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Florine Stettheimer (August 19, 1871 – May 11, 1944) was an American modernist painter, feminist, theatrical costume, stage and furniture designer, poet, and salonist.

Stettheimer developed a feminine, theatrically-based painting style based on the avant-garde personalities and experiences of newly modernist New York City. The Retrospective Exhibition of her work, organized by her friend Marcel Duchamp in 1946, was the first retrospective of a woman artist ever held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Stettheimer painted the first feminist nude self-portrait, executed paintings depicting controversial issues of race and sexual preference, depicted the leisure activities and parties of her family and friends; and, with her sisters, hosted a salon renowned for attracting many of the most influential members of the avant-garde. In the mid-1930s, Stettheimer achieved international acclaim for her stage designs and costumes (using the innovative material cellophane) 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 to be New York City's "Cathedrals": Broadway, Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, and Art. On seeing these paintings in the 1960s, Andy Warhol declared Stettheimer to be his favorite artist. During her lifetime, Stettheimer exhibited her paintings at over 46 of the most important museum exhibitions and Salons in New York and Paris; and in 1938, when the curator of the Museum of Modern Art sent the first exhibition of American art to Europe, Florine Stettheimer and Georgia O’Keeffe were the only women whose work was included. Following her death in 1944, her friend Marcel Duchamp curated a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946. It was the museum's first retrospective exhibition of work by a woman artist. After her death, Stettheimer's paintings were donated to major museums throughout the United States. In addition to her many paintings and costume and set designs, Stettheimer designed unique frames for her paintings and matching furniture, and wrote humorous, often biting poetry. A book of her poetry, Crystal Flowers, was published privately and posthumously by her sister Ettie Stettheimer in 1949. It was reissued to acclaim in 2010.

Early life and Training
Florine Stettheimer was born in Rochester, New York on August 19th, 1871. Her mother, Rosetta Walter, was one of nine daughters born into New York's German-Jewish wealthy upper class. Little is known about Stettheimer's father Joseph Stettheimer who had five children with her and deserted his family for Australia never to be heard from again. Florine grew up in between New York City and Europe, in a highly matriarchal environment. By the time Stettheimer was ten, Rosetta and her five children spent part of every year in Europe. By the early 1890s, Rosetta's eldest two children, Stella, and Walter, who were much older than the other three, married and left Carrie, the next eldest, Florine, and Ettie the youngest, to form a close bond with their mother that lasted until her death in 1935.

As a young child, Stettheimer already demonstrated a talent and interest in making art. From 1881 to 1886, when she was ten to fifteen years old, she was enrolled in Stuttgart's Priesersches Institut, a girls' board school, where she took taking private art instructions with the director, Sophie von Prieser. The Stettheimer ladies the moved to Berlin from 1887–1889, and Florine continued taking private drawing lessons there. Regularly traveling through Europe with her mother, Carrie, and Ettie, Stettheimer taught herself art history by visiting every museum and major art gallery in Italy, France, Spain, and Germany, studying the Old Masters, and critiquing their work in her diaries. She also continued to take private art lessons in alternative media such as casein. In 1892, Stettheimer enrolled in a four-year program at The Art Students League in New York, a school renowned for its radical policies towards women. As she had learned the style of German academic painting while in Europe, at the Art Students' League, she studied with teachers such as Kenyon Cox and Carol Beckwith who had studied in Paris to learn French academic painting. By graduation, she had mastered painting realistic, traditional, academic portraiture and nudes in both of the primary European styles. Returning to Europe, in addition to visiting museum collections, Stettheimer also visited contemporary salon exhibitions and artists' studios and saw the work of the Cubists, Cezanne, Manet, van Gogh, Morisot, and Matisse, years before her American contemporaries at the Armory Show. With varying success, she tried her hand at a variety of media and styles from Symbolism and Fauvism to Pointillism.

Feminism
Marcel Duchamp referred to Stettheimer as a Bachelier, or “New Woman,” a term used to refer to early feminists. During her twenties and thirties, she engaged in flirtations and romantic relationships, and her paintings, diaries, and poems reveal her admiration for the male anatomy. However, they also demonstrate that she adamantly opposed the idea of marriage, believing like many feminists that it constricted women’s freedom and interfered with creativity. She had white pantaloons made which were only worn by feminists and suffragettes and also provided freedom for working on larger canvases. During her years in Europe, Stettheimer and her sisters sought out theatrical productions that featured feminist women's themes and women performers. Among the flyers in the family scrapbooks is a copy of the proceedings of the First International Feminist Congress held in Paris in 1896. In 1915, Florine Stettheimer painted a naked, over life-size, self-portrait, Nude Self-Portrait. At the time she was 45, an age that any female would have been considered an "older woman" as the average life for a woman then was the late 40s. Combining elements of past controversial nudes including Manet's painting of the prostitute Olympia and Goya's Nude Maja, Stettheimer's Nude Self-Portrait is only the second known nude self-portrait by a woman that exists. The earliest is by the German artist, Paula Modersohn-Becker, painted a decade earlier. Holding a flower bouquet over her blatantly painted pubic hair, Stettheimer's humorous, mocking, expression in the portrait markedly contrasts with traditional paintings of nudes, making it the first openly feminist nude painted from a woman's point of view, rather than for a man's pleasure. The artist painted several works of unusual, female-oriented contexts such as her monumental 1921 work Spring Sale at Bendel’s, in which she humorously captured wealthy women of varying girths trying on clothing in an expensive department store; or Natatorium Undine, that portrays nude woman riding on floats or swimming on half-oyster shells. On the right, a group of women dance around a handsome male exercise instructor whom they admire for his physical appearance, in a sexual reversal from traditional subject matter.

Early Opera Set Design
The greatest influence on Stettheimer's unique painting style was the theatrical productions of Russian Serge Diaghilev's newly formed Ballets Russes in Paris around 1912. She was so taken with the colors, contemporary staging and dance movements of the productions that she decided to create the libretto, costumes and sets for her own opera, Orphée des Quat'z Arts. The resulting maquettes, with their fully costumed characters, complete with intricately sewn and beaded materials, display the theatrical, active, dance-like movements, individualized personalities, and miniaturized scale of her fully mature paintings. A number of the female figures also wear the transparent, radical new material, cellophane. This was to become the hallmark of both her personal studio interior design and her famous stage sets for the avant-garde opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, two decades later.

Return to New York and the Stettheimer Salon
In 1914, the Stettheimers were stranded in Bern, Switzerland by the outbreak of World War I, and boarded a ship for New York. Stettheimer decided to reject her traditional, academic training, and create a new painting style capturing the immediate, expressive, emotions she felt on seeing the sights, sounds and people characterizing new modern, 20th century New York City. The four Stettheimer women moved into an apartment on West 76th Street in Manhattan where they began holding salons, including recent expatriate artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Francis Picabia, as well as members of Alfred Stieglitz' circle such as Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, and many other musicians, writers, poets, dancers and members of New York's cultural avant-garde. One of the unique aspects of the Stettheimer salon was that their numerous gay, bi-sexual, and lesbian friends and acquaintances did not need to disguise their sexual orientation at the gatherings as they did at other salons (such as the Arensberg Salon), despite the fact that any other than heterosexual relationships were against the law in New York at the time. Stettheimer often previewed her newest paintings to her friends at her salons as in her painting, Soirée. A number of the special cocktails and dishes (such as feather soup) that were served at the Stettheimer salons became featured in popular Broadway shows. During the summers, the Stettheimers often held day-long, salon-like, parties for friends at rented summer houses. Stettheimer painted a number of these gatherings of her family members and friends enjoying these outdoor festivities including, Sunday Afternoon in the Country.

Mature Painting Style
Stettheimer's only solo exhibition was held in 1916 at Knoedler's Gallery, only a year an a half after she arrived back in New York. It consisted of a number of early, heavily impasto-painted, Matisse-derivative works. When nothing sold, she was, as her friend the art critic Henry McBride noted, "vaguely dissatisfied". Within a year, she developed her own, uniquely feminine style, rejecting Matisse's thick impasto, as well as the abstract modernism and the baroque masculine regionalism of her contemporaries. Instead, Stettheimer transformed her painting style by returning to the miniaturized, theatrical, colorful influence of her Orphee des Quat'z Arts opera designs, now on monumental-sized canvases. In Stettheimer's mature work, each canvas is composed like a theater's stage, filled with figures easily identified as various family members and well-known friends and acquaintances. Each character actively moves across the canvas as though caught in motion. In all but her portraits, Stettheimer filled her painting with bright, often unmixed, primary colors against a flat white background, and many, small, highly detailed, humorous touches. Using various media, built up against a flat white background, Stettheimer keyed her compositions using primary colors as accents, often symbolically. Among the many distinctive features of her paintings is the biting humor evident in many compositions' small narrative details, (the small altar boy trying to peek under the bride's gown in ''Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue.'  Stettheimer also filled her often over life-sized compositions with visual performances of individually recognizable figures, arranged around actual site-specific, prominent, locations, and detailed, well-known, architecture,

The 1920s
The 1920s were Stettheimer's most prolific period. She painted a number of individual portraits of male friends and herself and family. Like her literary contemporaries such as Marcel Proust and Gertrude Stein, instead of trying to reproduce what the sitter looked like, Stettheimer's portraits reveal their sitter's personality through illustrating a mixture of their habits, vocations, accomplishments and contexts. In her portrait of Marcel Duchamp, for example, she included images of a number of his "ready-mades," as well as his feminine alter-ego, Rrose Sélavy. She also painted individual portraits of her sisters and her mother, and a self-portrait in which, wearing an artist's beret, transparent cellophane-wrapped sheath, and red-winged cape; depicting herself floating upward towards the sun. Stettheimer also painted several monumental works dealing with controversial subjects such Asbury Park South that shows African-Americans enjoying a well-known, segregated New Jersey beach. The painting is remarkable in that it is the earliest work by a white American artist to paint black figures with the same non-caricatured features as the Caucasian figures. In Lake Placid, Stettheimer painted herself and friends of various religions (including Jews and Catholics) enjoying a day at Lake Placid, a site renowned for being segregated for only Protestants. Recalling the premiere of a controversial Ballets Russes performance Stettheimer saw in Paris in 1912, in Music, Stettheimer painted herself asleep, dreaming of the dancer Nijinsky, en pointe, with the body of both a man and a woman.

The 1930s
During the 1930s, Stettheimer continued to paint large works, some of which were increasingly introspective and returned to her familial subject matter and locations. Every year on her birthday, she continued to paint a floral still-life that she termed her "eye-gay." Much of her time during this decade was spent concentrating on her designs for the opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, and two of her monumental Cathedral paintings..

The Cathedral Paintings
Beginning in 1929, and continuing until the mid-1940s, Stettheimer painted four monumental works she titled her "Cathedral" paintings. In these, she commemorated what she considered the main "secular shrines" of New York City: the new theater and movie districts of Times Square and Broadway; Wall Street as the center of finance and politics; 5th Avenue's upper-class stores and society; and the elitism and in-fighting among New York's three major Art Museums, the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She continued to work on The Cathedrals of Art until a few weeks before she passed away, and it remains unfinished.

Four Saints in Three Acts
In 1934, the first avant-garde opera in America, Four Saints in Three Acts, with stage design and costumes by Florine Stettheimer, opened to sold-out audiences in Hartford, Connecticut. The libretto was written by Gertrude Stein and the music by Virgil Thomson. The cast was entirely African American singers. Stettheimer was invited to design the opera when Thomson came to her studio and saw her paintings with Stettheimer's frames, her matching furniture designs, and the studio's huge cellophane curtains. In preparation for the production, Stettheimer made individual dolls with fully sewn costumes for each of the African American characters, and designed each scene setting in small shoe boxes. She covered the entire back of the opera stage with layers of bright cellophane, created palm trees with cellophane and features, and, for the stage sets, copied her own furniture with glass balls and white curves. Although the opera received mixed reviews, Stettheimer's costumes and sets were universally acclaimed.

Death
On May 11, 1944, Stettheimer died of cancer in New York hospital. She was attended daily by her sisters Ettie and Carrie (the latter died unexpectedly a few weeks later,) and her lawyer Joseph Solomon. Unlike the other members of her family who were buried in the family plot, Stettheimer asked to be cremated, and several years later, her ashes were scattered during a boat trip in the Hudson River by Ettie and Solomon. For many years, the artist had expressed her wishes that all her work be given, as a collection, to a museum. However realizing that it might prove too difficult to find one museum to take the entire collection, she revised her will, asking that her sister's "follow her wishes" that her works not be sold, but be donated to museums around the country. Ettie left this task to Solomon and Stettheimer's friends who donated Stettheimer's paintings to virtually every major museum in the United States, including giving the Cathedral paintings to the Metropolitan Museum. Stettheimer asked to be cremated, unlike the other members of her family who were all buried, and her ashes were eventually scattered by her sister Ettie and Solomon in the Hudson River.

On hearing of her passing, Marcel Duchamp wrote Ettie from France and asked if he could organize a retrospective of Florine Stettheimer's paintings. The exhibition, the first full retrospective of a woman artist organized by the Museum of Modern Art, included a catalog essay written by Stettheimer's friend, the prominent art critic Henry McBride Following its run in New York, the Stettheimer retrospective traveled to the San Francisco Legion of Honor Museum and the Arts Club of Chicago.

Legacy
Until the end of her life, major gallerists in New York, including Julien Levy and Alfred Stieglitz, asked Stettheimer to join their galleries. Although she did exhibit at a number of retail galleries and was often asked to sell her work, she priced each painting at the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars, so no one could afford them. As Henry McBride noted, "she used to smile and say that she liked her pictures herself and preferred to keep them. At the same time, she did lend to public exhibitions". Beginning in 1919, Stettheimer submitted/was invited to exhibit paintings in almost every important exhibition of contemporary art. These included the first Whitney Biennial, several of the earliest group exhibitions and the Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie International exhibitions, and the Salon d'Automne in Paris. In all, she exhibited in over forty-six exhibitions, and her large, colorful works were usually singled out by art critics for praise. By the 1930s, she was second to Georgia O'Keeffe as the best-known woman artist in New York. In a Harper's Bazaar article after her death, the writer Carl Van Vechten noted, Florine Stettheimer, "was both the historian and the critic of her period and she goes a long way toward telling us how some of New York lived in those strange years after the First World War, telling us in brilliant colors and assured designs, telling us in painting that has few rivals in her day or ours".

Following her death in the late 1940s, when Stettheimer's works were donated to art museums, the taste in art had moved to abstract expressionism, and her paintings were relegated to museum basements. In addition, because her paintings were not sold at art galleries or at auction, they received no publicity and so her name and work was forgotten. In the 1970s Stettheimer's work was revived by feminist art historians including, most prominently, Linda Nochlin. Stettheimer went through another major revival in 1995 with a major retrospective exhibition of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and her first biography, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer. From this point on, her work influenced a number of contemporary women and gay artists, drawn to her female gaze and decorative, theatrical style. Beginning in 2015 with the first major retrospective of Stettheimer's work in Europe at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, Stettheimer's work is included in numerous exhibitions in the United States, her significance as an early feminist artist and her widespread influence on contemporary artists is more fully recognized. As Andrew Russeth noted in an article in ARTnews magazine, Stettheimer's paintings, "elegantly make the case that she is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century and could serve as a useful model for those of the 21st."

Collections
Work by Stettheimer is in the following collections:


 * Asbury Park South - halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, New York
 * La Fete A Duchamp - Private Collection
 * West Point - Lost
 * The largest collection, with 65 of Stettheimer's works (mostly her early student works, but also Portrait of Myself and her portraits of her two sisters. Columbia also has the dolls and maquettes for Four Saints in Three Acts and ''Pocohantas',' and the Stettheimer sisters' scrapbooks of theater programs,) are at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University.
 * The second-largest, with 56 works, is at the Museum of Modern Art (along with Family Portrait #2 and Portrait of My Mother, these include all of her drawings and maquettes for her Orpheus ballet, and her two extant three-dimensional screens.)
 * Metropolitan Museum of Art - the Cathedral series: Cathedrals of Broadway (1929), Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue (1931) , Cathedrals of Wall Street(1939) , Cathdrals of Art(1942–).
 * Whitney Museum of American Art - New York/Liberty (1918–19) , Sun (1931)

Today, most major art museums that were established prior to 1950 have a single painting by Florine Stettheimer in their collections; as do a few University Art Museums including Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, and The Art Museum at Stanford University, as these were distributed after the artist's death according to her wishes by her lawyer Joseph Solomon and her friends, Carl Van Vechten, and Kirk Askew Bloemink, Life and Art, p. 286, Note. 46.

Solo exhibitions

 * Exhibition of Paintings by Miss Florine Stettheimer, Knoedler & Co. Gallery, New York, October 16-28, 1916

Selected Group exhibitions (from over 40 during her lifetime)

 * 25th Anniversary Exhibition of the Arts Students League of New York, American Fine Arts Society Building, New York, 1900 (listed as a non-resident member)
 * First Annual Exhibition of Society of Independent Artists, Grand Central Palace, April10-May6th, 1916. (Friend Marcel Duchamp's Fountain urinal also exhibited)
 * American Paintings and Sculpture Pertaining to the War, Knoedler & Co Gallery, New York, curated by Marie Sterner, 1918
 * Salon d'Automne, 15eme Exposition, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, November 1-December 20th, 1922
 * Seventh Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, February 24-March 18, 1923 (Stettheimer exhibition annually at the Society through the 1920s)
 * Twenty-Second Annual International Exhibition of Paintings, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1924
 * Twenty-Third Annual Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, December 23, 1924-January 25th, 1925
 * Chicago Women's World's Fair, April 1925
 * 100 Important Paintings by Living American Artists, Arts Council of the City of New York, Architecture and Allied Arts Exposition, 1929
 * First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painters, The Whitney Museum of American Art,1932
 * Modern Works of Art: 5th Anniversary Exhibition November 19, 1934–January 20, 1935, The Museum of Modern Art
 * Twenty-Third Annual International Exhibition of Paintings,'' Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1934
 * Three Centuries of American Art, 1609-1938 Jeu de Paume, May 24–July 17, 1938
 * Art in Our Time: 10th Anniversary Exhibition: Painting, Sculpture, Prints May 10–September 30, 1939 The Museum of Modern Art
 * Twentieth Century Portraits, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, January 9th, 1942 - February 24, 1943
 * Painting, Sculpture, Prints May 24–October 15, 1944. The Museum of Modern Art

Posthumous exhibitions

 * Florine Stettheimer, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut, 1945
 * Florine Stettheimer, October 1–November 17, 1946, The Museum of Modern Art This is the first Retrospective Exhibition of a Woman Artist to be held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
 * Exhibition of Paintings by Florine Stettheimer, The Arts Club of Chicago, 1947
 * The Flowers of Florine Stettheimer, Durlacher Brothers Gallery, New York, 1948
 * Florine Stettheimer Exhibition, Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York, 1949
 * Florine Stettheimer Exhibition, Wellesley College Museum, Wellesley, Massachusettes, organized by Durlacher Brothers with Ettie Stettheimer, 1950
 * Twelve Paintings by Florine Stettheimer, The Detroit Institute of Arts, 1951
 * Exhibition of Paintings of Florine Stettheimer, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1952
 * Florine Stettheimer: Her Family, Her Friends, Durlacher Brothers Gallery, New York, 1965
 * Florine Stettheimer, An Exhibition of Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, Columbia University, New York, February 8-March 8th, 1973
 * Florine Stettheimer : still lifes, portraits and pageants, 1910 to 1942, 1980 Institute of Contemporary Art
 * Friends and Family: Portraiture in the World of Florine Stettheimer, ??–Nov. 28, 1993, Katonah Museum of Art
 * Florine Stettheimer: Manhattan Fantastica, Whitney Museum of American Art, ?? July–November 15, 1995
 * Florine Stettheimer September 27, 2014 – January 4, 2015, Lenbachhaus, Munich
 * Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry May 5 - September 24, 2017,The Jewish Museum and October 21, 2017 – January 28, 2018 Art Gallery of Ontario

Original Primary Work and Sources

 * Ettie and Florine Stettheimer Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Ct. YCAL MSS 20, Gift of the Estate of Ettie Stettheimer, 1967
 * Art Properties, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York, Gift of the Estate of Ettie Stettheimer, 1967
 * Museum of Modern Art, Art Library Archives, New York, N.Y. Gift of Estate of Ettie Stettheimer, 1967
 * Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Austin, Texas
 * Peter Juley Photographs, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.
 * Florine Stettheimer, Crystal Flowers, privately printed in limited edition by Ettie Stettheimer, circa 1946

Theses

 * Bloemink, Barbara, "Florine Stettheimer; Alternate Modernist," Ph.D., Yale University, 1994.
 * Liles, Melissa M., "Florine Stettheimer: A Re-Appraisal of the Artist in Context," M.A. Richmond: Virginia Commonwealth University, 1994

Solo Exhibition Catalogs

 * Columbia University in the City of New York. Florine Stettheimer: An Exhibition of Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings. New York: Columbia University, 1973
 * Columbia University in the City of New York. Florine Stettheimer: An Exhibition of Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings. New York: Columbia University, 1973