This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Florine Stettheimer.
Born: 29 August 1871, United States
Died: 11 May 1944
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
A pioneer artist from early twentieth-century New York, Florine Stettheimer advanced new possibilities in painting for women artists. Drawing on influences from European avant-garde arts, literary modernism, and the theater, Stettheimer’s aesthetic vision presents a signature mix of the whimsical and the decorative with a sharp eye for composition developed through her knowledge of art history and understanding of the latest artistic movements. Although they often veer toward the fantastical, her paintings also provide a slice of artistic and social life in pre-World War II New York, celebrating the city’s creative energy in a bygone era.
Childhood and Adolescence
Florine Stettheimer was the fourth of five children born in the city of Rochester, New York to Joseph and Rosetta (née Walter) Stettheimer. Her mother was of German-Jewish heritage and had an affluent upbringing thanks to the family’s banking business. Joseph abandoned the family, leaving Rosetta to raise the children on her own. The matriarchal household proved to be a foundational setting for Florine who expressed strong feminist views as an adult.
Florine was especially close with her sisters, Carrie and Ettie, who shared an affinity and passion for the arts. The Stettheimer sisters’ artistic inclinations were supported by their mother, who split the family’s time between New York City and Europe, where they had ample access to cultural experiences and renowned works of art.
Early Training and Work
From around ages ten through fifteen, the family lived in Stuttgart, Germany, where Florine studied art at the Priesersches Institut from 1881 to 1886. In 1890, the family moved back to New York City, and in 1892, Florine enrolled in the Art Students League, where she studied for four years. Her teachers included Carroll Beckwith, Harry Siddons Mowbray, and Kenyon Cox. During her formal art school studies, she developed skills and techniques for painting and drawing live models, enrolling in the first ever live drawing class for women in the city.
At the turn of the century, the Stettheimer family returned to Europe on an extended stay (1898 to 1914), where they traveled across Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy. Stettheimer immersed herself in European culture, especially in Paris, a key hub of modern art. She was captivated by the French avant-garde art scene and attended philosophical lectures by Henri Bergson. Her early paintings at this time incorporated influences of then major art movements including, Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, and Fauvism. In addition to visual art, she was drawn to modern ballet, most notably, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and the company’s set and costume design by artists such as Léon Bakst. The Ballets Russes’ interdisciplinary aesthetic vision struck a chord with her, and she would later realize a total aesthetic environment in her living quarters and exhibition. In 1912, inspired by the company’s production of L’après-midi d’un faune, Stettheimer began working on her own libretto and designed costumes for the ballet she conceived called Orphée of the Quat-z-Arts. The ballet was never produced, but her fantastical designs for it remain well appreciated among art lovers to this day.
Mature Period
In 1914, the Stettheimers returned to New York City at the outbreak of World War I. In 1926, Rosetta, Florine, Carrie, and Ettie moved into the opulent French Renaissance-style Alwyn Court building on West 58th Street. Among their artistic circle, the building became synonymous with the sisters and their cosmopolitanism. Due to the War in Europe, a number of key European avant-garde artists moved to New York City around this time. Stettheimer became especially close friends with Marcel Duchamp, who taught her and her sisters French. Regarding Florine and her two sisters, Duchamp later wrote, “they were so funny, and so far out of what American life was like then.” Other artistic members of her inner circle included Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Albert Gleizes, Edward Steichen, Gaston Lachaise, and the writer Carl Van Vechten, among others. The three Stettheimer sisters were revered as salonistes. Holding a salon – an informal evening at home where friends, artists, writers, musicians gathered – was an imported tradition from European high society. The Stettheimers were not the only ones holding them in New York, but theirs was especially well known among a select group of the city’s artistic luminaries. Unlike other salons at the time, LGBTQ guests did not have to conceal their identities at these events. The Stettheimer salons were a “sanctuary” and a unique aesthetic space, as art historian Cécile Whiting explains, where the interiors echoed the refined sensibilities of the attendees. Held in their apartment as well as in Florine’s studio in the Beaux-Arts building (now known as the Bryant Park Studios), the evenings contributed to the city’s thriving Jazz Age creative community as well as the rising tide of queer modernism in New York. Stettheimer’s personal life and sexuality remain unknown as her sister edited out any information that might relate to it from her diary entries after her death. However, her outlook as a progressive and independent woman – as well as her awareness, as noted in her diary, of antisemitism – most likely contributed to her embrace of other marginalized groups such as her queer friends.
Also at their salons, Florine would typically preview a painting prior to contributing them to group exhibitions. She began these intimate art previews in 1916, calling them “Birthday Parties.” Apart from being her confidants and critics, her friends became muses for many of the paintings she made. In a poem titled “Our Parties,” she expresses her enthusiasm for representing her friends in her works of art: “Our Parties / Our Picnics / Our Banquets / Our Friends / Have at / last a raison d’etre / Seen in color and design / It amuses me / To recreate them / To paint them.”
In 1915 Stettheimer painted one of her most revolutionary works of art, Model (Nude Self-Portrait), which is a modern and feminist riff on Manet’s famous 1863 painting Olympia. The painting depicts the forty-five year old artist provocatively posed naked on a bed while holding a bouquet of flowers. Stettheimer’s fully nude self-portrait was one of the first of its kind painted by a woman artist. Other intimate subjects that started to appear during her mature period included her family (mostly her mother, Carrie, and Ettie) and friends in the arts, such as Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, Alfred Steiglitz, Edward Steichen, and Henry McBride. Although Georgia O’Keeffe does not appear in any of Stettheimer’s paintings, the two women were close. Writer Ruth Andrew Ellenson states that O’Keeffe and Stettheimer “played off each other in an artistic dialogue that pushed both women creatively.” “Stettheimer’s Family Portrait II,” for example, she adds, “is a response to O’Keeffe’s Manhattan, both exploring the imagery of modernity in a changing New York.”
In 1916, Stettheimer’s paintings were exhibited in a solo show at M. Knoedler & Co. Gallery in Manhattan. For this exhibition, she decorated the gallery with sets of furniture and ornate curtains that she’d designed. Her vision of combining art with design elements to create a total aesthetic environment predated the concept of Installation art. The Knoedler Gallery show was both her first and last solo exhibition during her lifetime, however. After some mixed reviews and without any work sold, Stettheimer retreated from public exhibitions, only occasionally contributing her paintings to group shows. Despite a lukewarm reception from critics and collectors, she was very well admired by her artistic peers. O’Keeffe even pleaded with Stettheimer to keep pursuing a career in painting in a letter, writing, “I wish you would become ordinary like the rest of us and show your paintings this year!” Alfred Stieglitz also tried to get Stettheimer to exhibit her work to the public. He repeatedly offered to display her work at The Intimate Gallery, a successful venue which he opened in 1925, but she turned him down. She eschewed the mainstream art scene and business in favor of more intimate gatherings and cultural happenings.
Although she chose not to participate as a professional artist, Stettheimer made significant contributions to New York’s cultural scene, especially in theater. Her talent for theatrical design was exemplified through the sets and costumes she created for the inaugural production of author and modern art collector Gertrude Stein and composer Virgil Thomson’s opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. The show opened on Broadway in 1934. Her billowing, intricate costumes were made with vibrant lace, silk, feathers, sequins, and taffeta. Reflecting her vision for a three-dimensional aesthetic space, her design process was unconventional, hands-on: “Sketching was not her medium of choice,” explains design writer Molly Long, “instead, she designed intricate miniature figurines of each operatic character, and scaled-down shoebox stages for every scene of the show.”
Later Years and Death
Stettheimer’s best-known group of works are her Cathedrals paintings. These are large canvases that depict what she considered to be New York City’s most iconic places: Broadway, Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Although she used the term “cathedral” in each painting’s title, these works of art portray secular scenes. Art historian H. Alexander Rich wrote that “the series is designed to resemble a multi-part altarpiece, not merely in terms of its scale and dimension (each work measures more than 50 inches wide and 60 inches high) but also in its ideal display.”
She spent her later years finalizing her Cathedrals and working for theatrical projects. She worked on her art until her death from cancer on May 11, 1944 at the age of seventy-two. Her last request was that her works not be sold, but rather donated to various museums across the United States. Her sister Ettie, lawyer Joseph Solomon, and friends obliged.
In 1946, Marcel Duchamp curated a large, posthumous retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art. Friend and critic Henry McBride wrote the accompanying exhibition catalog. In 1949, Ettie published a book of her sister’s poetry titled, Crystal Flowers.
The Legacy of Florine Stettheimer
Stettheimer eschewed labels for her work, and it is difficult to contextualize her within any preexisting modernist canons. Such a difficulty, however, renders her work and legacy all the more important as a tool for re-thinking the canons themselves. As art critic Max Pearl reflects, “Because [her work] isn’t easily lumped in with the era’s major movements, it was written off as lovely but ultimately unclassifiable and therefore a blip in art history.”
When we look closely, however, all along, there had been an undercurrent of appreciation among artists who would later shift the course of post-World War II art. As art critic Peter Schjeldahl writes, “She seemed an eccentric outlier to American modernism, and appreciations of her often run to the camp.” That appreciation would have a significant impact on the development of postmodernist movements like Pop Art. Andy Warhol once remarked that she was his favorite artist. As a burgeoning queer artist in the aftermath of the macho bravado of the Abstract Expressionists, Warhol likely saw in Stettheimer a precedent for an alternative aesthetic that embraced other expressions of gender. As Somerville notes, “Her singular feminine, theatrical, figurative style fell out of fashion when first Abstract Expressionism and then Minimalism dominated the art world.” But artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Warhol saw in her a seamless blending of avant-garde compositional ideas with popular imagery and everyday life, the latter of which became hugely important for them and their followers.
Contemporary critics have also cited her as a proto-feminist artist. As art writer Alexxa Gotthardt writes, her paintings contain a “a celebration of womanhood – and female autonomy – that today reads as brazenly feminist.” With a feminist insight into the question of gender division and labor, we can also appreciate Stettheimer’s role as a saloniste. While traditional art history has been predicated on the achievements of singular artists, a broader understanding of creative labor would also include consideration of the social organizing and community building role that created a wider ecology of collaboration and exchange in which artists could thrive.
Althought her work went unappreciated by the mainstream art world of her time, those who knew her always understood the significance of her cultural contribution. Carl Van Vetchen aptly sums up her legacy in a 1947 piece for Harper’s Bazaar, asserting that she “was both the historian and the critic of her period and she goes a long way toward telling us how some of New York lived in those strange years after the First World War, telling us in brilliant colors and assured designs, telling us in painting that has few rivals in her day or ours.”