Sylvie Le Bon said about twentieth-century art, “If we must reject the empty fetishes of “The Eternal Feminine,” or of “Feminine nature,” we must nevertheless recognize the fact that there are women and that the fact of being one puts one into a special situation.” With this, it is worth understanding that there was an enormous range and variety of paintings by twentieth-century women artists, but it is really difficult to understand what kind of style or sensibility they put in their artworks. Like, if you look at the sharply abstract, Architectonic Painting of 1917 by Lyubov Popova, the wittily decorative Family Portrait II of Florine Stettheimer, or the monumental Mother and Child of Paula Modersohn-Becker, you will find that they all consist of a mysterious essence of femininity but they differ with each other in many ways. It’s because art exists in a complex social, historical, psychological, or political matrix within which it is actually formed. Certainly, the gender of an artist counts for something in the creation of an artwork, though it doesn’t play a significant role in it. But despite the existence of essentialist theories about women’s natural directions in art, many relevant critics or sources suggest that women make no difference to their creative process. However, I feel that even two women artists from the same period and the same movement or style can create highly differentiating canvases because of the differences in psychological and social complexes. What’s your take on this particular direction? As you think the answer, meanwhile, I am introducing one of the female American Modernists, Florine Stettheimer, who has a completely different life and choices than many other women artists. As a woman unfettered by the usual financial or domestic responsibilities, she provides us with completely different artworks, held by the definitions of modernism, its derivations, and traditionally accepted forms.
Florine Stettheimer | Fast Knowledge
Florine Stettheimer was an American Modernist who rarely marketed her artworks due to extensive financial security. Being a hardworking, diligent, and driven artist, she created her own visual voice through a combination of many techniques in her paintings.
Artist Abstract: Florine Stettheimer.
Florine Stettheimer was an artist who painted for her own pleasure to suit herself instead of the vagaries of the art market. Her lack of economic incentives prevented her from joining any codified circle of artists and gaining visibility “in pursuit of a more conventional artistic career.” This kept her out of modern art history. Ironically, her financial security led to refraining her artworks from the public’s view. Florine never marketed her work or got associated with a single gallery even when urged to do so by her friends and art dealers. Turning to every one-person exhibition, she would often steep the prices of her artworks to discourage the interested purchasers from her works. Hence, after her death, her virtual anonymity led her paintings to be relegated to museum basements, thereby keeping them permanently off the market.
The mature painting of Florine uses the styles of Brueghel and Velázquez and even Matisse and Manet with Persian miniatures and even theatrical designs, all combined with a feminine sensibility. Her artworks lacked the dominating iconic imagery, simplified unity, and transcendent subject matter of American modernist paintings by Arthur Dove or Charles Sheeler. Instead, they had these scattered figural groups who were often engaged in different activities, sometimes even surrounded by unrelated objects.
Her work was often marked with an ambivalence. Though she lived under a matriarchal family, she shows a close, paternalistic system in her paintings. As a professional artist, her self-image sanctioned her efforts, but her response to the contemporary art world negatively affected her success. Even half a century later after her death, her artworks didn’t get an apparent niche to place them under.
| Artist | Florine Stettheimer |
| Birth | New York, 1871 |
| Death | 1944 |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Feminine Theatrical Artworks |
| Period | Modernism |
Looking at the Life of the Artist.
A Brief Introduction to Her Life.
Been the second youngest of three daughters and one son of Rosetta Walter and Joseph Stettheimer, Florine Stettheimer was born in Rochester, New York in 1871. Joseph Stettheimer was a vague and one of the enigmatic figures, who settled in Rochester, New York to apparently spend enough time with Rosetta to conceive five times. However, while his children were still young, he disappeared from the immediate life of his family. According to his family, he might have emigrated to Australia and never returned. After half a century, their lawyers noted that the women rarely mentioned their father,
“It was a closed book… they always talked about their mother, their mother, their mother, their mother, you see, but never about their father, and that left, I think, quite a mark on Florine Stettheimer.”
Early Childhood of Florine Stettheimer.
Florine had four siblings; Stella, Caroline, Walter, and Henrietta. The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer explains her childhood,
“Florine Stettheimer’s early childhood encompassed a medley of people, places, textures and visual imagery, and she used the materials of her existence to fuel her creative energies. The unusual timing of the artist’s life, caught on the cusp between two centuries and cultures, gives it a complexity and richness of contrasts drawn together into a visual crazy quilt of memories. The quilt’s underlying structure of the culture and mores of the nineteenth century is balanced by the social changes brought about by the new century, whose influences are woven throughout her early work and personal life.”
When Florine’s father left the family, Rosetta stayed in Europe with her young children to avoid any kind of social or financial embarrassment. A grandniece of the family surmised,
“They may have lived in Europe because they had less money than the rest of the family but also because they seemed to like it.”
In one of the poems by the artist, she explains her childhood which was filled with creative activities and humor. She writes,
“Early schooldays in a pretty town
where lived a King and Queen
And Papageno and Oberon
Goetz and Lohengrin
There was a military band
To which we “little One” paraded
With Maggie every day at noon
And a cake store which we raided
Everyday at four
And Life was full of parties
In woods where wildflowers grew
In parks where Greek gods postured
In our parlor of tufted Nattier blue.”
Florine used to have a children’s scrapbook, which she used to fill with watercolors correlating individuals with animals, birds, and insects through the use of color and physiognomy. One of the most significant people from her childhood was the family’s Irish nurse, Margaret Burgess, whom they called Maggie. Years later when she painted a portrait of her mother, she would include a background scene with the beloved nurse, Maggie in her daily role. The childhood of the artist was just amazing, filled with hundreds of nostalgic memories.
Florine Stettheimer and When She Began Learning Art.
Art was always significant in the early life of Florine Stettheimer. When she was interviewed decades later, she remarked,
“I began painting as a little child.”
Though there is no indication whether her sisters received art lessons, we know that Florine studied art with Kenyon Cox at the Art Students League, she traveled abroad with her mother and two sisters, Ettie and Carrie to study art in Berlin, Stuttgart, and Munich between 1906 and 1914.
Florine wrote a small poem to describe her Berlin days,
“In Berlin
I went to school
I painted
I skated
I adored gay uniforms
I thought they contained super forms
Though they did not quite conform
To my beauty norm
The Apollo Belvedere.”
However, at the beginning of the 1890s, Rosetta and her children returned temporarily to New York City when Florine was nineteen and her eldest sister, Stella married Mr. Feuchtwanger. Deprived of a father and eldest sister, the younger sisters now looked at their brother Walter, but as soon as he finished high school, he eventually settled in California, where he married and raised his children, growing distance from his sisters.
After the departure of the eldest siblings and also their father, the three young girls had a closer bond, finally taking the decision of not marrying and abandoning their mother. Though Rosetta didn’t have intellectual skills and training, she compensated for it by instilling an unusually strong sense of individuality and independence in her remaining daughters. Following this, in 1895, Ettie Stettheimer took her degree in psychology in 1898. After her graduation, she went on to earn a Ph.D at the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg in Breisgau, Germany, where she worked with the philosopher and teacher Heinrich Rickert. Several years later, she published her first novel, Philosophy.
At this same time in 1892, Florine enrolled in a four-year drawing and painting program at the Art Students League.
Personal Preferences of Florine Stetteheimer.
There were often assumptions that Florine and her two sisters didn’t ever marry because of the result of eccentricity, lesbian inclinations, or physical appearance rather than personal choices.
However, Florine doesn’t represent in any of her letters, poems, or paintings that she preferred women as she always was interested in the company of men. Her diaries demonstrated that she had always adored the male bodies, particularly when naked or in uniform. The life and art of Florine Stettheimer explains,
“Her diaries and correspondence indicate that she was rather disinterested in sex, and her mature painting, like her life history, suggest an arrested sexuality and a preference for flirtation and high-stylish affect over physical relations. Throughout her life, Stettheimer’s attachments tended to be romantic fantasies, the realities of which she rarely faced.”
Further, her two sisters chose to not marry because of their matriarchal upbringings and the changing role of women during the nineteenth century.
The Feminist Aesthetic.
Ettie Stettheimer was an outspoken, active feminist. She attended woman suffrage meetings in 1908 and 1909 and was aware of every proceeding of the First International Feminist Congress in 1896. Susanna Moore, the protagonist of Ettie’s novel in 1923, was later described,
“what emerges at the end of Victorianism when the curtain of male supremacy was finally lifted. She is without mate, for by the time she was formed, her mate, who was her Victorian father, was dead… here she is in her youth- dedicated, wrong-headed, self-intoxicated, and powerful.”
As Ettie grew feminist, Florine was just less outspoken but her various entries in her diaries and poems reveal a developing “Female Aesthetic.” After watching the 1909 performance of Lysistrata in Munich, Florine complained,
“The play was written by a man who was completely anti-feminist… I concluded that they should have all the roles taken by men and the performance only for men- the way it was written, no woman could enjoy it.”
The fact that Florine never saw herself in the traditional role of women as wife, helpmate, and mother but as earnest, professional artist, draws attention to her unmarried status, connoting herself as a “New Woman.”
The Artist Between 1900 to 1914s.
Florine Stettheimer continued traveling with her family during this time but she caught herself with the family responsibilities, which led her to struggle to find privacy to paint. Hence, she rented a studio and took art lessons from local instructors. She particularly learned some art techniques from “Herr Apotheker F,” under whom she explored the properties and techniques of working with casein, a method of painting in which a derivative of milk is used to create a chalky surface, similar to the fresco art. In Europe, during her early thirties, she had a romantic connection with James Loeb, son of Solomon Loeb. She writes about him in her diary,
“James Loeb spent a few hours with us in the afternoon. He looks so capable. He told me he had a statue cast in bronze- and he is going to build a house here- but he does not encourage modern art- I should like to see what he has contributed to it.”
However, after her departure to New York following World War I, she found a distraction on board in the form of Loeb. She writes,
“he claims to have forgotten that I was to be aboard although I invited him to come on our steamer and thought he looked very pleased when I did!”
After this, her romantic relations disappeared from her diaries.
Life After World War I, Success, and After Life.
Following the outbreak of World War I, they returned to New York City, where they immediately established a salon that drew the avant-garde’s most vibrant members to their apartment and summer home, Andre Brook. Their guests included Marcel Duchamp, Gaston Lachaise, Carl Van Vechten, Albert Gleizes, Elie Nadelman, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Henry McBride, the critic. As time went on, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Virgil Thomson, Cecil Beaton, and Pavel Tchelitchew joined the Stettheimer family circle. Both of Florine’s sisters had accomplished careers. In 1923, the artist painted Ettie in front of a dark, spectral background illuminated by a combination of a burning bush and a Christmas tree. Ettie earned a doctorate in philosophy from Freiburg University and published two novels under the pseudonym “Henrie Waste.”
In 1916, Florine Stettheimer had a disastrous exhibition at the Knoedler which withdrew her from public exposure although she did participate in the annual exhibitions of the Independent Society of Artists from 1917 to 1926. She occasionally exhibited at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh, and beginning in 1931 she exhibited with the American Society of Painters, Printers, and Gravers. Her major public success of the thirties was the sets and costumes she created for the Gertrude Stein-Virgil Thomson Opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, that opened at the Wadsworth Antheneum Theatre in Hartford in 1934.
Later Life of Florine Stettheimer.
In 1935, Florine’s mother died which caused the Stettheimer sisters to separate, and Florine moved to her own studio apartment in the Beaux-Arts Building where she continued painting, entertaining, and unveiling her works.
After she died in 1944, her works were exhibited in various museums.
Briefly Analyzing Florine Stettheimer Paintings.
1. Portrait of Our Nurse, Margaret Burgess.
As I told you earlier one of the significant people of Florine and her sibling’s childhood was Margaret Burgess, whom they called Maggie. This portrait depicts the attachment of the artist to her. It was in 1929 that the artist painted this painting where Maggi stands near a table looking at the viewer with her five little Stettheimer “angels” floating above her head. Displayed in an authoritative pose, Maggie stands with one of her hands resting on her prie-dieu, holding a stylus, and another hand, holding a book. She looks sad when it comes to her facial expression. Florine Stettheimer further portrays a black prie-dieu with its bright-red tufted pillow, bearing a sign, “Maggi, Nurse, Teacher, Guide.” The artwork’s intent was to portray a final farewell to her beloved Maggie as she rests in heaven, her little charges affirming her good works on earth. Among the five winged Stetthemier children, Walter, the only boy, lies at the top of a pyramid encircling Maggie’s head. Stella is easily differentiated by her blonde hair and mature facial expressions. The rosy features of Carrie are topped by a hair ribbon, while the quizzical gaze of Ettie can be seen beneath her thick eyebrows. At the same time, Florine adds an appearance with her reddish-brown hair worn at the said in a long braid, occupying a space to the nearest of Maggie’s head.
2. Medusa, 1909.
The artwork is incorrectly dated on various websites but according to the book, The Art and Life of Florine Stettheimer, its right date is 1909. Florine painted this artwork when she was in Munich. She portrayed Ettie as the subject matter of this artwork where she characterizes her as Medusa, the mythological Gorgon whose hair is made up of writing snakes. Whoever (men) sees Medusa went blind from just her sight. In the artwork, Ettie is easily recognizable by her level gaze, with her close brows and straight expressions. She has a critical expression with the red color in the background. The painting is signed with the artist’s initials intertwined in the form of a snake. Florine Stettheimer describes in her diary that a custodian pointed out that the object under her gaze was a Medusa where she told them that she was not well acquainted with the subject, while she was in a Museum of Italy. After the death of Florine in 1944, Ettie voiced that there were rarely any critical comments from her sister that needed to be deleted.
View the painting here.
3. Self-Portrait In Front of Chinese Screen.
The artwork is a self-portrait that was previously unknown and was painted between the years 1912-14, demonstrating her experimentation with the Italian fifteenth-century style. Florine portrays herself as a professional artist here, giving her a similar resemblance to what Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun showed in her self-portraits. The artist depicts herself standing on a beautiful oriental screen which is embellished with exotic plumed birds, looking towards the viewer. Wearing a white smock and turban, which covers most of her head, she holds paintbrushes and a palette, looking towards the viewers as if she was interrupted by our stance. She shows herself in a three-quarter turn which was one of the characteristics of Botticelli in his religious and secular portraits. She further adds shadows over a flattish white background to denote cheekbones and chins.
4. Beauty Contest.
The artwork witnesses Florine’s exhibition of the personal variant of Baroque and Rococo theatricality. Though the artist notes in her diary,
“Beauty contests are a blot B.L.O.T. on American something- I believe life- or civilization,”
she nevertheless relished the free play of the pictorial inventiveness in the artwork. Fitting herself in the upper left of the painting with Edna Kenton and Edward Steichen, who is photographing the contest, she dedicates this artwork to the memory of P.T. Barnum. She shows the androgynous and least ambiguous physiques of the contestants with the inclusion of the blacks here.
5. Heat.
Florine Stettheimer painted the summer of 1918 in this artwork, spending almost two years to complete it. However, on July 22, 1918, the Stettheimer sisters held a party to celebrate their mother’s birthday party in their backyard. A year later, Florine commemorated the event in a painting she titled Heat to depict the backyard of their rented Bedford Hills summer home. Carl van Vechten describes the artwork as one,
“in which the corseted parent in heavy black sits bold upright, while her daughters, exhausted by the humidity, cline, wilt, and expire in informal positions.”
Florine composed this like a vertical flag with three bands of red, yellow, and green colors. Inside the bright hot color fields, the figures are supposed to be disposed clockwise, with Rosetta at the top with her birthday cake, lit with candles. To the right, her daughters, Carrie, Florine, Ettie, and Stella, reacting to the heat take different poses on the variations of the Rococo’s curve. Charles Demuth wrote about the artwork,
“There is to be found here a quality which is found in the 18th century French, a quality of the slightly ennuied, not exhausted, just a trifle of fatigue, and not expecting but constantly demanding great surprises and thrills from a period too completely understood to furnish them. She is more in the know of the Trianon than Marie Laurencin who is generally acclaimed as its modern interpreter.”
Final Words.
There were of course lot of women artists I have come across but Florine Stettheimer was the most distinctive among them. She painted, wrote poetry, and maintained journals which give a lot more about her life and socio-economic changes surrounding her. Having a life completely independent of man, she though had many emotional passages, Florine had her best partner, her sister, Ettie, who gives a brief account of her life, after her death. A truly inspiring life, she was filled with different feelings at different stages of her life, which affected her artworks. I have presented a brief account of the life and artworks of Florine Stettheimer, but there is much more to learn about this mysterious woman artist, which you can read from The Art and Life of Florine Stettheimer.
Resources.
- The Art and Life of Florine Stettheimer by Barbara J. Bloemink.
- Women Artists, 1550-1950 By Anne Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin.
- Featured Image: La Fete a Duchamp by Florine Stettheimer; Florine Stettheimer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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