Florine stettheimer biography

  • Florine stettheimer prints
  • Florine name
  • Florine stettheimer self-portrait

    • •

    Florine Stettheimer

    American painter (–)

    Florine Stettheimer (August 19, – May 11, ) was an Americanmodernist painter, feminist, theatrical designer, poet, and salonnière.

    Stettheimer developed a feminine, theatrical painting style depicting her friends, family, and experiences in New York City. She made the first feminist nude self-portrait and paintings depicting controversies of race and sexual preference. She and her sisters hosted a salon that attracted members of the avant-garde. In the mids, Stettheimer created the stage designs and costumes for Gertrude Stein 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 Street, 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. In , when the Museum of Modern

  • florine stettheimer biography

    • •

    In the early s, the art historian Barbara Bloemink was rummaging through a Yale library in search of a dissertation topic when she came across “a funny letter about how impossible men are” from the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. The letter was addressed to a Florine Stettheimer. Intrigued, Bloemink dug deeper and discovered that, like O’Keeffe, Stettheimer was an American painter who was active in the early 20th century. Bloemink fell in love with the bright colors, winking humor, and progressive, feminist messaging of Stettheimer’s faux-naïf paintings. It was unlike anything she had seen from an artist of that era. Despite her professor’s initial objections (he didn’t think Stettheimer was a good painter, nor important enough), Bloemink sallied forth, writing her dissertation on this enigmatic chronicler of Jazz Age New York.

    Three decades after the publication of her dissertation, Bloemink is again making the case for Stettheimer as a fascinating, and crucial, figure of art history, on

    •

    Florine Stettheimer

    A Biography

    This first full biography confirms Florine Stettheimer as one of the 20th century’s most significant, progressive artists whose work remains highly betydelsefull today. Stettheimer was a feminist and a multi-media artist who painted several sexually explicit, political works examining identity issues documenting New York City’s growth as the center of cultural life, finance, and entertainment between the World Wars..

    During her first 40 years in Europe, Florine Stettheimer studied academic painting and was aware of all the earliest modernist styles ahead of most American artists. Returning to New York, she and her sisters led an acclaimed Salon for major avant-garde cultural figures including Marcel Duchamp, the Stieglitz circle, poets, dancers, writers, etc. She showed her innovative paintings in over 46 of the most important museum exhibitions and Salons, wrote poetry, designed unique furniture and gained international fame for