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for FLORINE STETTHEIMER
FLORINE STETTHEIMER
--Columbia.edu
Person TypeIndividual
BiographyFlorine Stettheimer (August 29 1871-May 11 1944) was an artist, designer and poet. Although during her lifetime she was little known outside the circle of New York modernists of which she and her sisters were a part Stettheimer's achievements in painting and costume set and furniture design have since been recognized as important contributions to American art in the first half of the twentieth century. She was born in Rochester New York the second youngest of five children in a well-to-do German-Jewish family. After studying art in both New York and Europe Stettheimer settled permanently in New York City with her mother and two of her sisters Ettie and Carrie in 1914. Together they hosted salons and intellectual gatherings for over twenty years that included such figures as Gaston Lachaise; Marcel Duchamp; Carl Van Vechten; Avery Hopwood; Georgia O'Keefe; and Alfred Stieglitz many of whom became the subjects of Stettheimer's portraits. Her first and only solo exhibition during her lifetime took place in 1916, subsequently Stettheimer showed her work only in group exhibitions. In her vividly-colored portraits of family and friends, Stettheimer both experimented with modernist styles and expressed her often witty social commentary on contemporary culture. She also designed picture frames furniture and other decorative elements for her studio and apartment in New York. Lastly Stettheimer created sets and costumes for two never-produced ballets and the well-known 1934 Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts. In addition to her inclusion in numerous group exhibitions since her death, there have been two retrospectives of Stettheimer's work in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art and in 1995 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her paintings have been donated to museums around the country, and her extant diaries and correspondence are housed in the Beinicke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University while her journals, early paintings and drawings and scrapbooks are at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New York.
--Columbia.edu