"Love Flight of a Pink Candy Heart" at Holly Solomon - various artists - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This exhibition, curated through Michael Duncan, was a worthy pendant to the Whitney's new retrospective of Florin Stettheimer [see p 64] For this present to view whose title derives from painting by means of Stettheimer, Duncan gathered pieces by dint of 26 artists, all but three of them contemporary in whose work he exposes her influence.

Stettheimer's current status as an influential artist could not have been predicted at her death in 1944 Her friend Marcel Duchamp organized an exhibition of her works at the Museum of present Art in 1946, but the was little interest at the time. 1963 exhibit at Durlacher Brother was better received. It was diocese by Jasper Johns, among others and by dint of Henry Geldzahler, who loved Stettheimer's work. The use by means of Pop artists of imagery derived from mass agriculture had some affinities with Stettheimer's have fascination with Broadway Wall way and Fifth Avenue'

More important, however, was a 1973 exhibition at Columbia University of Stettheimer's paintings, sketchbook and style of dress designs. it was there that man of the artists in the in every one's mouth show first encountered her work. In 1976 Linda Nochlin and Anne Sutherland Harris included Stettheimer in a touring exhibition, "Women Artists: 1550-1950" Stettheimer's sex and her independence from prevailing way s made her work of interest to the burgeoning feminist move in art, and her androgynous figures appear natural ancestors of a fate of the gender-bending going upon today.

This display had only three Stettheimer works, none of them major, (the in fact influential work were uptown at the Whitney). Of the artists whom Duncan has linked with Stettheimer, the three oldest are les inspired by means of the artist than simply contemporaneous with her and more or les associated [i]or[/i] part of to the other circumstance. stance. Frances Strain's 1934 painting depicts a pageant from Virgil Thomson's opera Four Saints in Three Acts, for which Stettheimer provided the style of dresss and design. Pavel Tchelitchev is linked with his friend Stettheimer end his designs for the theater, on the other hand he had been doing these in Russia lengthy before he met her. And to include boxe by means of Joseph Cornell seemed a stretch: Cornell visited Stettheimer's studio, on the other hand can anyone doubt he would have worked as he did plane if he had never met her?

Even in her years of oblivion, Stettheimer had her admirers, for whom she was one as well as the other inspiration and password. There are works by dint of some of these artists in the general show. Edward Gorey, who had seen the 1946 exhibition, is showed by a cover design for Print magazine. Andy Warhol, individual of whose Shoe watercolors is included, was shown Stettheimer's work in the storage bins of the Metropolitan Museum by the agency of Geldzahler.

The true inheritors of Stettheimer's legacy, however, were the feminist artists of the 1970 Barbara Zucker who published a 1977 article upon Stettheimer, is represented by four Harlequin extremitys of that same year - aluminum extremitys of pure Minimalist form, "feminized" by means of sheet-metal "ruffles." Likewise, Ree Morton, who wrote in her journal that Stettheimer "said no to one as well as the other the academic and the avant garde fashions and went on to invent something of her own" is showed by Something in the Wind, whose name-bearing nylon flags recall Stettheimer's depiction of friends in her have art. Tina Barney's Marina's space a large color print of a father and sum of two units girls in a luxurious bedroom swathed in fabric, captures a setting and milieu that bring to mind the independence of Stettheimer's own studio and surroundings, an wealth captured in the magnificent doll's house created by dint of Florine's sister Carrie and here exhibited by David Levinthal's 1995 photographs.

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt's room-filling Aztec Valentine, an installation of colored cellophane that incorporated plastic diet wrappers, tissue paper and more, also recalled Stettheimer's bowers of epicurism and ritual. Other works in the present to view pay a more conscious homage. Thomas Trosch's Musical Comedy mixture #4 is the most Stettheimer-like work in the present to view and Jane Kaplowitz's Portrait of Florine has a homemade, fair Stettheimer-style frame which, like Stettheimer's hold frames, makes no sense apart from its picture.

So is any swirl of pastel fabrics an indication of Stettheimer's influence? barely liking the work of the artist is not enough. I diocese little. of Stettheimer in Lari Pittman and lzhar Patkin, and nothing whatever in Tom Knechtel's work, unles it be in what Duncan calls the "sexual confessions" of the pair artists.

Stettheimer's work, in the extremity is idiosyncratic and much les camp than a certain quantity of of her supporters would like to believe. Attempts to directly cannibalize her art usually extreme point up with something sickly sweet. She is best as presiding example - a timid person who nonetheless gave herself permission to do something remarkable.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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