Boho rococo

Now, 15 years after her first Stettheimer exhibition, Sussman is once again trying to introduce a broader audience to the work, this time in a show at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, where she is a curator. Sussman's show will reflect new scholarship that has accumulated in the intervening years, as well as recent art-historical methodologies that have opened the discipline to issues of context and resuscitated previously marginalized figures, but which have left Stettheimer's contribution relatively unexplored.

For me, Stettheimer's marginality, together with her particular painterly awkwardness and her quirky "originality," provided the initial attraction; other artists somewhat off the beaten track, artists like Gustave Moreau, Pavel Tchelitchev, and Louis Eilshemius, supplied an ersatz genealogy for her - ancestors who, in the eyes of art history, might be called the magnificent failed ones. But if the "perversity" of these underground styles was the initial lure, my fascination quickly opened onto questions of context - of what kind of attendant creative activity provided the groundwork for the painterly idiom she developed.

It is this relation between the life and the work that has made Stettheimer such a key figure for me; my own art has involved a repositioning of the relation between painting, social activity, and communication. So I welcomed the chance to talk with Sussman, in anticipation of the full-scale Stettheimer show, cocurated with Barbara Bloemink, that opens at the Whitney July 13.

JUTTA KOETHER: You curated a show of Florine Stettheimer's work back in 1980. How did you get interested in her, and how has that interest developed into the larger commitment behind the survey you're curating at the Whitney?

ELISABETH SUSSMAN: I initially came across Stettheimer in a biographical entry about her in Notable American Women, a women's encyclopedia. I was interested in the '20s, in Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc. - all these stories about bohemian Greenwich Village, the mixture of theatrical and literary types, and the roles of women in that milieu - and everything I was interested in at the time seemed to figure in this biographical entry. Virtually the minute I read it, and before I'd seen even one of her paintings in the flesh, I fired off a proposal for a show.

I knew her milieu from my own background. The biography made quite a bit of the fact that she was German-Jewish, and I had always felt that identification very strongly.

JK: I discovered Stettheimer somewhat later, when a friend gave me her 1973 Columbia University catalogue as support and inspiration for my own art. For me, finding out about her was like crossing paths with a kindred spirit outside painting's conventional history. Over the years I've discovered other advocates: Linda Nochlin, and later Jay Gorney, who showed me her significance as a figure in an as-yet-unwritten history of gay esthetics.

ES: Back then the show involved a lot of detective work. I read the journals, which are in the Yale library, and found quite a bit of material at Columbia. A biography was published in a limited edition in 1963. It was commissioned by her family and written by Parker Tyler, an important gay writer and film critic at the time. As it turned out, it was Tyler who had written the encyclopedia entry I saw. I got interested in his whole network of involvements: he was a link between the gay cultural community of the '20s and the gay community within an art scene I knew something about - New York in the '60s. It was through Tyler and View magazine, where he worked, that Andy Warhol came in. Tyler, who had met Stettheimer and reviewed her work in View before writing the biography, also wrote about Warhol's films. And Warhol, through other channels, was by the '60s a Stettheimer fan.

Stettheimer was interesting enough to me as a kind of intersection for untold or half-told histories; then her work turned out to be great in its own right. I must have seen something, like these completely crazy colors, that told me I was on the right track; the more of her work I saw, the more I liked it.

JK: She had an unorthodox versatility, an ability to have a noncareer in art and still be at the center of things, an attractor and a trigger of conversation. These qualities - not to mention her interest in decorating - suggest a kind of anti-Modernist disposition. Could she be seen as a precursor of today's involvement of artists in popular culture?

ES: She was certainly interested in dance and theater, especially when the staging was ornate. She was actually involved in avant-garde theater; she did the stage designs and costumes for the Virgil Thomson/Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts. All the performers were black and the decor was mostly white! Her decorative interventions stretched the Thomson/Stein vision. One of her trademarks, which she used in the production, was cellophane. She had a thing for cheap glitter, which features in all of her early work. Her studio was hung with cellophane curtains; there were nets, beads, and see-through clear stuff all over the place. Cecil Beaton was a fan and wrote about her interiors, besides creating paper interiors himself. And of course Warhol covered the walls of the Factory with aluminum foil.