Together with her brighter-than-life coloration palette, deliciously unrealistic sense of proportion, and tendency to use paint like cake frosting, it may be exhausting to consider that Florine Stettheimer depicted her actual associates and on a regular basis life in her work. However for Stettheimer (1871–1944), there wasn’t a lot of a distinction between artwork and life. Generationally rich and single, Stettheimer loved extra freedom from the constraints of capitalism and patriarchy than the common girl her age. Her unconventional life-style led to shut friendships with plenty of artists, dancers, and artwork critics, a lot of whom had been LGBTQ+, and whereas Stettheimer’s personal sexuality is essentially unknown to us at this time, her inventive and social life has been extensively interpreted as embracing a form of queer, Modernist utopia.
Stettheimer handled her studio within the Beaux-Arts Constructing in Manhattan, overlooking Bryant Park, like a three-dimensional extension of her painted worlds, filling it together with her artworks and furnishings she designed and sometimes painted herself. Her mattress, for instance, was lined in an enormous lace cover, just like the one she painted over her sleeping self-portrait within the c. 1920 portray “Music.” These parallel particulars enable one to think about the Ballets Russes dancers in “Music” — like Vaclav Nijinsky, at middle, radiant and female in a pink circle of sunshine — as each fantastical figures and actual folks at house in Stettheimer’s studio.
Collectively together with her sisters, Carrie and Ettie, Florine hosted a flourishing salon in Midtown Manhattan between 1915 and 1930. The Stettheimers’ events rivaled the influential salons of pioneering fashionable artwork collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg, and sometimes attracted an overlapping circle of inventive friends, together with Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Demuth, Avery Hopwood, and Marsden Hartley. However in contrast to these gatherings, the Stettheimers’ salon was hosted by a trio of single, middle-aged girls who contrasted with the dynamic of the married Arensbergs, and modern accounts notice that their LGBTQ+ friends felt extra relaxed and capable of specific their identities and needs extra freely. Certainly, the Stettheimers’ was one of many solely avant-garde salons in New York the place sexuality and queerness had been brazenly acknowledged and mentioned.
Stettheimer painted not solely the way it regarded, however the way it felt, to be a part of a queer and financially privileged social group. In work like “Sunday Afternoon within the Nation” (1917) and “La Fête à Duchamp”(1917), partygoers flit by means of summer season surroundings in skinny, androgynous our bodies wearing shiny, diaphanous garments. Within the former, Florine renders herself in a white swimsuit with purple stilettos and Duchamp within the foreground with Rrose-coloured accents on his garments (this chromatic nod to Duchamp’s feminine alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, turns into a wholly pink swimsuit in “La Fête”). The dancer Adolph Bolm seems in head-to-ankle inexperienced. Stettheimer’s daring software of coloration — fuschia, grass inexperienced, lemon yellow, vivid and unmixed, straight from the tube — conveys a euphoric, playful temper, the place friendship and subversive sensuality trump conventional pictorial (and gendered) hierarchies.
One other portray, “Natatorium Undine” (1927), additional flips anticipated gender roles in its depiction of a bunch of girls exercising round a flexing man. This literal Adonis is positioned on a pedestal, passive and contained, whereas the ladies train and swim and act freely. For “Natatorium Undine” is a girls’s pool, for girls in barely-there swimwear, diving into phthalo-green water, flocking collectively, floating on a turtle (inscribed “Daddy”), swans, and waves. And on the very middle of the portray, a nude girl, lily-white, arches her again on a vulvic sea shell, her golden head within the place of a clitoris.
“Love Flight of a Pink Sweet Coronary heart” (1930) extends the queer utopia of Stettheimer’s oeuvre in its subversion of romantic love tropes. Within the decrease middle of the composition, she paints herself as a baby, taking pictures Cupid’s arrow after a lace-trimmed Valentine’s coronary heart that floats by means of a yellow meadow of younger, lovely figures. Whereas a few of them are doable portraits of Stettheimer’s former love pursuits, there are additionally references to members of the LGBTQ+ group, together with a portrait of Demuth, wearing white, and fictional characters that symbolize her shut pal, the photographer Carl van Vechten. Duchamp makes a cameo because the harlequin at decrease left, dancing with Stettheimer herself. These figures mix actuality and fiction, fairly actually, in an unbound elision of sexual, romantic, and platonic love. The portray is earnest and nostalgic but self-aware: “It appears to me that Florine is laughing a little bit at herself,” her sister Ettie noticed when she donated the portray to the Detroit Institute of Arts.
No matter Stettheimer’s personal sexuality — her diaries had been completely edited by Ettie after her dying — her work and life-style convey a way of queer belonging, albeit tempered by class and race: Stettheimer had no working-class associates, and nearly all of her associates had been White. However the freedom, playful sensuality, and gender euphoria on show in her work resonate with current conceptions of queer group. Moderately than viewing Stettheimer as Modernist anathema — an ultra-femme exception to the patriarchal rule — one can see her canvases as engaged in that canonical Modernist pursuit of utopia, a shedding of the previous, stuffed with optimism, and pleasure, for the long run.