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The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer. - book reviews
Art Journal, Summer, 1996 by Ann Lee Morgan
This social world can be seen in many of Stettheimer's paintings, especially the portraits and conversation pieces (group portraits in domestic or landscape settings). Her other works - not counting the flower pieces that testify to her love of flowers but do not seem to carry more complex meanings - are generally fantasies or social commentaries. Whatever Stettheimer's subject, it is always sharply observed. Her individualistic style is above all nonacademic: decorative, coloristic, improvisatory, painterly, and playful. Her figures are weightless, both physically and psychologically; usually slender, and almost floating, with tiny, pointed hands and feet, they show little emotional engagement or personality beyond what can be read from gesture, clothing, and other outward attributes. Surface patterns organize her compositions, and spatial or temporal discontinuities are both frequent and fluid.
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To achieve her characteristic style, Stettheimer drew upon many sources, as Bloemink demonstrates. Although modernist experiments were crucial, she variously incorporated elements from Japanese prints, Persian miniatures, "primitive" Trecento painting, Watteau's fetes gallantes, Botticelli, Brueghel, and Serge Diaghilev's Ballet Russes. Bloemink also ties Stettheimer's work directly to many aspects of contemporary life and thought, including the fin-de-siecle rococo revival in France, Freudianism, Bergson's philosophy, Surrealism, and especially the fiction of Proust, her favorite author.
Stettheimer's idiosyncratic personal amalgam first emerged in conversation pieces that rank among the most original of her achievements. La Fete a Duchamp (1917; [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]), apparently the second of these, records Stettheimer's remembrance of the garden party the sisters gave for the French artist's thirtieth birthday. Here, Stettheimer portrays her explicitly modern "notion of reality as a composite of multiple sensations and perceptions" (Bloemink, p. 84), a conception that rapidly became a hallmark of her art. Soon she developed a personal approach to portraits, which were numerous in her work of the 1920s. As exemplified by her portrait of Van Vechten (1922; [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]), these were recognizable images of her subjects, but subsidiary elements expanded on the sitter's accomplishments and personality traits. Several major paintings are elaborate fantasies, which are difficult to decode. Music (1920), which later hung in the artist's bedroom, is "among the most 'surreal' of her paintings, and it reveals the artist's fascination with Freudian theory, self-consciousness, and dreams" (Bloemink, p. 102). To one side, the artist herself dreams on a canopied bed, while at the other, a pianist plays for two costumed male dancers: Adolphe Bolm, a friend of the artist, who cavorts on his back in the foreground, and, at the center of the composition, the famed Nijinsky, unrealistically en pointe, wearing feminizing attire, and gazing toward the artist.
