76 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022
while, toward the foreground, two ele-
gant sisters, wearing pastel gowns, are
splayed out and gasping on lounge chairs.
The women have fashion-figure propor-
tions—long bodies, small heads, serpen-
tine arms—against a background of hot
color. The proportions of Edward Gorey
with the colors of Bonnard: that was her
favorite formula for women. The picture
surface sizzles and sweats and droops in
mimesis of the weather, while the bands
of aerated brick and orange that orga-
nize the landscape capture the tempera-
ture, too. (Eliminate the figures and one
would be left with the nuanced stripes
of colors of Rothko, who was also, later
on, drawing on Bonnard.)
Her color is loud. In any museum
room of early-twentieth-century paint-
ing, Stettheimer’s work makes even brash
contemporaries, such as Reginald Marsh
or Thomas Hart Benton, seem circum-
spect, with their still academic patterns
of chiaroscuro. She knew this and liked
it, writing in a poem that although she
had once given herself “to the moment
of quiet expectation,” she had then
seen “Time/Noise/Color/Outside
me/Around me/Knocking Me ...
Smiling/Singing/Forcing me in joy to
paint/them.”
Stettheimer from then on had the
most recognizable and flamboyant style
in American art: her pictures at the Met
blazon out like Jelly Roll Morton solos
in a German music school. Usually sim-
ilar in size, about four feet by three feet,
her pictures are often vertical, like the
posters and magazine covers that clearly
inspired her. There’s an empty space up
top, as if waiting for a title to be filled
in; then an event in the middle; and, be-
neath that, a crowd of her willowy, ele-
gant figures. The surfaces are nervous
and brightly acidic in feeling; the paint,
laid on with a palette knife, deliciously
resembles cake frosting.
Stettheimer’s deliberate simplifica-
tion of drawing, her repetitive figure
style, and her relentlessly additive,
crowded compositions can at first evoke
“outsider art.” But there are two types
of outsider art, one made from below
and one from above. There is the out-
sider who is, at first, indifferent to the
possibility that money might be made
from art, and then there is the outsider
who needs to make no money from her
art. Though blessed by the first kind of
folk artist, American art has also had its
share of the second. Charles Ives was
able to compose mainly unperformed
music because he was solidly in the in-
surance business. Stettheimer, like Proust,
her beloved literary hero, enjoyed the
detachment provided by wealth, the lux-
ury—shared by Edith Wharton, Ger-
ald Murphy, and Cole Porter—of mak-
ing what she wanted. It was long claimed
that, after a 1916 gallery show that sold
no paintings, Stettheimer refused to ex-
hibit ever again. This isn’t quite true, as
Bloemink tells us: she did show her work,
including at the first Whitney Biennial
and at the Museum of Modern Art. But
she nursed an inveterate distrust of deal-
ers, and could afford to.
“Primitive” in her day could also refer
to the art of the Italian Trecento and
Quattrocento, and that was a form of
temporal “outsiderism” that she certainly
responded to; she used the formats of
Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel in the mock-
epic armature of her “Cathedrals” series.
Just as often, she recycled the propor-
tions of Quattrocento narrative paint-
ing. She was surely affected as well by
pictures like Fra Carnevale’s “The Birth
of the Virgin,” at the Met, with its isos-
celes triangle of figures parading at the
bottom of the frame.
But, even though she was, through
her European exposure, probably better
acquainted with Old Master art than her
American contemporaries were, Stett-
heimer did choose to play the amateur.The art historian Sarah Archino has re-
cently made an incisive case for the vital
role of a now lost “amateur aesthetic” in
the growth of early-twentieth-century
American art. It celebrated the happy
processes of the visual artist who did it
for the sake of doing it, with an empha-
sis on the active, non-professionalized
pleasures of cartoons and illustrations
and décor. Gelett Burgess, a cartoonist
and a humorist who exhibited at the
photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s galleryin the nineteen-tens, evolved an entire
mock theory for this kind of deliberately
amateur art. Not unlike Warhol’s “Pop-
ism,” Burgess’s theory was both a bur-
lesque of his ideas and an explication of
them. It involved a set of comically sim-
plified characters that he drew called the
Goops, and insisted that there was no
hierarchy among cartoons, children’s
drawings, commercial illustration, and
“advanced” art. Stettheimer is, in this way,
more Goopist than avant-gardist, with
the proviso that Goopism was a kind of
American avant-garde. In a warning with
resonances for Stettheimer’s career, Bur-
gess sagely wrote that a series of satiri-
cal watercolors of his “will of course be
misinterpreted; they will be taken too
seriously and too frivolously.”S
tettheimer’s big pictures kid the ab-
surdities they show, and yet approve
of society’s investment in the absurdities.
None is more audacious than her 1921
work “Spring Sale at Bendel’s.” No other
artist at the time, avant-garde or acade-
mic, would have regarded a department-
store sale as an event worthy of being
treated as the central Manhattan sacra-
ment it has always been. On the ground
floor of Bendel’s—then an upscale de-
partment store, before it became a cut-
ting-edge one—Stettheimer’s women
grab for bargain dresses with the fren-
zied grace of maenads on a Greek red-
figure vase: they pose, strut, try on. One
shopper, with a long, sword-shaped green
plume on her hat, of the kind a Homeric
warrior might have on his helmet, leaps
into the air to seize a blue dress from a
rival shopper.
Stettheimer’s signature emotion is
found in the way she burlesques the cock-
roach-caught-in-the-light busyness of
her American shoppers even as she reg-
isters a deep affection for their pursuits.
Bloemink rather primly suggests that
Stettheimer was “not immune to peri-
odic personal indulgences in these stores”;
in fact, as Stettheimer wrote, her atti-
tude was “one of love” for “Maillards
sweets/and Bendel’s clothes/and Nat
Lewis hose.” Everyone rushes to the light
of pleasure, and if the figures look ab-
surdly insectlike, well, Stettheimer loved
insects, and designated the dragonfly her
“alter ego.” She was—as Susan Sontag
later characterized the camp aesthetic,
unintentionally echoing Burgess’s for-