78 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022
she finally had a chance, in the early
thirties, to fulfill the dream—one that
she had carried since the Ballets Russes
days—of making her own theatrical
Gesamtkunstwerk, when she was asked
to design the Thomson-Stein opera
“Four Saints in Three Acts,” a mysti-
cal-medieval story with an all-Black
cast. Its director, John Houseman, de-
scribed her as “formidable but enchant-
ing,” and recalled that she stubbornly
insisted on finding a stage light suffi-
ciently pure and white to glare poeti-
cally at her designs. She also pioneered
the use of cellophane as a set-design
material; she loved its crinkled translu-
cence, and treated it as a kind of indus-
trial taffeta. The show was, improbably,
a hit, transferring from Hartford to
Broadway and giving her one real mo-
ment of suitable New York glory.
But for the rest of her life she mostly
worked in the privacy of her midtown
studio, pressing down hard on complet-
ing the four “Cathedrals” paintings,
which she had begun in 1929, just as the
stock market collapsed. In fact, the four
pictures—which offer a rhapsodic in-
ventory of New York pleasures, and
which have now been given a place of
prominence in the Met’s installation of
modern American art, filling their own
wall—act as a kind of framing device,
the first dating from the very beginning
of the Depression, and the last dating
from the early forties, as the Depression
ended, though her work on the paint-
ings seems to have been more or less
perpetual and consistent.
Her four “Cathedrals” still represent
the four pillars of Manhattan Life: Wall
Street (meaning big money), Broadway
(meaning show business), Art (mean-
ing the political-social life of museums
and galleries), and Fifth Avenue (mean-
ing the formal life of “society”). Each
painting is really more devoted to the
celebrants than to the celebrities of the
secular sacrament it anatomizes. “The
Cathedrals of Broadway” is less about
the Broadway stars of the twenties, the
realm of the Lunts and the Ziegfeld Fol-
lies, than it is about the audiences that
took them in. It marks the moment when
talking films were replacing theatre as
the crucial fixture of New York City en-
tertainment: at its center, Stettheimer
has painted a black-and-white newsreel
image of Mayor Jimmy Walker throw-
ing out the first pitch of the baseball
season. Beneath the screen, a diminu-
tive line of dancers pose and preen. Skat-
ers from an ice show twirl gleamingly
in the middle distance. A gold-clad
greeter, as radiant as a Renaissance saint,
welcomes the spectators, while marquees
of the finest moving-picture palaces—
the Rialto, the Roxy—spin and explode
like fireworks in the night sky. “The Ca-
thedrals of Art” shows us not the artists
but the curators and collectors of the
period. A mock nativity scene domi-
nates the foreground: Baby Art is born
at the foot of the staircase of the Met,
under the flashbulb of a tabloid photog-
rapher instead of the light of a star. (Ac-
tually, the photographer depicted is the
great George Platt Lynes.) Stettheimer
herself poses as a kind of Madonna of
the art world. Above her, the rest of the
art-world figures—all, as Bloemink
shows, caricatural portraits of real peo-
ple—gesticulate and grimace. An art
critic holds “Stop” and “Go” signs; Al-
fred Barr, the once and future king of
MoMA, has retreated into his own in-
stitution to admire a pastiche Picasso.
Seeing the “Cathedrals” united at the
Met reveals them as a not entirely pleas-
ing decorative presence. With their over-
charge of primary color, glaring intense
pinkness, and eruptive scatterings of gilt,
feathers, ribbons, and rays, the paintings
can look more seductive in reproduction
than in situ. There is something just a
touch assaultive about them. The feel-
ing is exactly like that of walking into a
department store and being aggressively
sprayed with clashing perfumes. An el-
ement of the grotesque inflects Stett-
heimer’s version of the American rococo,
and one wonders whether this is part of
its Americanness, connecting her to John
Currin as much as to the nineteenth-cen-
tury circus poster. But the grotesque never
quite resolves into satire. Stettheimer’s
satiric impulses collide with the perpet-
ual predicament of camp, in which the
frivolous, having been made indistin-
guishable from the serious, is then asked
to be serious in Pflicht-ish ways it can’t
entirely sustain.S
tettheimer was out of her time, in
the simple sense that she was older
than her apparent contemporaries.
When she died, in 1944, she had out-
lived her period; a child of the GildedAge reborn in the twenties culture of
exuberant syncopations, she was out
of step with newer, more ponderous
rhythms. Yet, like most of the great ec-
centrics of art, she seems less eccentric
if we see her sideways, belonging to a
cohort of similar-minded inventors who
have also escaped our attention. The
English engraver William Blake, for ex-
ample, seems to come out of nowhere
but really belonged to a circle of radi-
cal, self-taught visionaries in love with
linear drawing. Stettheimer’s fantasies,
in a similar way, may feel aberrant in
the art world proper, but the view
changes if you glance over at the illus-
trators and designers and costume de-
signers—and even, for that matter, the
restaurant muralists—of her time. Many
of her pictures would have worked as
sublime New Yorker covers. She had a
profound kinship to artists often dis-
missed as “mere” illustrators, including
many women, such as Mary Petty, who
loved the same combination of bright-
hued simplification and unmuddied and
festive delight. Stettheimer was bring-
ing popular magazines and window dis-
plays and musical-comedy manners into
an art that was bound to look frivolous
but that was as purposefully light as a
dirigible, permanently afloat.
In one of her most affecting poems,
Stettheimer defended traits too easily
condescended to as feminine against
what she perceived as the deadening
dullness of men’s power. Men, she wrote,
are “the great earthmoisteners/The great
mud makers,” but
We are the sunbursts
We turn rain
Into diamond fringes
Black clouds
Into pink tulle
And sparrows
Into birds of Paradise.Only Stettheimer, of the feminist art-
ists of her time, would have spoken up
so ferociously for the polemical impor-
tance of pink tulle. Hers is the perpet-
ual response of the rococo to the neo-
classical, of Fragonard to David, of
leaping frivolity to restraining solemnity,
of the soap bubble to the boulder. Mud
is what afflicts her; loft is what affects
her. Her art still speaks against man-
made mud and for all bright feathers,
whether found in mattresses, on Ben-
del’s hats, or in flight.