A new look at the art of one of the most charming and idiosyncratic personalities of early 20th-century New York Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) was a New York original: a society lady who hosted an avant-garde salon in her Manhattan home, a bohemian and a flapper, a poet, a theater designer, and above all an influential painter with a sharp satirical wit. Stettheimer collaborated with Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, befriended (and took French lessons from) Marcel Duchamp, and was a member of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe's artistic and intellectual circle. Beautifully illustrated with 150 color images, including the majority of the artist's extant paintings, as well as drawings, theater designs, and ephemera, this volume also highlights Stettheimer's poetry and gives her a long overdue critical reassessment. The essays published here--as well as a roundtable discussion by seven leading contemporary female artists--overturn the traditional perception of Stettheimer as an artist of mere novelties. Her work is linked not only to American modernism and the New York bohemian scene before World War II but also to a range of art practices active today. Flamboyant and epicurean, she was an astute documenter of New York and parodist of her social milieu; her highly decorative scenes borrowed from Surrealism and contributed to the beginnings of a feminist aesthetic.

The American artist Florine Stettheimer. although little known today, is considered to have had a significant influence on the development of modernism in 20th-century American art. The paintings she produced after World War I and before her death in 1944, have been described by art historian Linda Nochlin as rococo subversive. In elegant, refined images, Stettheimer developed a vanguard approach not only to such traditional genres as portraiture, but to fundamental concepts of time-space continuity.

Poetry. Edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo. Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) was an American modernist of German-Jewish heritage living in New York. She was a painter, designer, and poet. Together with her sisters Ettie and Carrie, Stettheimer hosted a legendary salon on the Upper West Side, where they entertained the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, Henri McBride, and Georgia O'Keeffe. In 1934 Stettheimer designed the set and costumes for Gertrude Stein's opera Four Saints in Three Acts to much acclaim. In 1949, Ettie collected Florine's poems in CRYSTAL FLOWERS, a privately printed, elegant edition of 250. In addition to these rare poems, this new volume offers formerly unpublished material culled from archives, including three new poems and Stettheimer's libretto for her ballet "Orph e of the Quat-z-arts." Gammel and Zelazo have re-situated this overlooked poet among her modernist sisters, presenting her as an important practitioner of a modernism that integrates multiple art forms. Sixty years after it first appeared for a select few, her poetry shines for a new generation of readers ready to appreciate her irreverent camp aesthetic and her exuberant painterly style.

Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) was among the most fascinating artists on the New York arts scene during the first half of the twentieth century, and the painter and poet counted among her fans Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, who organized a retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art. With a longstanding interest in beauty contests and celebrity, Wall Street and consumer culture, Stettheimer anticipated in her work many of the same interests that would later characterize Pop Art, and her synthesis of the arts and urban life remains a source of inspiration for many artists working today. Published to accompany a major retrospective of Stettheimer’s work at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, this well-illustrated book brings together the artist’s paintings and poems, as well as her designs for studio and stage, offering deep insights into Stettheimer’s exceptional life and influence on the artists around her.

A full account of the life of the artist Stettheimer, "an eccentric, upper-middle-class German-Jewish spinster who lived in New York with her two sisters and mother and who accomplished her best work when she was over fifty years old."--Jacket.

Infusing her sensibility into every detail—from the Limoges vases in the chintz bedroom to the crystal-trimmed candelabra in the salon—Carrie Walter Stettheimer (American, 1869–1944) wove together the fashion and style of New York's high society in the early twentieth century to create one of the finest dollhouses in the world. Stettheimer worked on the twelve-room dollhouse for nearly two decades, creating many of the furnishings and decorations by hand. Styles of decoration vary from room to room, yet the wallpapers, furniture, and fixtures are all characteristic of the period following World War I. The result is a magnificent work of art, now in the permanent collection of the Museum of the City of New York.What may be the most astounding aspect of the Stettheimer Dollhouse is its one-of-a-kind art gallery, featuring miniature works from renowned avant-garde artists of the 1920s. Along with her mother and two sisters—Florine, a painter whose works are in many major museum collections, and Ettie, a writer—Stettheimer hosted grand soirées attended by contemporary artists, including Alexander Archipenko, Marcel Duchamp, and Gaston Lachaise, who presented her with miniature works for her dollhouse.The Stettheimer Dollhouse showcases all the works created especially for the dollhouse, including Duchamp's three-inch version of Nude Descending a Staircase. Each artist in the collection is profiled, while descriptions and color photographs of each room in the dollhouse offer an intimate tour of this delightful masterpiece.