You Wonderful Hot-Cold Thing

After her death in May 1944, the painter, poet, and designer Florine Stettheimer was eulogized by fellow painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Although the two were not always on warm terms, no other female artist in the United States equaled Stettheimer for originality, sense of color, or national renown. Indeed, given that there were so few female artists in New York City—or in the United States—who made significant work during the 1920s and ’30s, O’Keeffe was both a fitting and perhaps necessary choice. However, if the orator was predictable, the speech was not. Unlike many eulogies that tend toward glossy retrospection, O’Keeffe’s remarks were purposeful and pointed. This was an opportunity to speak candidly about matters Stettheimer herself might not have expressed so directly. “Florine made no concessions of any kind to any person or situation,” O’Keeffe said. “[She] put into visible form … a way of life that is going and cannot happen again, something that has been alive in our city.”

Characteristically unerring, O’Keeffe observed that Stettheimer had succeeded by refusing to bow to convention, either as a woman or as an artist, while fashioning herself as a creature of the interwar period during which she was at her creative height. These choices were not without repercussions: Since her death, Stettheimer has been subject to shifting reputational fortunes. A posthumous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, curated by Marcel Duchamp, was Stettheimer’s first solo show since 1916, and it was a blockbuster. It traveled to San Francisco’s de Young Memorial Museum as well as the Arts Club of Chicago and attracted tens of thousands of visitors. But rapidly changing tastes and lifestyles, along with the newly won global power of the United States, created an aesthetic regime hostile to Stettheimer’s fey figuration; preference for lacy detail; and complex systems of social, historical, and allegorical reference. Abstract expressionism dominated: New York “stole” the art world from Paris, and a bunch of young men who lived hard in Manhattan lofts made big, nonrepresentational canvases onto which it was possible to project nearly anything.

Stettheimer, a somewhat hermetic artist whose canvases cannily limned local life and politics in greater New York City, was for several decades lost to institutional storage. Her rehabilitation began only in the late 1960s when Andy Warhol, commissioned to curate an exhibition for the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, featured Stettheimer’s 1927 painting Bouquet for Ettie. In this still life, an impossibly attenuated trumpet-shaped vase supports a riotous clutch of what appears to be poppies, pansies, mums, foxgloves, and peonies—flowers of somewhat disparate seasons blooming together. One can imagine that Warhol, who once referred to Stettheimer as his “favorite artist,” would have adored the exuberance and mannered, humorous proportions of the piece. The bouquet and its vessel appear oddly alive, as if they have fused to form a previously unknown species of domesticated animal, now about to leap from its table. Of course, it is difficult to say whether Warhol “saved” Stettheimer or if, once again, the times had changed, demanding new and different images. Art historian Linda Nochlin’s 1980 essay “Florine Stettheimer: Rococo Subversive,” published by Art in America, is another important milestone. So is the artist Nick Mauss’s more recent and deeply personal curatorial work; both Nochlin and Mauss helped to encourage cult followings for Stettheimer among their respective generations.

But what exactly is Stettheimer’s artistic contribution, and how does her work read today? Where are viewers in the longer process of receiving Stettheimer’s multimedia output—work the art critic Roberta Smith described as a boom-bust cycle that “every 20 years or so . . . shakes up modernism’s orderly hierarchies”? In addition to being a visual artist, Stettheimer was an extremely able diarist and an exceptional poet. Over the course of her life, she wrote untitled poems, perhaps as a part of her journaling practice, characterized by deft attention to rhythm. Perhaps even more than the paintings, they help reveal the troubling contradictions of a life lived under conditions of polite constraint and wide-ranging intellectual and aesthetic gifts. They are at once comic, philosophical, and passionate. However, despite their original imagery and keen sense of the American idiom of Stettheimer’s time, they are seldom read today.

Looking at this remarkable writing together with Stettheimer’s canvases, the question of why she continues to be treated as a marginal figure becomes even more pressing. Barbara Bloemink, a Yale-trained art historian, proposes some answers in Florine Stettheimer: A Biography (Hirmer Publishers, 2022). Thus, it is once again a good time to revisit Stettheimer’s images and texts. However, far from clarifying matters where Stettheimer is concerned, Bloemink’s book—by turns fascinating, frustrating, highly original, and self-contradictory, a bit like the artist herself—increases the reader's uncertainty. Although I read it expecting clarification of Stettheimer’s place in American art, I came away with new queries.

***

Stettheimer was born in Rochester, New York, in 1871, the daughter of wealthy Jewish American parents whose families made their fortunes through garment manufacturing and dry goods businesses and were related by marriage to some of the most powerful families in Manhattan, including the Bernheimers and the Seligmans. In an early instance of the mix of elite status and social uncertainty that defined her life, Stettheimer, in the company of her four siblings, was whisked across the Atlantic as a girl after her father abandoned the family. It is not known whether her mother was attempting to escape the shame of a failed marriage, economize as a single parent, or both. The result was a childhood that played out like an extended vacation.

Stettheimer briefly resettled on the East Coast in the 1890s, where she studied at the liberal Art Students League, the first school in New York City to permit women to make drawings from nude models. She otherwise shuttled between and among Vienna, Paris, and other European cities, often in the company of her chic sisters, Ettie and Carrie. They attended performances of the Ballets Russes, were attentive to Henri Bergson’s phenomenology, and carefully examined canonical Continental art. With the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the Stettheimers withdrew to New York, which became their permanent home. Stettheimer subsequently left the United States only once, to visit Canada.

Most of Stettheimer’s significant work was created when she was between 45 and 70 years old, a fact that attests to the general psychological and social challenges that women faced during the period, as well as the Stettheimer family’s discomfort with an artistic calling. Although Stettheimer’s mother encouraged both Florine and Ettie to obtain educations unusual for women at the time (Ettie earned a PhD), she seemed to subscribe to the notion that the achievements of upper-class women were best kept private. Despite the family’s relatively enlightened views regarding the role of women, Stettheimer felt pressure to value hospitality and maintenance of the home above other pursuits, particularly her own studio practice. She had academic training in painting and produced a few exact early studies in the vein of John Singer Sargent, yet she purposefully un-schooled herself and took up a flat style that had more to do with American folk art, Persian miniatures, medieval European tapestries, ukiyo-e, and Chinese landscape painting. Why she did this is unclear—as such choices often are from an outside perspective. Perhaps the work of designers Léon Bakst, who created sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes, and Paul Poiret, the celebrity couturier who in 1911 held a “Thousand and Second Night” fancy-dress soirée in Paris, inspired Stettheimer’s own take on what today could be regarded as a form of pastiche based in orientalism.

As I argued in Art in America on the occasion of a 2017 retrospective of Stettheimer’s work at the Jewish Museum in New York City, it is important to consider Stettheimer’s twin interests in allegory and appropriation. Otherwise, it is difficult to reconcile such apparently contradictory impulses as her life-long fascination with the figure of the faun, as portrayed by Vaslav Nijinsky in his famous choreography for L’Après-midi d’un faune, and her equally powerful obsession with George Washington, to whom she dedicated a shrine-like room in her Bryant Park studio and who appears repeatedly in her paintings. I wrote then that Stettheimer seemed to have adopted her nationality as a sort of decorative style, grappling with questions related to power and assimilation—and the normalization of various kinds of segregation in the United States—throughout her career. Oil painting, an economically and culturally dominant art form, became subversively reconciled to minor styles in Stettheimer’s hands, even as she took on major themes.

However, this is not just an essay about Stettheimer’s paintings, as “juicy,” to use Duchamp’s word, or as evocative of their times as they are. Stettheimer was also a writer, a fact that serves Bloemink well in the biography. She makes thoughtful and generous use of excerpts from Stettheimer’s piquant poetry as well as the artist’s unpublished diaries—both currently archived at Yale’s Beinecke Library. Throughout her life, Stettheimer wrote verse almost offhandedly, and although she seems never to have intended it for publication, it is very good. Her poems, mostly undated, were never committed to type by the artist and only later transcribed by Ettie, who went on to edit Crystal Flowers (1949), a collection of her sister’s verse that she privately published in a small and now-rare run.

At Yale, the poems are organized into folders using chapter titles devised by both Florine and Ettie, which give some sense of the contents and themes: “Nursery Rhymes”; “Nature, Fauna, Flora”; “Americana”; “Moods”; “People”; “Notes to Friends”; and “As Tho’ From a Diary.” The last title is particularly telling: think Emily Dickinson meets Langston Hughes—or Dorothy Parker, Mina Loy, and Lorine Niedecker collaborate to create a future-looking, arch, and lucid style. (One of my favorites includes the couplet “You fooled me you little floating / worm.” Bloemink quotes from the poem to illustrate how Stettheimer might have taken the failure of a love affair.) Stettheimer’s talent for vivid language is also obvious in a number of poems that use extended culinary metaphors to describe romantic passion, as in this fantastic stanza:

You beat me
I foamed
Your sweetest sweet you almost drowned me in
You parceled out my whole self
You thrust me into darkness
You made me hot—hot—hot
I crisped into “kisses”

There is something of the coy euphemistic quality of popular music here, combined with a distinct economy of the verbal image that feels modern, if not strictly modernist, in character. In my reading, this scene of baking stands in for sex and orgasm. Here and elsewhere, Stettheimer ably describes irritations of the flesh and spirit in terms that read a bit like demented—and thereby improved—commercial jingles. Deceptively simple on their surfaces, her poems point to possibly illicit experiences that her sister Ettie seems to have excised from Stettheimer’s diary with a pair of scissors after the artist died.^[1]

Although using literary production to reveal a life as it was lived is often an unreliable strategy, Bloemink is quite convincing in her juxtaposition of Stettheimer’s verses with her own diegesis. Illuminating readings occasionally set the poems alongside color reproductions of Stettheimer’s paintings, allowing one to see how Stettheimer’s writing is of a piece with her visual work—how, for example, ambivalent phrases such as “I gloat over your perfections” and “You wonderful hot-cold thing” are mirrored in the simultaneously sugary, ironic, arch, and earnest way in which the artist painted.

Similarly, excerpts from Stettheimer’s journals furnish a fresh sense of her opinions and ambitions. Stettheimer’s sentences are frequently aphoristic: “Beauty contests are a B.L.O.T. on American something—I believe life—or civilization,” she quips, leveling a commentary that is expanded in her 1924 painting Beauty Contest: To the Memory of P.T. Barnum, which depicts a beauty contest reimagined as a hybrid happening involving a circus. The diaries also offer insight into the artist’s robust social life, including collaborative friendships with artists and writers such as Duchamp, Sherwood Anderson, and Alfred Stieglitz and more tepid interactions with others, such as Gertrude Stein, whose fame and indelible syntax seem to have troubled Stettheimer.

Things become more confusing and less successful in the unfolding of some of the historical and critical themes of the biography. Bloemink contends that Stettheimer’s reputation was negatively affected by an early biography by Parker Tyler, which the Stettheimer family lawyer commissioned 15 years after the artist’s death. Tyler describes Stettheimer as “timid” and “hypersensitive,” maintaining that her lack of commercial success in her 1916 debut exhibition plagued her for the rest of her life, so that “she never (or rarely) exhibited publicly again except to friends at a public salon.” By contrast, Bloemink stresses Stettheimer’s status as a committed feminist and independent thinker who had little need of widespread approbation. However, given the historical record Bloemink details herself, Stettheimer did exhibit far less frequently than she might have if she had been male or if she had, for example, separated herself—emotionally, socially, physically, economically—from her family.

Prominent galleries often offered Stettheimer solo exhibitions, and she invariably refused. She also priced her work prohibitively high. Was this a witty retort to misogyny or a preemptive defense? These actions, detailed in Bloemink’s narrative, don’t jibe with Tyler’s depiction of a shrinking violet or a “cloistered spinster,” but neither do they suggest a confident or even neutral relationship with the contemporary art scene on Stettheimer’s part. Rather, they seem to indicate a talented woman beleaguered by gender-based prejudice in public and more or less subtle gaslighting at home. It is no strike against the artist’s achievements to conclude that she was stymied. How could the so-called “New Woman” be supremely confident when the malingering presence of the Victorian angel in the house haunted all her efforts?^[2]

Another place where Bloemink stumbles is in what is nonetheless an intriguing and useful chapter on Stettheimer’s paintings of the 1920s, “Courting Controversy: 1919–1927.” Bloemink presents an oddly streamlined description of American nativism and the rise of white supremacist ideology between the wars. Rushing to defend Stettheimer against perceived charges of racism, Bloemink leans on historical relativism. Though I agree that Stettheimer was “unusually progressive,” she still used stock racial tropes in her paintings and set designs; it is important to look frankly at this fact. Although Bloemink narrates a short history of the failures of Reconstruction and notes the Great Migration, she fails to delve more deeply into the ways in which the concept of whiteness was legally and socially engineered during the period. Without considering contemporary academic eugenics studies, immigration restrictions, or legal precedents, such as the Supreme Court case U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), in which an Indian Sikh man who identified as Aryan was denied naturalized citizenship, it is impossible to accurately assess Stettheimer’s portrayals of American identity—or, for that matter, the artist’s rather overdetermined obsession with the color white in her paintings.^[3]

However, “Courting Controversy” contains what is also perhaps the book’s major contribution to Stettheimer studies: Bloemink locates a difficult-to-see detail of a girl wearing a dress printed with swastikas at the back of Stettheimer’s Beauty Contest (for my money, perhaps the artist’s most complex painting). The discovery of this reference to the rise of the far right in Europe is a significant contribution to any reading of the artist, in that it indicates her sense of the insidious nature of authoritarianism as well as its link to monolithic ideals of beauty.^[4] The girl in the swastika dress, a doughy pink figure with dots for facial features, holds a bundle of flowers, presumably a reward for the winner, who is certain to be selected from an array of pale types. As Bloemink writes, “In 1920s America, with its various segregated Jewish communities, it would have been unthinkable for a Jewish woman, no matter how beautiful, to win a beauty contest.”

In the end, Bloemink’s drive to secure for Stettheimer a canonical perch proves destabilizing. Stettheimer is not permitted in this biography to be a contradictory, not-always-heroic figure, and this purism hobbles what is otherwise an impressive dossier combining multiple modes of research and ways of seeing. Additionally troubling are the extraordinary number of typos in the text; these are so numerous and widely distributed that it’s highly improbable that the file used for the finished book was properly reviewed as final proofs.^[5]

This is disheartening on multiple levels but most of all because of Stettheimer’s own singular precision and care. The questions that arise for me, then, are these: who will do this work? Who will pay for it? This is to say, the work of elucidating the connections between and among personal writing, literary writing, visual production, and larger social and national histories, then publishing these contentions and observations in a thoughtful way—work that is left disturbingly incomplete in Florine Stettheimer: A Biography. I feel pretty low about all this, until I look at one of Stettheimer’s irrepressible poems:

YOU ARE THE STEADY RAIN
The looked-fors
The must-bes
The understandables
The undistinguishables
The inevitables
The earthmoisteners
The great mud makers
 
We are the sunbursts
We turn rain
Into diamond fringes
Black clouds
Into pink tulle
And sparrows
Into birds of Paradise