THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022 77
mula—“serious about the frivolous, friv-
olous about the serious.”
Given her ambition to “paint this
thing,” this American thing, Stettheimer
landed on a simple, direct solution, and
that was to paint
Our Parties
Our Picnics
Our Banquets
Our FriendsThe lines have more bite than it might
seem; as Proust believed, it is only when
society people are remade as art that they
are worth memorializing. In the nine-
teen-twenties, Stettheimer was in her
fifties, considerably older than most of
the fashionable avant-gardists in her cir-
cle. She assumed a role in her salon like
the classic American one of the benev-
olent if caustic aunt—a more intellec-
tual Auntie Mame of the avant-garde.
She kept her head, and her irony, intact
even among the enthusiasts. Her por-
traits usually involve a tongue-in-cheek
homage in which her avant-garde friends
are subsumed by an older portrait tradi-
tion, the kind that shows the sitter com-
plete with the tool of his vocation, paint-
brush or seaman’s wheel, neatly lodged
in the background. She filled her por-
traits with pet familiars and emblematic
objects. In her portrait of Alfred Stieg-
litz, the maker of suave black-and-white
photographs is himself transformed into
a suave black-and-white photograph, the
world around him largely drizzled out
to grisaille as in his own work. In an-
other painting, we see Stettheimer’s sis-
ter Carrie in the didactic foreground,
with the doll house she labored over for
decades, and again in the distance, din-
ing with the rest of the family in the
country. Carl Van Vechten is painted
with his typewriter, his violet stockings
(an obvious index of his sexual “inver-
sion”), and his black cats, part of his
half-playful diabolism, while a second-
ary, fatter dream figure of Van Vechten
hovers in the background, a genie com-
plete with an Orientalist turban.
There could be, as Van Vechten rec-
ognized, an element of malice in Stett-
heimer’s stylized portraits. In her portrait
of her sister Ettie, the attendant icon is
a highly decorated Christmas tree. “I my-
self have a very unpleasant conscience
about celebrating Xmas at all,” Ettie wrote
once to a friend, making it “highly doubt-
ful,” as Bloemink writes, that she would
have wanted to be pictured in such a goy-
ische scene. It was a family tease, and, like
all family teases, was well-meaning in its
affect and sharp-edged in its effect.
Of all Stettheimer’s portraits, the best
are of Duchamp himself. One shows him
in his two guises, as masculine Marcel
and as his alter ego, cross-dressed Rrose
Sélavy. (Bloemink makes a good case
that the latter is also modelled on a self-
portrait of Stettheimer.) Another, from
the mid-nineteen-twenties, shows him
as a disembodied shaved head, spoofing
the image of Jesus on the Veil of Veron-
ica while suggesting the mentalist-ma-
gicians’ posters of the period. He is pure
mind, radiating out into the world. In
return, Duchamp made at least one draw-
ing of Stettheimer, a pencil sketch that
is, touchingly, not at all Duchampian but
a skillful, unsentimental registry of her
sharp, intelligent features.
Some of Stettheimer’s winking,
Goopist spirit infuses a nude self-por-
trait, painted soon after her return to
New York, which her friends and fam-
ily called “A Model,” and which gracesthe cover of Bloemink’s book. (It wasn’t
recognized as a self-portrait until re-
cently, the consensus having before been
that she was too proper for such ex-
posure.) In her mid-forties when she
painted it, she presents herself as every
bit the equal of the approaching flapper
generation, a knowing woman unafraid
to embrace others’ eroticism along with
her own. With bobbed hair and a come-
hither smile, her pubic hair displayed in
a way then rare, she is fetching and con-
frontational, ready for any eventuality. It
seems improbable that so casually erotic
a personage could resist all attachments,
but, with the exception of one or two
mysterious shipboard-style romances,
she seems to have.V
ery much an artist at home in
the twenties, cut to the same ec-
static pattern as Fitzgerald and Edna
St. Vincent Millay—whom she often
resembled in her self-made modernism
and her assault on puritanism—Stett-
heimer had a happy local vision that
seemed to stand on shakier soil when
the Depression hit New York hard. Still,“I dooon’t know this sooonngg. I’m just heeeere with
my daaaaaughter and her frieeeends.”