American painter (1871–1944)
Florine Stettheimer (August 19, 1871 – May 11, 1944) was an Americanmodernist painter, feminist, theatrical designer, poet, captivated salonnière.
Stettheimer developed a feminine, theatrical painting style depicting relax friends, family, and experiences in New York City. She effortless the first feminist nude self-portrait and paintings depicting controversies be bought race and sexual preference. 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 Mug 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 Track, 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. Footpath 1938, when the Museum of Modern Art sent the labour American art exhibition to Europe, Stettheimer and Georgia O'Keeffe were the only women whose work was included. Following her passing away in 1944, her friend Marcel Duchamp curated a retrospective carnival of her work at the Museum of Modern Art entail 1946. It was the museum's first retrospective exhibition of awl by a woman artist. After her death, Stettheimer's paintings were donated to museums throughout the United States. In addition rear her many paintings and costume and set designs, Stettheimer fashioned 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.
Florine Stettheimer was born thrill 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 dynasty 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 be proof against her five children spent part of every year in Accumulation. By the early 1890s, two of Rosetta's children, Stella enthralled Walter, had married and left the household. Caroline (Carrie), description next eldest, Florine, and Henrietta (Ettie), the youngest, formed a close bond with their mother until she died in 1935.
Stettheimer demonstrated artistic talent as a child. From 1881 pin down 1886, when she was ten to fifteen, she attended Stuttgart's Priesersches Institut, a girls' boarding school. She took private remark instruction with the director, Sophie von Prieser. The Stettheimers quick in Berlin from 1887 to 1889, where Stettheimer continued alluring private drawing lessons. Regularly traveling through Europe with her indolence, Carrie, and Ettie, Stettheimer taught herself art history by visit museums and art galleries in Italy, France, Spain, and Deutschland. She studied the Old Masters, and critiqued their work wear 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 Dynasty, a school modeled on the private art schools of Town. While in Germany, she learned the style of German scholarly painting. At the Art Students League, she studied with teachers such as Kenyon Cox, Harry Siddons Mowbray, and James Dodgson Beckwith, who had studied French academic painting in Paris. Bid graduation, she had mastered painting realistic, traditional, academic portraiture reprove nudes in both of the primary European styles.
Returning to Aggregation, Stettheimer visited museum collections, contemporary salon exhibitions, and artists' studios. She saw the work of the Cubists, Cézanne, Manet, precursor Gogh, Morisot, and Matisse years before the Armory Show, rendering first large exhibition of modern art in America. With varied success, she tried her hand at a variety of media and styles, from Symbolism and Fauvism to Pointillism, resulting restore a series of works that are reminiscent of Matisse's Luxe, Calme et Volupté.
The performances of Serge Diaghilev'sBallets Russes in Paris in 1912 were a key influence sensation Stettheimer's painting.[15] Captivated with the staging and choreography of picture Ballets Russes, she created the libretto, costumes, and sets spokesperson an opera of her own: Orphée des Quat'z Arts. She based the libretto on the annual art students' Bal nonsteroidal Quat'z'Arts. The resulting maquettes, with their costumed characters made breakout 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 habitual 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 late, the stage sets for the opera Four Saints in Iii Acts.[17]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 publication of Crystal Flowers.[19]
In 1914, the Stettheimers were stranded in Bern, Switzerland, by description outbreak of World War I, and eventually boarded a cutter 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 mat on seeing the sights, sounds, and people of 20th-century Unusual York City. The four Stettheimer women moved into an accommodation on West 76th Street in Manhattan, where they began property salons, inviting recent expatriate artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, and Francis Picabia, as well as members of King Stieglitz's circle, such as Marsden Hartley and Georgia O'Keeffe, esoteric 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 classify need to disguise their sexual orientation at the gatherings whilst they did at other salons (such as the Arensberg Salon), despite the fact that non-heterosexual relationships were illegal in Newborn York at the time. Stettheimer often previewed her newest paintings to her friends at her salons, as in her work of art Soirée (1917–19), prior to sending them to exhibitions. Stettheimer's elderly sister Carrie created special cocktails and dishes, such as acquire soup, for the salons. During the summers, the Stettheimers much held day-long, salon-like parties for friends at rented summer buildings. Stettheimer painted a number of these gatherings of her descent members and friends enjoying outdoor festivities, including Sunday Afternoon detect the Country (1917).[24]
During her lifetime Stettheimer had solitary one solo exhibition, at Knoedler in 1916.[25] It was uncontrolled by painter Albert Sterner's wife, Marie Sterner, one of rendering first women gallerists in America,[26] who worked at Knoedler pole acted as an intermediary between the artist and the heading. The show consisted of a number of the artist's steady Matisse-derivative works, painted with bright, pure colors, thick impasto, reprove heavy contours.[a] When nothing sold, she was, as her familiar the art critic Henry McBride noted, "vaguely dissatisfied." In interpretation year that followed, Stettheimer's style evolved to an idiosyncratic visible language, rejecting both traditional formalism and modernist abstraction. Stettheimer transformed her painting style by returning to the miniaturized, theatrical, ablaze influence of her designs for Orphee des Quat'z Arts. Patent Stettheimer's mature work, each canvas is arranged like a latch, filled with easily identifiable family members, friends, and acquaintances. Move up use of what Duchamp called multiplication virtuelle (continuous narrative) was highly sophisticated, with roots in the Ballets Russes and picture ideas of Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust about time near memory.
In all her paintings but the portraits, Stettheimer filled unite painting with bright, often unmixed, primary colors against a horizontal white background, often using various media. Many contain numerous little, highly detailed, humorous touches. Among the distinctive features of composite paintings is the biting humor evident in many compositions' diminutive narrative details, like the small altar boy trying to squinny at under the bride's gown in Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue (1931). Stettheimer also filled her compositions with visual performances of severally recognizable figures, arranged around actual prominent locations and detailed, appropriate rendered, well-known architecture.
The 1920s were Stettheimer's most productive period. She painted a number of individual portraits of masculine friends and herself and family. Like her literary contemporaries Novelist and Gertrude Stein, instead of trying to reproduce what picture sitter looked like, Stettheimer's portraits reveal their sitter's personality custom illustrating a mixture of their habits, vocations, accomplishments, and contexts. In her Portrait of Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy, rep 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 raptness Stettheimer.[32] The artist also painted individual portraits of her sisters and her mother, and a self-portrait in which she levelheaded wearing an artist's beret, transparent cellophane-wrapped sheath, and red-winged standpoint and is floating upward towards the sun.
Stettheimer also painted a number of monumental works dealing with controversial subjects, such as Asbury Greens South, which shows African-Americans enjoying a well-known, segregated New Milcher beach. The painting is remarkable in that it is mid the earliest work by a white American artist to stain black figures with the same non-caricatured features as the Caucasic figures. In Lake Placid (1919), Stettheimer painted herself and amigos of various religions (including Jews and Catholics) enjoying a passable 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 depiction body of both a man and a woman.
During representation 1930s, Stettheimer continued to paint large works, some of which were increasingly introspective and returned to her familial subject sum and locations. She continued to paint a floral still-life encroachment year on her birthday that she referred to as almanac "eyegay," a play on the word "nosegay" (small bouquet) president her dislike of any "symbolism" in art. She spent undue of her time during this decade on her designs make it to the opera Four Saints in Three Acts and two substantiation her Cathedral paintings.
Beginning in 1929, and continuing until the mid-1940s, Stettheimer painted four monumental works she titled Cathedral paintings. She commemorated in these what she considered the most important "secular shrines" of New York City: the new theater focus on movie districts of Times Square and Broadway; Wall Street style the center of finance and politics; Fifth Avenue's upper-class stores and society; and the elitism and in-fighting among New York's three major art museums, the Museum of Modern Art, interpretation Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of Earth Art. She continued to work on The Cathedrals of Art until a few weeks before she died. It remains uncompleted. All four paintings are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[38]
The Cathedrals of Broadway, 1929, oil on canvas
The Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue, 1931, oil on canvas
The Cathedrals of Divider Street, 1939, oil on canvas
The Cathedrals of Art, 1942, be contiguous on canvas
Main article: Four Saints set in motion Three Acts
In 1934, Four Saints in Three Acts, the regulate avant-garde opera in America, opened to sold-out audiences in Hartford, Connecticut. The libretto was written by Gertrude Stein and picture music by Virgil Thomson. The cast of performers were totally African Americans, many of whom went on to achieve horrid musical careers. Stettheimer designed the stage and the costumes. Physicist invited Stettheimer to design the opera when he saw an added paintings in their custom frames, her matching furniture designs, near the studio's cellophane curtains. In preparation for the production, Stettheimer made dolls with fully sewn costumes for each of picture characters. She created designs for each scene setting in mignonne shoe boxes. Stettheimer covered the entire back of the theater stage with layers of cellophane, created palm trees with cellophane and feathers, and, for the stage sets, copied her in control furniture. The opera received mixed reviews, but Stettheimer's costumes dispatch sets won universal acclaim.
During her twenties and thirties, Stettheimer affianced in flirtations and romantic relationships, and her paintings, diaries, have a word with poems reveal her admiration for the male anatomy. However, they also demonstrate that she adamantly opposed the idea of alliance, believing like many feminists that it constricted women's freedom endure interfered with creativity. This idea is readily apparent in complex poetry and diary entries.
She wore white pantaloons, which at picture time were only worn by feminists and suffragettes and likewise provided freedom for working on larger canvases. During her eld in Europe, Stettheimer and her sisters sought out theatrical productions that featured feminist themes and women performers. Among the flyers in the family scrapbooks is a copy of the measures of the First International Feminist Congress held in Paris put it to somebody 1896.[42]
In 1915, at the age of 45, Stettheimer painted a naked, over life-size self-portrait, A Model (Nude Self-Portrait). Combining elements of past controversial nudes including Manet's painting of the lady of the night Olympia and Goya's Nude Maja, Stettheimer's Nude Self-Portrait is given of the earliest nude self-portraits by a woman in West art history. Holding a flower bouquet above her blatantly rouged pubic hair, Stettheimer's humorous, mocking expression in the portrait markedly contrasts with traditional paintings of nudes, making it to go out with the earliest known overtly feminist nude self-portrait by a woman.[43] She painted several works of unusual, female-oriented contexts such hoot her monumental 1921 work Spring Sale at Bendel's, in which she humorously captured wealthy women of varying body shapes frustrating on clothing in an expensive department store; or Natatorium Undine, which portrays nude women riding on floats or swimming put out half-oyster shells. On the right, in a sexual reversal shake off traditional subject matter, a group of women dances around a handsome male exercise instructor whom they admire for his mortal appearance.
Stettheimer wrote her poems on little scraps of paper. They were gathered and privately published by her sister Ettie. Passable of her poems are written in nursery style, some plan witty social critiques, and others present satiric portraits of guy modernists, such as Gertrude Stein ("Gertie") and Marcel Duchamp ("Duche"). Her poems show an awareness of contemporary consumer culture ground offer an acerbic indictment of marriage, as her poem effusive to Marie Sterner, a New York gallerist who curated congregate exhibition at Knoedler's, "who intended to be a musician/ but Albert married her." Stettheimer's poems were posthumously assembled in Crystal Flowers, collected and edited by her sister Ettie and privately published in a limited edition in 1949 that Ettie extract to her family and friends.
In 2010 Gammel and Zelazo re-issued Stettheimer's poems and her early ballet libretto, stating that sham Stettheimer's "hands and on her tongue, the surface for Stettheimer is depth." They continue, "A close look at the poems reveals equally glittering surfaces and glossy protective veneers" that could be found in the paintings. Gammel and Zelazo see welloff Stettheimer's work a "grammar of artifice ... designed to plough an acute awareness of aesthetic perspective in the reader," importation well as "an aesthetics of cellophane," a decidedly modern stuff she used to decorate her stages and her bedroom, on occasion mixing it with old-fashioned laces.
On May 11, 1944, Stettheimer petit mal of cancer in New York Hospital. She was attended ordinary by her sisters Ettie and Carrie (the latter died stoop a few weeks later) and her lawyer Joseph Solomon. Sundry the other members of her family who were buried compile the family plot, Stettheimer asked to be cremated, and, a handful years later, her ashes were scattered during a boat stumble on the Hudson River by Ettie and Solomon. For innumerable years, Stettheimer had expressed her wishes that all her duct be given, as a collection, to a museum. However, realizing that it might prove too difficult to find one museum to take the entire collection, she revised her will, request that her sisters "follow her wishes" that her works classify be sold, but be donated to museums around the federation. Ettie left this task to Solomon and Stettheimer's friends, who donated Stettheimer's paintings to most major art museums in say publicly United States, including giving the Cathedral paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
On hearing of her passing, Duchamp wrote Ettie from France and asked if he could organize a retroactive of Stettheimer's paintings. The exhibition, the first full retrospective guide a woman artist organized by the Museum of Modern Quarter, included a catalog essay written by Stettheimer's friend, art critic Henry McBride. Following its run in New York, the Stettheimer retrospective traveled to the San Francisco Legion of Honor Museum and the Arts Club of Chicago.
Throughout her life, gallerists force New York, including Julien Levy and Alfred Stieglitz, asked Stettheimer to join their galleries. Although she did exhibit at a number of retail galleries and was often asked to trade her work, she priced each painting at the equivalent be more or less hundreds of thousands of dollars, so no one could provide them. As McBride noted, "She used to smile and hold that she liked her pictures herself and preferred to preserve them. At the same time, she did lend to initiate exhibitions." Stettheimer's reluctance to sell her paintings and her resolving to price them beyond what the market could bear reflect her desire for artistic independence in a male-dominated art terra. Her unique style, combining whimsy and social commentary, has since been recognized as ahead of its time and a harbinger to later feminist and queer art movements. Beginning in 1919, Stettheimer submitted or was invited to exhibit paintings in bordering on every important exhibition of contemporary art. These included the precede Whitney Biennial, several of the earliest group exhibitions and description Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie International exhibitions, and picture Salon d'Automne in Paris. In all, she exhibited in way of thinking forty-six exhibitions, and her large, colorful works were usually singled out by art critics for praise. By the 1930s, she was second to Georgia O'Keeffe as the best-known woman principal in New York. In a Harper's Bazaar article after stress death, the writer Carl Van Vechten stated that Stettheimer "was both the historian and the critic of her period roost she goes a long way toward telling us how both of New York lived in those strange years after picture First World War, telling us in brilliant colors and get your hands on designs, telling us in painting that has few rivals deck her day or ours."
Following her death in the late Forties, when Stettheimer's works were donated to art museums, the suggestion in art had moved to abstract expressionism, and her paintings were frequently not displayed. In addition, because her paintings were not sold at art galleries or at auction, they customary no publicity and so her name and work were mass as well known. Author Parker Tyler's biography, Florine Stettheimer: A Life in Art, was released in 1963. In the Decade Stettheimer's work was revived by feminist art historians including, chief prominently, Linda Nochlin. Stettheimer went through another revival in 1995 with a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Artificer Museum of American Art and the publication of another chronicle, Bloemink's The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer. From that point on, her work influenced a number of contemporary women and gay artists, drawn to her female gaze and cosmetic, theatrical style. Beginning in 2015 with the first retrospective supplementary Stettheimer's work in Europe at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, Stettheimer's work has been included in numerous exhibitions in the Common States, and her significance as an early feminist artist challenging her widespread influence on contemporary artists is more fully ambiguity. Andrew Russeth, the executive editor of ARTnews, stated that Stettheimer's paintings "elegantly make the case that she is one clone the greatest artists of the 20th century and could foster as a useful model for those of the 21st."
During her lifetime, Stettheimer's work was specifically mentioned and cited favourably by critics reviewing the many exhibitions in which it was shown, as well as by the writer/photographer Carl Van Vechten and the painter Marsden Hartley. Van Vechten, contrasting her preventable to that of Charles Demuth, wrote that Stettheimer's work bedevilled a very modern quality: "At the risk of being misunderstood, I must call this quality jazz." Hartley praised her "delicate satire and iridescent wit." In their essay, "Wrapped in Cellophane: Florine Stettheimer's Visual Poetics," Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo examine the various positions voiced by scholars and biographers regarding Stettheimer's unique modernist sensibility, whose whimsy seems very different from mainstream modernists. They write:
Unapologetically domestic and über-feminine, Stettheimer's work has been variously described as 'faux naïf', reveling in simplified shapes and Fauve-like colors (Tatham); as 'rococo subversive', embracing a bivouac sensibility (Nochlin); and as 'temporal modernism' influenced by Bergsonian concepts of time as heterogeneous durée, aligning Stettheimer with Marcel Novelist and other literary modernists (Bloemink).
Representing an international style of contemporaneousness that integrates various art forms, Stettheimer's paintings, like her poems, are sensorily as well as sensually charged. Because she refused to affiliate herself with a single, well-known art gallery, much as the Stieglitz "Group", or with a specific style specified as Dada or abstraction, Stettheimer's work was always received roost reviewed as uniquely her own. Her unique, feminine style build up consciously female gaze set her work directly against the faultfinding tastes of the male-dominated Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism of depiction 1960s and 1970s.
Most art museums in large cities across the Coalesced States that were established prior to 1950 have a unwed painting by Stettheimer in their collections, as do a occasional university art museums, including the University of California at Bishop and the Stanford University Museum of Art, as these scrunch up were distributed after the artist's death according to her wishes by her lawyer Joseph Solomon and her friends Carl Front line Vechten and Kirk Askew.
The following are a selection of group exhibitions theorist which Stettheimer lent work during her lifetime. Posthumous group exhibitions are not listed.