74 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022
BOOKS
ARTS AND LEISURE
What Florine Stettheimer brought to American art.
BYADAMGOPNIK
S
hortly after the birth of Pop art, in
the nineteen-sixties, came the dis-
covery of the precursors of Pop, the
American artists who had anticipated
the Pop fascination with commercial
culture: billboards, magazine advertise-
ments, Broadway shows, department
stores, the works. Frozen out by the win-
try regime of absolute abstraction, these
artists sprang back to life: Stuart Davis,
with his Damon Runyon imagery of
Lucky Strike packs and newspaper head-
lines; Charles Demuth, with his feed-
store signs and water-tower lettering;
Gerald Murphy, with his precisionist
studies of watches and razors and safety
matches, who went from being cast as a
beautiful Fitzgerald loser, having inspired
the character of Dick Diver in “Tender
Is the Night,” to sudden recognition as
an American rhapsodist alongside Fitz-
gerald himself.
Of all these, the painter and scenic
designer Florine Stettheimer has been
the most challenging to weave back into
the story of American art, because her
reëvaluation has involved a number of
contradictions. On the one hand, she
was a perfect heroine for the emergence
of a feminist-minded art history. Forty
years ago, Linda Nochlin wrote an essay
in Art in America reintroducing Stett-
heimer to the world, and celebrating
“The Cathedrals of New York”—a se-
ries of four paintings that were meant
to encapsulate the secular religions of
mid-century Manhattan—as a deep and
permanent contribution to our self-
understanding. On the other hand, Stett-
heimer belonged, unashamedly, to a
world of what we call privilege. She lived
for many years in the extravagantly ro-
coco Alwyn Court apartment building,
with her mother and two of her sisters,
who, like Florine, never married or set
up a household with anyone, male or fe-
male. (This seemed as unusual then as
it does now.) A wealthy woman from
the top of German Jewish New York
society, Stettheimer seldom engaged in
the vulgar business of selling her work.
A famous exemplum virtutis has the
young Andy Warhol calling on the also
young Met curator Henry Geldzahler
in the early sixties, with the curator vol-
unteering that the artist might want to
see the museum’s Stettheimers, then not
always on view. Warhol assented enthu-
siastically, and a sensibility was not so
much born as retrofitted. Yet there was
little Pop practice in Stettheimer’s work:
no appropriation, no collage, no photo-
graphic or typographic images taken di-
rectly from the living stream of popular
culture. The world of movies and mu-
sical comedy and department-store sales
was always translated into her own feath-
ery, ornamental style, all cockatoo col-
ors and birthday-cake surfaces. She pi-
oneered Pop subjects and Pop manners
without Pop strategies. It was Stett-
heimer, though, who was perhaps the
closest American friend of the Pop pro-
genitor Marcel Duchamp, the inventor
of ordinary-object appropriation and the
readymade, the man who took a urinal
from a shopwindow and brought it into
the art gallery.
Now the art historian Barbara Bloe-
mink has arrived to untangle these con-
tradictory impulses and attainments, with
the publication of “Florine Stettheimer”
(Hirmer), the first extensive and schol-
arly biography of the artist. Stettheimer
turns out to have been surprisingly shrewd
in her judgments of others and self-
reflective about her talents and motives.
Her faux-naïf, fluorescent style has been
regarded as a fountain of exuberance
from a semi-trained, instinctive artist; in
truth, she was a highly trained drafts-
man who could turn a torso with the
“The Cathedrals of Broadway” (1929) celebrates a secular sacrament of the city. best of the academics. One particular gift © THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
