THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022 75
of Bloemink’s biography is that it pre-
sents the vers-libre poetry that Stett-
heimer wrote alongside her paintings,
and shows that her verse, though pro-
duced without the immense technical
care that she poured into her visual art,
is in its way just as remarkable. Its tone
presages Frank O’Hara’s affable, off hand
“Lunch Poems” of the fifties and sixties,
his soda-fountain haiku. (There is a small
Canadian edition of Stettheimer’s com-
plete poems, but they deserve a full-scale,
illustrated trade publication.) Bloemink
also does the necessary work of putting
pictorial circumstance into social con-
text: she discovers, for instance, that an
ice-skating picture long thought to de-
pict Rockefeller Center actually shows
a forgotten rink in Central Park, near
Columbus Circle, and she explains what
this urban space looked like and meant
to New Yorkers at that time.
Bloemink can’t resist some panicky
pieties, to be sure. She regularly insists
that her subject was “subversive,” even
though Stettheimer was a wealthy so-
ciety bohemian who never had to work
for a living and who had the habits and
manners of her class and kind. To rep-
resent her as a model contemporary is
to miss exactly what was courageous in
her life and work. Being subversive or
transgressive is not in itself a virtue; as
the Trump years have shown us, every-
thing depends on which rule is being
transgressed and what norm subverted.
Stettheimer’s originality lay in how un-
apologetically she embraced her own
condition, how clearly she looked at her
world as it was, rather than trying to
paint the equivalent of the socially con-
scious cartoons in the New Masses. More
than any artist, she painted as a New
Yorker, in love with New York, and cap-
tured its whole culture, not so much un-
cosmeticized as wearing makeup of its
own exultant choosing, mascara and lip-
stick and glitter laid on thick.
A
n essential book remains to be writ-
ten on the American garment and
haberdashery business in its relation to
art: Gerald Murphy was a Mark Cross
heir, while Diane Arbus and Richard
Avedon were shaped by money made
and lost from schmatte stores on Fifth
Avenue. The old European pattern in
which one generation makes the money,
the next consolidates the social position,
and the third practices the arts got am-
putated in New York, with the second
generation leaping directly from dry-
goods to wet surfaces, from the store
to the studio. (One could add to the story
the role of both Gimbels and Wanama-
ker’s in Manhattan as spaces for showing
advanced painting. Stettheimer exhibited
her work five times at Wanamaker’s.)
Stettheimer, born in 1871, was one of
those drygoods legatees on both sides of
her family tree: her maternal grandfa-
ther, Israel Walter, had a successful dry-
goods business downtown, on Beaver
Street; her father, Joseph Stettheimer,
had made money in the garment trade
in Rochester. But Joseph, for unclear rea-
sons, abandoned his family when Flo-
rine was a small girl. They moved to New
York, and she grew up in a wholly ma-
triarchal environment, with her aunts
Caroline and Josephine, alongside her
mother, Rosetta, as the dominant figures
in her life. (Caroline had married into
still another wealthy Jewish garment-busi-
ness family, the Neustadters of San Fran-
cisco.) Bloemink reproduces an extraor-
dinary photograph of Florine’s relatives,
six aunts and a single outmatched uncle.
Matriarchal families have a complicated,
braided relationship with feminism.
Those who live within them know that
women can do it all, but they do it as
women, among women, and can turn in-
ward for reinforcement as readily as they
fight outward for equality. That was how
Rosetta and the Stetties, as her three
youngest daughters were known, ended
up: a defensive phalanx of four.
The Stetties and their mother wan-
dered through Europe in the last de-
cades of the nineteenth century and early
in the twentieth, with long stops in Rome
and Florence, where Florine, already
having decided to become an artist, ab-
sorbed a love of Quattrocento painting;
Botticelli’s marriage of coloring-book
fantasy and intricate linear decoration
was a particular passion. As was then
the custom among aesthetic-minded
people, the family spent at least as much
time in romantic Germany as in ad-
vanced Paris. They lived for some three
years in Munich, where Florine studied
painting in the academic mode.
Living and learning in Germany, how-
ever, produced in her an abhorrence of
German culture, with its pervasive ethic
of Pflicht—duty or high seriousness. EvenBeethoven didn’t escape her disgust at
Teutons being Teutonic. “Oh horrors/I
hate Beethoven,” she wrote in a private
poem. “And I was brought up/To r e-
vere him/Adore him/Oh horrors/I hate
Beethoven/I am hearing the Fifth/Sym-
phony/Led by Stokowski/It’s being
done heroically/Cheerfully pomp-
ous/Insistently infallible.” She was bored
and irritated by the cheerfully pompous,
the insistently infallible, the piously ec-
static: everything that bore traces of sol-
emn instruction and humorless purpose.
She believed that the only duty of an
artist was not to have one.
Bloemink argues, persuasively, that
the pivot point of Florine’s artistic life
came about, as it did for so many, through
an encounter with the Ballets Russes,
which she attended in Paris in 1912. “I
saw something beautiful last evening,”
she wrote in her journal. “Bakst the de-
signer of costumes and painter is lucky
to be so artistic and able to see his things
executed.” The crisp edges and diagonal
excitement of the movement must have
seemed overwhelming and liberating.
With characteristic ambition, and per-
haps characteristic impracticality, she
began designing her own never-produced
ballet, exploring ideas that she would
later return to in her designs for the opera
“Four Saints in Three Acts,” by Virgil
Thomson and Gertrude Stein.
She returned to New York in 1914,
with the onset of the war, a dancer’s leap
from the ever-darkening Pflicht of Eu-
rope. Where émigrés typically accepted
New York while longing for Europe,
she loved New York, much preferring
it to any European capital, and even
after the war remained faithful to it,
never returning to the Continent. One
of her poems reads:
Then back to New York
And sky towers had begun to grow
And front stoop houses started to go
And life became quite different ...
Which I think is America having its fling
And what I should like is to paint this thing.
But how to paint this thing? She
turned to Thalia, Greek muse of com-
edy, while others turned to Thalia’s dim-
mer and more sober sisters. Her first
truly masterly painting was “Heat,” from
1919, a fabulously funny and evocative
portrait of the Stettheimer women during
a New York summer heat wave. Mom
sits regally in the back, dressed in black,