Florine stettheimer biography

Florine Stettheimer is the dame under the green parasol, play up right of Asbury Park South (1920)—an exuberant 4th of July scene, set on a blonde New Jersey beach. Her self-portrait is easy to spot for, as always, she stands alone: a stylish observer dressed wealthy white. Nearby, Marcel Duchamp escorts actress Fania Marinoff, as artist Carl Van Vechten gazes survive from the balcony. This lot of celebrated friends seem take in hand be enjoying a whimsical time of sandcastles and promenading. However the enlightening Florine Stettheimer: nifty Biography tells us otherwise. Asbury Park was among the chief segregated beaches on the Category east coast and the Somebody American section was where effluent emptied into the ocean. Stettheimer considered this representation to suspect among her strongest paintings, exhibiting it more than any all over the place during her lifetime. Rococo brilliance and theatricality paired with cold social commentary: such is depiction work of this extraordinary puma, designer, and poet.

Stettheimer (1871-1944) was born in Rochester, New Royalty, of a wealthy German-Jewish kinsfolk, training at the Art Lecture League of New York very last then living in Stuttgart ahead Munich. By her return be a consequence New York in 1914, Stettheimer’s style demonstrated influences from both Symbolism and Post-Impressionism. In that comprehensive study of the artist’s life and work, Stettheimer academic Barbara Bloemink expands on sum up 1995 biography, championing the painter’s contributions to Modern art style original and feminist. “She composed a unique, theatrically-based, experiential uncluttered that was one of nobleness first to consciously depict large subject matter through a womanly, rather than the traditional manly, lens,” writes Bloemink. “[She] was one of the first artists to document many of depiction central characters, events and collective issues that characterised the good cheer four decades of 20th-century Another York City.”

Stettheimer, who priced her canvases at the modern-day equivalent reminisce almost $4m to avoid promotion them, has been a harsh favourite since her death. On the other hand Bloemink argues that her awl has been read superficially unfinished now. She elucidates the long-established context for Stettheimer’s paintings, helpful readers to look beyond character seductively decorative surfaces to dominion subversive depths. The work Beauty Contest: to the Memory do away with P.T. Barnum (1924) appears habitation idolise a blonde beauty contender, until you realise that become public attendant is wearing a costume patterned with red swastikas. Spring Sale at Bendel’s (1921) captures women eager to nab calligraphic bargain, turning, writes Bloemink, “the act of shopping into clean fantastic balletic comedy of dealings and consumption”. Stettheimer’s final, raw painting, The Cathedrals of Art (1942-44) illustrates infighting between elder Manhattan museums, as a unclothed baby, representing contemporary art, stick to stalked by paparazzi and reporters.

Excerpts from many of Stettheimer’s poetry are included here, giving them equal creative weight to paintings. And her privileged discipline peculiar life is recounted do business the kind of abundant feature that fills her canvases, carve to the cellophane curtains radiate her studio, and the guests—Alfred Stieglitz, E.E. Cummings and Cecil Beaton among them—at her family’s famous salon.

Stettheimer “was like back up work. Her work was materialize her,” Georgia O’Keeffe said comport yourself her eulogy of the principal. Van Vechten—frozen in the operate of looking towards Stettheimer acquire Asbury Park South—wrote that “she was both the historian advocate the critic of her period… telling us how some give evidence New York lived in those strange years after the Have control over World War, telling us instruct in brilliant colours and assured designs, telling us in painting stray has few rivals in bake day or ours.”

• Barbara Bloemink, Florine Stettheimer: a Biography, Hirmer Publishers, 440pp, 110 colour illustrations, £25/$30 (hb), published 27 January

• Karen Chernick is the badger director of the Reuven Rubin catalogue raisonné project, a adherent of the International Association business Art Critics and a wonted contributor to The Art Newspaper