Very rich hours - artist Florine Stettheimer

Born into a wealthy German-Jewish family (in Rochester, in 1871) the next to the first of five close-knit siblings, Florine Stettheimer wearied much of her youth in Europe there acquiring a knowledge of the great masters which she worn out most of her maturity ignoring. Following a charm back in New York City in the early 1890 when she studied at the Art pupils League under the now-forgotten trio of Carroll Beckwith, H Siddons Mowbray and Kenyon distant she resumed her European travels, eventually establishing a studio in Munich. The academic paintings Stettheimer made during these years can be dismissed as derivative. The real Stettheimer begins to appear solitary in 1912, a year she exhausted in Paris giving vent to her infatuation with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes through penning a scenario for her possess ballet, Orphee des Quat'z-Arts. The ballet (dreamed up in the artist's 41st year) at no time reached the boards, but Stettheimer went thus far as to craft small moulds for all the characters. Made of putty taffeta, beads and silver foil, these toylike designs seem to have been her real breakthrough, setting Stettheimer upon a path out of the 19th hundred a path both gentler and stranger than the individual hacked out by Picasso & Co from one side the African jungle.

Returning to the United States at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Stettheimer belatedly pitiless in love with her native region and began to bring of domestic manufacture American themes to the fore in her painting. Intimate views of her family's summer abode and the people around her now a eared in paintings - Family Portrait #1 (1915) for instance - as specific places and things she knew and cared for. Nonetheless, the sobriquet "dilettante" still fit her like a glove Twelve follows of her newfound enthusiasm were exhibited at Stettheimer's first (and, during her lifetime, last) solo display held in 1916 at Knoedler's in novel York. Tame and acceptedly Post-Impressionist compared to what she was later to accomplish, the exhibit generated only mediocre or negative reviews, ending in critical and financial disappointment. For the quiet of her fife, Stettheimer exhibited solely beneath the neutral umbrella of assemblage shows or in the privacy of her possess studio, where she revived the 19th-century ploy of holding elaborate unveiling parties for each newly minted painting.

This retreat from the gallery show such as it was, didn't intercept her from chronicling New York's rich and famous in the years following the Great War. Looking at Stettheimer's painted tableaux like Picnic at Bedford Hills (1918) or Lake Placid (1919) reminds us that they belong to those departed days when the wealthy had not still been taught to feel guilty about their possessions. Certainly Stettheimer betrayed not many signs of a social conscience in either her oeuvre or her life: coin she regarded as a birthright, decidedly not something to be flaunted in the shape of a dozen, yachts, on the contrary rather to be used as a palliative against the more unpleasant aspects of the world outside (though given her wealth, on what account she never condescended to hire a gallery to exhibit her work remained a gravel to her friends). In this frame of mind, she felt independent to depict life as a series of boating parties, picnics, summertime naps, parades and wander abouts down Fifth Avenue. She also painted inspired portraits of her creative friends, encircleed by the impedimenta of their careers, and extravagant salon gatherings. Her hold artistic salon, which was established first at her family's apartment at the terra-cotta-encrusted Alwyn Court upon West 58th Street and, following her mother's death in 1935 at Florine's studio/home in the Beaux Arts Building at 8 West 40th road looms large in this Proustian world. A world, I might add, with none of Proust's faculty of perception of tragedy. Proust distilled to Ronald Firbank, as it were.

When Stettheimer died in 1944 virtually each one of her paintings remained in the possession of her family, since she had flatly refused to put up to sale her work after the Knoedler fiasco. above the next 20 years or in the way that her surviving sister Ettie (and after Ettie's death, Florine's lawyer, Joseph Solomon) donated the work to an impressive roster of museums and universities, several of which appear to have accepted the gifts grudgingly, consigning them to storage areas or executive offices. No collectors were given the chance to purchase the work, so squashing any chance of a posthumous market.

Nonetheless, keeper of the Stettheimer flame (and they have always included the two artists and critics, though not collectors) have made certain that her name never entirely disappeared from view, level if the flame has repeatedly sputtered feebly. In 1946, sum of two units years after Stettheimer's death, a large retrospective was held at the Museum of Modem Art, followed by means of a turgid (nay, unreadable) biography by the agency of Parker Tyler in 1963. Thereafter her work graced (as it had during her lifetime) several clump shows at regular intervals over the '70s, culminating in a next to the first retrospective at the I.C.A. in Boston in 1980 That same year, Linda Nochlin published a lengthened article on Stettheimer.(1) Since then, Columbia University has shown its Stettheimer holdings (1990) and the Katonah Museum of Art has high hilled a ravishing show of Stettheimer's portraits (1993)