GLR September-October 2022

ESSAY

A Painter of Multitudes A LLEN E LLENZWEIG

I WAS FULLY INTRODUCED to the “eccentric” art of Florine Stettheimer when the Jewish Museum in New York City mounted a major retrospective in 2017 ( Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry ). Until then, I had mostly been aware of her as the costume and set de signer for the landmark Gertrude Stein-Virgil Thomson avant-garde opera Four Saints in Three Acts , which premiered in the U.S. in 1934. I know a good deal more about Stettheimer now thanks to

cel Duchamp, writer-photographer Carl van Vechten, art critic Henry McBride, and painters Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as members of the avant-garde, among them notably homosexual men like McBride and Hartley. For this alone, the Stettheimers have a place inAmerican art history. The “Stetties” thus join other New York salonistes as “influencers” of their era: the left-wing bohemian Muriel Draper and the high toned society couple Kirk and Constance Askew. Like them, the Stetties created a “haven for friends of fluid sexuality and pro

Barbara Bloemink’s new biography of the artist. Bloemink revises the previous profile of Stettheimer as a “cloistered spinster” or an “eccentric maiden aunt.” She corrects the impression, fostered by gay film critic Parker Tyler’s 1963 commissioned biog raphy, that a “timid” and “hypersensitive” Stet theimer was unable to encounter the world as a fully realized, capable woman. For example, Tyler incor rectly claimed that Stettheimer was so “devastated” by the lack of sales from her earliest 1916 exhibition that “she never (or rarely) exhibited publicly again.” Finally, Bloemink wants to overturn earlier com mentary that dismissed Stettheimer’s œuvre with such terms as “naïve” or “overly feminine,” resem bling “puff-pastry” and compared to “outsider” or “children’s art.” The work, in short, has been treated with condescension, and the artist widely misunder stood. (That said, I do demur from finding Stet theimer’s paintings of flower bouquets worthy of deep reflection.) Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) had a privi leged upbringing as one of five children whose parentage was German-Jewish, al though also Dutch Protestant on their ma ternal side, and decidedly privileged financially. Three unwed Stettheimer sis ters—Carrie, Florine, and Ettie—remained in cozy domesticity with their mother, Rosetta, until her death in 1935. Rosetta’s husband Joseph had abandoned his wife and children early on. The oldest sister, Stella, and one brother, Walter, married and settled in California, leaving behind the sibling sorority of three. Along with their mother, the trio presided over a post World War I salon in New York that drew luminaries from the art world such as Mar

Allen Ellenzweig, a longtime G&LR contribu tor , is the author of the recently published book George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye.

The G & LR Florine Stettheimer. Beauty Contest: To the Memory of P.T. Barnum , 1924. Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford.

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