known for its institutionalized anti-Semitism. Recalling the premiere of a controversial Ballets Russes performance Stettheimer saw in Paris in 1912, in Music, Stettheimer painted herself asleep, dreaming of the dancer Nijinsky, en pointe, with the body of both a man and a woman.