Florine Stettheimer

1871 - 1944

Biography(b Rochester, NY, 29 Aug 1871; d New York, 11 May 1944).
American painter and society hostess. Throughout her youth, Stettheimer travelled frequently to Europe with her sisters and mother, spending months at a time in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and France. At the age of 21 she enrolled at the Art Students League in New York and studied painting with Kenyon Cox. While her sister Ettie worked toward a PhD in philosophy at the University of Freiburg, she continued her studies in art in Berlin, Munich, and Stuttgart, where she encountered painters such as Ferdinand Hodler, Gustav Klimt, and Franz von Stuck. She also enthusiastically followed the Ballets Russes, with its sets and costumes by Léon Bakst. At the outbreak of World War I she returned New York, where her family maintained a residence on the Upper West Side at West 76th Street, and there, in collaboration with her sisters and mother, hosted cultural gatherings on a regular basis. The paintings she had produced in Europe were used to decorate the house, which served as an important site of convergence for European and American vanguard artists. Marcel Duchamp, Charles Demuth, Albert Gleizes, Marsden Hartley, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Morton Schamberg, Alfred Stieglitz, Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964), and others frequented the Stettheimer’s salon.

In 1916 Stettheimer exhibited some of her Symbolist-inflected work at M. Knoedler & Company, recreating a domestic environment for the occasion within the gallery. She sold no work and the reviews were mixed. She never showed her work in a public gallery again but continued to paint and display work in her home and the studio she maintained in the Beaux Arts Building on West 40th Street.

Freed from commercial and critical imperatives, her painting—satirical tributes to the members of her art-world circle—became increasingly fey and fantastical. The composer Virgil Thomson was taken with her work and invited Stettheimer to design the sets and costumes for the opera Four Saints in Three Acts, which he was creating in collaboration with Gertrude Stein. Stettheimer began work on this project in 1929. In the same year America’s first museum of modern art opened in New York (an event that inspired Stettheimer’s painting Cathedrals of Art). Four Saints in Three Acts opened five years later at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, and was immediately acknowledged as a landmark event in American modernism. Gospel singers from Harlem performed Thomson’s score, which borrowed its cadences from Stein’s libretto. Stettheimer embellished a backdrop with swags of cellophane that made the scene sparkle under the lighting. The premier performance drew the major cultural leaders of the period, including Alfred H. Barr. Finally, at the age of 63, Stettheimer’s work received public acclaim. After her death in 1944, Duchamp pressured the Museum of Modern Art to organize a major retrospective. The show, which opened in New York in 1946, travelled to Chicago and San Francisco. [Tirza Latimer. "Stettheimer, Florine." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2022043.]

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