The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer. - book reviews

Since her death in 1944, Florine Stettheimer's idiosyncratic work, and her equally odd life, have persistently appealed to a small audience. Yet few have fully appreciated her achievement. In The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer, Barbara Bloemink rescues her work from frothy, faux naif interpretations and unequivocally positions it within advanced currents of art and thought. She demonstrates that Stettheimer's paintings incorporate sharp observation of modern experience, comprehensive knowledge of the history and present condition of art, and profound, if ironic, appreciation for overlapping issues of transience, ambiguity, androgyny, and pleasure.

It is probably safe to say that virtually no one who visited the related retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year had seen a major exhibition devoted to Stettheimer's work. The only previous retrospective in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art,(1) preceded the Whitney's by forty-nine years. In the last twenty-odd years, the only noteworthy Stettheimer exhibitions have been a retrospective at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art in 1980(2) and a portrait show at the Katonah Museum in 1993.(3) The only previous book on the artist, Parker Tyler's biographical and critical study, appeared in a limited edition more than thirty years ago.(4)

Along with museum curator Elisabeth Sussman, Bloemink served as guest co-curator of the splendid Whitney exhibition, which included nearly all of the most important paintings. The show's valuable catalogue comprises essays by the two organizers, along with a reprint of Linda Nochlin's perceptive article "Florine Stettheimer: Rococo Subversive," which locates the seriousness of Stettheimer's art in a social consciousness that resisted - and often deflated - established authority.(5) Sussman's catalogue essay summarizes Stettheimer's career and, with considerable insight, directs attention to Stettheimer's legacy in gay, pop, and feminist art. In her essay, Bloemink, who is currently the director of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Kansas City, stresses Stettheimer's attraction to the optical over the ideal and considers the artist's approach to representing modern experience in her art.

For a clear and detailed account of Stettheimer's artistic and personal development, one may turn with satisfaction to Bloemink's biography. Building upon Tyler's ambitious if imperfect work, Bloemink's account is thoroughly researched, comprehensive, and convincingly straightforward. Stettheimer was born in Rochester, New York, in 1871, the fourth of five children, to parents who came from New York City's wealthy Jewish elite. She spent most of her childhood in Europe, and in her early twenties studied at the Art Students' League in New York for three years. Between 1898 and 1914, along with her mother and two sisters, she was almost constantly on the move, traveling widely in Europe when not in New York. During these years, Stettheimer read extensively in the literature of art history, incessantly visited museums and galleries, and from time to time studied privately.

In 1914 World War I drove the family home - for good, as it turned out. Stettheimer was now forty-three. Although she had been working as an artist since childhood, her painting was still derivative and relatively uninteresting. However, intimations of her later originality may be seen in designs for an unrealized ballet, for which her watercolors, figurines, and costume designs survive. Several of these in the Whitney show were the earliest works included; they represent, as Bloemink notes, "Stettheimer's first overt steps toward abandoning academic training and formulating her own unique style" (p. 48).

The earliest paintings in the exhibition, from 1915 and 1916, attempt with some success to synthesize elements of Post-Impressionism. Twelve of these high-keyed, decorative paintings constituted Stettheimer's only one-person show during her lifetime, held at the respectable Knoedler & Company in October 1916. Nothing sold, to her surprise and disappointment.

In retrospect, it is clear from her immediately subsequent work that the Knoedler paintings were transitional. Suddenly, apparently in relative isolation from artistic encouragement - and perhaps against all odds - Stettheimer transformed herself into one of the most original and sophisticated artists in New York. Once she had found her personal style, in 1917, Stettheimer worked steadily, and nearly all of her best paintings were done within the next fifteen years. Stettheimer's activity in this period was presumably facilitated by a relatively settled existence in New York. As the artist forged her personal artistic style, the feminine Stettheimer menage a quatre was assuming its legendary identity. While the three sisters together assiduously tended to their mother, Carrie ran the household and supervised the social occasions at which the four always appeared together. In her free time she exercised her talent for design by furnishing a fabulous doll-house. Ettie, who had earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Freiburg, wrote fiction. For nearly twenty years, at their spacious, haut bourgeois apartment and their various rented summer homes, the "Stetties" frequently and lavishly entertained friends who included some of New York's most interesting cultural luminaries, such as Marcel Duchamp. Carl Van Vechten, Alfred Stieglitz, Henry McBride, Paul Rosenfeld, Charles Demuth, and Gaston Lachaise.