黑料不打烊

Photograph of Florine Stettheimer, ca. 1917-1920.

Upon returning to New York in 1914 after living abroad for a few years, the artist, poet, and society figure Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) wrote a poem in which she marveled at the changes she observed: “Then back to New York / And skyscrapers had begun to grow / And front stoop houses started to go / And life became quite different.” At the end of the poem, she mused that “what I should like is to paint this thing.” And paint the thing she did. As not just a member of a coterie of luminaries but arguably its core, she painted scenes of New York’s artistic and social elites relaxing in the country (Sunday Afternoon in the Country, 1917), picnicking upstate (Picnic at Bedford Hills, 1918), engaging in conspicuous consumption (Spring Sale at Bendel’s, 1921), swimming and sunbathing (Asbury Park South, 1920), and posing for beguiling family portraits (Family Portrait II, 1933).

Stettheimer and her two sisters, Ettie and Carrie, and their mother Rosetta (the father disappeared early on, and none of the sisters married or had children) lived a life of privilege thanks to the family’s amassing of a fortune in the garment industry. They frequently hosted salon gatherings at their posh midtown apartment, Alwyn Court, for artists, musicians, writers, and intellectuals; friends included Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Carl van Vechten. The three sisters, referred to as “The Stetties,” were all engaged in creative and intellectual pursuits, but Florine was the only visual artist. She had academic training and extensive knowledge of the European masters, but developed her own style influenced by Symbolism, primitive and folk art, and the set designs for the Russian Ballet.

Florine Stettheimer, Family Portrait II, oil on canvas, 46 1/4 x 64 5/8" (117.4 x 164 cm), 1933

Art historian Linda Nochlin describes Stettheimer’s style as “gossamer light, highly artificed and complex; the iconography, refined, recondite and personal in its references.” The figures are recognizable in terms of their identities but simplified and slightly attenuated. Her colors are sometimes bold and saturated and other times frothy and Rococo. In an untitled poem, she mused that her “attitude is one of love / for all its adoration / for all the fringes / all the color / all the tinsel creation.” Unsurprisingly, many critics have used Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “On Camp” to frame her work. Sontag’s claims that camp is “a way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon,” that the way to view camp is “not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization,” and that camp touts a new perspective in which “[one] can be serious about the frivolous, and frivolous about the serious” seem to encapsulate Stettheimer’s scenes.

The crowning achievement of Stettheimer’s oeuvre is the canvases that make up the Cathedrals quartet: The Cathedrals of Broadway, 1929, The Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue, 1931, The Cathedrals of Wall Street, 1939, and The Cathedrals of Art, 1942. They are large, measuring five feet tall and just over four feet wide, and are densely populated with figures both known and anonymous, grand architectural elements, textual flourishes, and both obvious and enigmatic symbols. The term “cathedral” is religious, but instead of worshipping the gods, Americans worship art, money, spectacle, and society. Religious imagery is present in the arched altar shape that frames the central image of each painting (it’s reminiscent of Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel), and in The Cathedrals of Art in particular, where in the foreground right Stettheimer stands as “commere” (godmother) and in the foreground left her friend Robert Lochner is “compere” (godfather), their placement echoing those of patrons and intercessors found in the foreground of Renaissance paintings in order to invite viewers into the scene.

Allusions and altars aside, the paintings are thoroughly and unapologetically secular. They celebrate American dreams, pastimes, heroes, icons, and gatekeepers, all in a most flamboyant and effervescent style. It is certainly possible to be skeptical about, or even hostile to, the world of privilege, consumerism, and celebrity in the Cathedral series. One could even turn to Guy Debord’s 1967 work The Society of the Spectacle to use a passage like “The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity” to critique Stettheimer’s vision, but, frankly, the paintings are too fun, too skillfully rendered, and too effectively evocative of a place and time to fully embrace this viewpoint.

Florine Stettheimer, The Cathedrals of Broadway, 60 1/8 × 50 1/8 in. (152.7 × 127.3 cm), 1929.

The Cathedrals of Broadway, for example, gives us a snapshot of the moment when silent films, portrayed by the roped-off figure in the foreground, are transitioning into “talkies.” Patrons both aristocratic and solidly middle-class buy tickets for shows held at such famous institutions as the Rialto and the Roxy, the names of which flash out at us in the background. The lure of New York as the entertainment capital of the nation is palpable in this vivid, jazzy, exuberant work.

Florine Stettheimer, The Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue, oil on canvas, 60 × 50 in. (152.4 × 127 cm), 1931.

The Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue is dedicated to New York “society,” centering a wealthy and glamorous couple’s wedding at the center of the canvas while various other artists, the Stettheimer sisters, heroes like Charles Lindbergh, and a visiting dignitary populate the spaces around the altar and red silk canopy and carpet. The names of famous New York shops and restaurants, such as Tiffany’s, Delmonico’s, Hudnut’s, and B. Altman’s, shimmer in the background, as much a draw as the city’s famous buildings and bridges. 

Florine Stettheimer, The Cathedrals of Wall Street, oil on canvas, 60 × 50 in. (152.4 × 127 cm), 1939.

The Cathedrals of Wall Street honors George Washington, a figure who Stettheimer admired deeply and whose gleaming gold statue looms large on the right side of the canvas, and the Roosevelts, with a portrait of Franklin featured in the center and an elegant Eleanor in a blue dress in the foreground. But it is also a celebration of money in all its institutionalized forms, with words like “bank,” “trust,” “Morgan & Company,” “banker,” and “mortgage” affixed to edifices, and the faces of Bernard Baruch, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan staring out grimly from the tympanum over the lintel labeled “New York Stock Exchange.” The classical elements, patriotic pageantry, and gilded decoration are over-the-top, and Stettheimer clearly knows it; there’s an archness to the piece, a sense that she can roll her eyes at Americans’ conspicuous love of wealth even as she knows she’s lucky enough to benefit from it.

Florine Stettheimer, The Cathedrals of Art, oil on canvas, 60 1/4 × 50 1/4 in. (153 × 127.6 cm), 1942.

The final piece, The Cathedrals of Art, is a who’s who of the art world of the time, featuring the critic Henry McBride, the museum directors of the Met (the museum’s central stairs are depicted here) and the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art, the tabloid photographer George Platt Lyons, and more. “Baby art” is being born and photographed in a burst of light in the foreground, and then led up the stairs by Francis Henry Taylor. On the two framing pillars are the statements “Art in America” and “American Art,” bold assertions of the young country’s aesthetic accomplishments even amidst the Met’s hallowed halls of centuries’ old global masterpieces.

Certainly, the four Cathedrals works are campy and maybe a little spectacular in the mode of Guy Debord, but Stettheimer’s societal observations and critiques, idiosyncratic and visionary aesthetic style, and ability to capture the glamour and élan of life in New York City in the interwar years make her Cathedrals series a uniquely significant contribution to American art.

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