ART Camp Art in the Age of

Ake no miStAke: in the seen in the context of the social and intel- firstmajor u.S. exhibition in CASSANDRA LANGER lectual environment of early 20th- century overtwenty years devoted to modernism and new york’s avant-garde. mthis artist, we are treated to her paintings trace the mass culture of her just how radical Florine Stettheimer’s Florine Stettheimer: times from the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age, paintings were.her best work splits open Painting Poetry linking the cosmopolitan sensibilities of thefrenetic, exhilarating world she lived in TheJewish Museum, and manhattan. When Stettheimer with her frank, beautiful,and bewitching May5–September 24, 2017 made her new york debut in 1916 with a paintings, which are among the most elo- solo show at the prestigious quent and powerful social critiques of her time. connoisseurs of Gallery,itwas abust, garnering lukewarm reviewsand no sales. camp will relish her originality. ever resourceful, Florine, her two sisters, and their mother in the past, Stettheimerhas often been characterized, in the determinedtoshowcase Florine’stalentsbycreating an elite words of one interpreter,asa“lightweight feminine artist with that would, and did, attract many of the leading lights of awhimsical bent.” Stephen brown, one of the organizers of this the artistic vanguard: , ,carl thought-provoking exhibit at the Jewish museum in manhat- vanvechten, andvirgil thomson(allgay); cecil beaton, Geor- tan, asserts that “this view is belied by her powerful thinking gia o’keeffe, and baron Adolph de meyer and his wife olga, of portraiture and her astute adaptation of european vanguard alesbian who was the god-daughter of edward vii; writer na- ideas, most notably , to uniquely American im- talie barney and artist Romaine brooks, both lesbians; and Al- agery.” however,when brown positions Stettheimer as the fred Stieglitz, , Gaston Lachaise, marie “last” Symbolist, he does her adisservice, if only because as- Sterner,and Leo Stein (heterosexuals). signing end points to artistic movements is an exercise in futility.more to the point, Stettheimer’s arthas nothing to do with Symbolism; rather,her workisadevastat- ing critique of modern life informed by a camp sensibility.brown is uncomfortable with the open-endedness of Stettheimer’s urbane art, which resists categorization. i understand the drive that art historians have had to manufacture order,but these cate- gories often reveal more about the inter- preter than about agiven artist’swork. Stettheimerand her sisters wereinparis in 1910,attending the premier of thebal- lets Russes’ production of L’après-midi d’un faune,featuring ’sno- torious performanceasthe faun.takinga contrarian point of view,Stettheimer saw thesexually explicit representations of the Russian dancer,which critics of the day called “lecherous” and “bestial,”assome- thing beautiful and marvelous. She found his play-acting as engaging, as did her les- bian cousin natalie barney,whose Friday afternoon salon at 20 rue Jacob the Stet- Florine Stettheimer, Asbury park South,1920 theimers certainly visited while abroad. Florine Stettheimer was born in 1871 into awealthy Jewish Athoroughly modern heterosexual woman and feminist, familyinRochester,new york. She wasartistically gifted from among herearliest and most scandalous pieces was Florine’s an early age and studied at the Art StudentsLeague in new york nude self-portrait with red hair (1915). in an astonishingrebuke city and then in europe, where she was inspired by the ballets to european painting, she challenged art historical tradition, Russes. She returned to new york in 1914. her work must be spoofing manet’s by painting her own aging body in adefiant demonstration of feminist autonomy: as the subject of Cassandra Langer is afreelance writer based in New York City. her own gaze. in Family PortraitII(1933), she shows herself in

46 The Gay &Lesbian Review / WORLDWIDE