32 Facts About Florine Stettheimer

Florine Stettheimer was an American modernist painter, feminist, theatrical designer, poet, and salonniere.

Florine Stettheimer is best known for her four monumental works illustrating what she considered New York City's "Cathedrals": Broadway, Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, and New York's three major art museums.

Florine Stettheimer was born in Rochester, New York, on August 19,1871.

Florine Stettheimer grew up between New York City and Europe, in a matriarchal family.

Florine Stettheimer took private art instruction with the director, Sophie von Prieser.

Regularly traveling through Europe with her mother, Carrie, and Ettie, Florine Stettheimer taught herself art history by visiting museums and art galleries in Italy, France, Spain, and Germany.

Florine Stettheimer studied the Old Masters, and critiqued their work in her diaries, and she continued to take private art lessons in media such as casein.

In 1892, Florine Stettheimer enrolled in a four-year program at the Art Students League in New York, a school modeled on the private art schools of Paris.

Florine Stettheimer saw the work of the Cubists, Cezanne, Manet, van Gogh, Morisot, and Matisse years before the Armory Show, the first large exhibition of modern art in America.

Florine Stettheimer based the libretto on the annual art students' Bal des Quat'z'Arts.

On returning to New York harbor, Florine 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 of 20th-century New York City.

The four Florine Stettheimer women moved into an apartment on West 76th Street in Manhattan, where they began holding salons, inviting recent expatriate artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, and Francis Picabia, as well as members of Alfred Stieglitz's circle, such as Marsden Hartley and Georgia O'Keeffe, and other musicians, writers, poets, dancers, and members of New York's avant-garde.

Florine Stettheimer often previewed her newest paintings to her friends at her salons, as in her painting Soiree, prior to sending them to exhibitions.

Florine Stettheimer painted a number of these gatherings of her family members and friends enjoying outdoor festivities, including Sunday Afternoon in the Country.

Florine Stettheimer transformed her painting style by returning to the miniaturized, theatrical, colorful influence of her designs for Orphee des Quat'z Arts.

Florine Stettheimer filled her compositions with visual performances of individually recognizable figures, arranged around actual prominent locations and detailed, accurately rendered, well-known architecture.

Florine Stettheimer painted a number of individual portraits of male friends and herself and family.

Florine Stettheimer painted several monumental works dealing with controversial subjects, such as Asbury Park South, which shows African-Americans enjoying a well-known, segregated New Jersey beach.

In Lake Placid, Florine Stettheimer painted herself and friends of various religions enjoying a day at Lake Placid, a site known for its institutionalized anti-Semitism.

Florine Stettheimer spent much of her time during this decade on her designs for the opera Four Saints in Three Acts and two of her Cathedral paintings.

Florine Stettheimer commemorated in these 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; Fifth 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.

Florine Stettheimer continued to work on The Cathedrals of Art until a few weeks before she died.

In preparation for the production, Florine Stettheimer made dolls with fully sewn costumes for each of the characters.

Florine Stettheimer created designs for each scene setting in small shoe boxes.

Florine Stettheimer covered the entire back of the opera stage with layers of cellophane, created palm trees with cellophane and feathers, and, for the stage sets, copied her own furniture.

Florine Stettheimer wore white pantaloons, which at the time were only worn by feminists and suffragettes and provided freedom for working on larger canvases.

In 1915, at the age of 45, Florine Stettheimer painted a naked, over life-size self-portrait, A Model.

Florine Stettheimer 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 body shapes trying on clothing in an expensive department store; or Natatorium Undine, which portrays nude women riding on floats or swimming on half-oyster shells.

On May 11,1944, Florine Stettheimer died of cancer in New York Hospital.

Florine Stettheimer was attended daily by her sisters Ettie and Carrie and her lawyer Joseph Solomon.

Unlike the other members of her family who were buried in the family plot, Florine Stettheimer asked to be cremated, and, several years later, her ashes were scattered during a boat trip on the Hudson River by Ettie and Solomon.

For many years, Florine Stettheimer had expressed her wishes that all her work be given, as a collection, to a museum.