© COPYRIGHT

by

Sarah Leary

2019

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

FLORINE STETTHEIMER’S STUDIO PARTY AND THE ART OF CONVERSATION

BY

Sarah Leary

ABSTRACT

Between 1917 and 1919, Florine Stettheimer created a painting inspired by the salons that took place in her New York studio. In Studio Party, numerous artists and creative figures mingle around her studio inspecting her newly unveiled artwork. Scholars have attended to Stettheimer’s

“naïve” style and have argued that this work and others look to the subject matter and mis en abyme technique in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), which pictures the artist working on a painting of the King and Queen of Spain, as evidenced in the reflection in the mirror in the background, while court members wait on their daughter to the right of Velázquez. By contrast, my thesis analyzes the work in the context of Stettheimer’s dual roles as artist and salonnière.

Drawing on the history of portraiture and early twentieth-century debates about artistic practice, I argue that Studio Party is a group portrait that represents the impact of conversation and, thereby, salons on artistic practice. In this way, Stettheimer championed her role as a salonnière and asserted her status as an artist, but also countered traditional notions of the lone male artist- genius.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would not have been realized had it not been for the support and guidance of the entire American University Art History Department. Generous grants from Carol Bird

Ravenal and the College of Arts and Sciences enabled me to conduct critical archival research. I gratefully acknowledge the staff at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia

University and Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University for their help and patience. I am thankful for the professors at American University, especially Dr. Allen and Dr.

Pearson, for their exceptional advice and insight throughout the entire thesis process. I am deeply indebted to Dr. Elder for her guidance and feedback on this thesis and my two years at American

University.

Thank you to my colleagues at the American University Museum for their constant encouragement. I am also thankful for my cohort whose friendship made these two years all the more positive and worthwhile. To Jessica Chien, I am grateful for your friendship and enthusiasm for this project. A special thank you to Olivia Rettstatt as I could not have completed this project without her.

I extend my deepest appreciation to my entire family for their support throughout this process. Thank you to my sister Megan, brother Matthew, and sister-in-law Eilish for the much- needed laughter while writing this thesis. My unending gratitude goes to my parents, Shawn and

Sheryl Leary. Through every challenging moment, they were there with love and support. I cannot thank them enough for their unwavering confidence in me.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1 AUTHORSHIP IN THE NEW YORK AVANT-GARDE ...... 8

CHAPTER 2 REDEFINING THE SPACES OF SOCIABILITY ...... 20

CHAPTER 3 FAUX NAÏVE: A COLLECTIVE APPROACH TO STYLE ...... 29

CONCLUSION ...... 38

ILLUSTRATIONS ...... 40

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 42

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Florine Stettheimer, Studio Party, or Soirée, c. 1917-1919, oil on canvas, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University………………..……………………………………………………………... 40

Figure 2: Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas,1656, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid …… 40

Figure 3: Florine Stettheimer, The Cathedrals of Art, 1942, oil on canvas, Gift of Ettie Stettheimer, 1953, The Metropolitan Museum of Art ……………….……………… ... 40

Figure 4: Florine Stettheimer, Family Portrait Number 1, 1915, oil on canvas, Gift of the Estate of Ettie Stettheimer, 1967, Columbia University of the City of New York ….……..…. 40

Figure 5: Stettheimer, Studio Party, detail …………………………………………….…….... 40

Figure 6: Florine Stettheimer, Nude Self-Portrait, ca. 1915-1916, oil on canvas, Gift of the Estate of Ettie Stettheimer, 1967, Columbia University of the City of New York ………….... 40

Figure 7: Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris …………….... 40

Figure 8: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, La Maja Desnuda, c. 1797-1800, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado ……………………………………………………………………………….. 40

Figure 9: Carl Sprinchorn, sketch of The Stettheimer Salon (1944), watercolor and ink on paper. Estate of Florine Stettheimer, Joseph Solomon, Executor ……………………….……. 40

Figure 10: Rembrandt van Rijn, Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, Known as the ‘Night Watch’, 1642, oil on canvas, On loan from the City of Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum ………………………………………..……….. 40

Figure 11: Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, [post 1950 reproduction of 1917 original], 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Gift (by exchange) of Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris, Philadelphia Museum of Art ………………………………………………...….……... 40

Figure 12: Gustave Courbet, L'Atelier du peintre. Allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique et morale (The Artist's Studio, a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life), 1854-1855, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay .. 40

Figure 13: Henri Matisse, The Red Studio, fall 1911, oil on canvas, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, The Museum of Modern Art ………………………………………………...….. 40

Figure 14: Peter Juley, interior of Stettheimer’s Beaux Arts Building duplex studio apartment. Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, the Photograph Archives of the Smithsonian American Art Museum …………………………………………………………….……...……… 41

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Figure 15: Peter Juley, interior of Stettheimer’s Beaux Arts Building duplex studio apartment. Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, the Photograph Archives of the Smithsonian American Art Museum ………………………………………………………………….……...… 41

Figure 16: Florine Stettheimer, early drawings, late-1880s, Flat Box 269, Florine Stettheimer Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University …………………… 41

Figure 17: Florine Stettheimer, early drawings, late-1880s. Flat Box 269, Florine Stettheimer Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University ……...……………. 41

Figure 18: Florine Stettheimer, Nude Studies, 1890s, oil on canvas on mounted wood, Gift of the Estate of Ettie Stettheimer, 1967, Columbia University of the City of New York ...…. 41

Figure 19: The Quilting Party, 1854-1900, oil on paper, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection ………………………………………………………………………...….... 41

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INTRODUCTION

This thesis analyzes Florine Stettheimer’s Studio Party—sometimes referred to as Soirée

(figure 1). The painting depicts a salon set in the artist’s studio, where she exhibited her new paintings to her guests. Stettheimer’s investment in this painting is not the new art she is displaying, but rather the salon’s guests who were also artists and fellow creative individuals in the New York avant-garde community. Stettheimer’s inclusion of figures into the space of the studio, which male artists typically depict as a solitary or even sacred enclave, prompts further analysis. I examine the unique relationship between sociability and artistic practice evidenced in the painting as well as its engagement with the history of portraiture and debates about individuality and skill among avant-garde artists working in the early-twentieth century.

Ultimately, I argue that Studio Party is a group portrait that affirms the significance of conversation, salons, and community and, thereby, revises conventional understandings of art making.

In the late 1910s, amidst growing political tensions abroad, New York City experienced an influx of Europeans artists and, with it, novel styles, subject matter, and modes of artistic practice. Among the Americans who returned to the United States during this period was Florine

Stettheimer. Stettheimer lived abroad for much of the first forty years of her life. During this time, constant travel prevented her from dedicating herself fully to her artistic practice. She painted few large-scale works and instead focused on smaller paintings or works in other media more adaptable to her constant travel. Throughout this time, though, Stettheimer maintained studio space in New York. For example, starting in 1901, she rented a large studio in the Beaux-

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Arts Building located in midtown Manhattan, decorating it in her unique style.1 When visiting the city, Stettheimer spent most of her time painting in this studio.

This space became all the more important after she moved back to New York in 1914. At both Florine's studio and the family’s New York City apartment, the Stettheimers began hosting salons—private social gatherings intended to inspire intellectual and creative conversations between guests.2 These events were frequented by artists, critics, writers, and other intellectuals living in the city. The Stettheimer salons played a significant role amongst the New York avant- garde; they became a place for artists to meet and engage with one another. Indeed, Georgia

O’Keefe first met Marcel Duchamp at one of Stettheimer’s studio salons in the early 1920s.3 It was through these guests that Stettheimer’s studio assumed a function that went well beyond the typical workspace. Traditionally, an artist creates, develops, and conceives of new creative ideas in this space, secluded from outside influences, including other people.4 During the Stettheimer’s salon gatherings, the studio became a space of sociability and conversation among her numerous guests.

Sometime between 1917 and 1919, Stettheimer chose to paint one of these salons. Aptly titled Studio Party, this medium-sized canvas portrays Florine, along with her sister Ettie, hosting artists Gaston Lachaise and his wife Isabelle, Albert Gleizes, Juliette Roche Gleizes, and

1 Since the 1890s, Stettheimer rented a studio in New York City, however, in a different building. The Beaux-Arts Building, now the Bryant Park Studios, opened in 1901.

2 Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun, Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 2.

3 Note 15 in Barbara Bloemink, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 263.

4 Rachel Esner, Sandra Kisters, and Ann-Sophie Lehmann, eds., Hiding Making – Showing Creation: The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 10.

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Maurice Sterne as well as playwright Avery Hopwood and art critic Leo Stein.5 Paintings by

Stettheimer hang on the walls of the studio while a new artwork rests on an easel facing visitors to the salon rather than towards the viewer. Two visitors examine the later painting while others converse with one another. The food and drink portrayed at the bottom of the composition suggest a social purpose to the gathering.

Barbara Bloemink, the leading scholar on Florine Stettheimer, understands Studio Party as a commentary on Stettheimer’s fraught place in the art world and in art history. Bloemink frames Studio Party as a conversation piece of the type prevalent in England during the eighteenth century.6 To account for the painting’s studio setting, Bloemink compares the composition of Studio Party to Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) (figure 2), locating

Stettheimer within a tradition descended from this Spanish proto-modern artist. Thus, on the one hand, Bloemink sees Stettheimer as ingratiating herself into an illustrious history. Yet, on the other, she reads Studio Party as a melancholy meditation on Stettheimer’s place among her peers. She notes that the salon guests “are too caught up in their own thoughts to notice ‘art’ on the walls and thereby ‘recognize’ Stettheimer as a serious artist.”7 Pursuant to this, Bloemink

5 Ettie Stettheimer identifies the dark and somber figure in front of Florine Stettheimer’s Nude Self Portrait (c. 1915) in Studio Party as Sankar, a Hindu poet. Further information cannot be found about this individual. Sitting next to Florine Stettheimer on the couch in Studio Party is a figure dressed in a Harlequin costume. Stettheimer carefully obfuscates the figure’s identity in her composing of the scene. For more information please see, Ettie Stettheimer’s labeled photograph in Box 2 Folder 1 of Florine Stettheimer Papers; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

6 Throughout her numerous publications on Florine Stettheimer, Barbara Bloemink continuously frames Studio Party as a conversation piece or uses it to legitimize Stettheimer and her family within the history of art as salonières. For more information please see Barbara J. Bloemink, “Florine Stettheimer: Hiding in Plain Sight,” in Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity, ed. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 478-514.

7 Bloemink, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer, 98.

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finds Stettheimer’s attempt to locate herself in the art historical canon as an ironic and even self- deprecating statement.8

Feminist art historian Linda Nochlin focuses on Stettheimer’s style and refers to it as

“rococo subversive.”9 She argues that Stettheimer embraced her gender and the constructed qualities of femininity, and flaunted these qualities through her style, which became an active challenge to societal norms of art-making and even to the male-dominated art world. For example, she sees a work like The Cathedrals of Art (figure 3) as affirming the power and prestige of the New York City institutions of art and those involved in running them. However,

Nochlin notes that hidden under the Rococo artifice and design are acknowledgements of issues within the art world such as the mechanical way critics deem art worthy for institutions like those pictured within it.10 As an early intervention into the scholarship on Stettheimer, Nochlin’s approach dominated the general understanding of her style for succeeding decades.11

Using a feminist post-structural lens, scholar of visual culture Jui-Chi’I (Rachel) Liu studies Stettheimer’s complex representations of herself as a “New Woman” and understands these representations to directly challenge the masculine modernism of Stettheimer’s time. Liu argues that Stettheimer’s subjectivity in Studio Party is an “enactment of her diasporized identity as the wandering and masquerading Jewess.”12 In this way she splits her identity through the mis

8 Bloemink, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer, 96.

9 Linda Nochlin, “Florine Stettheimer: Rococo Subversive” Art in America 68, (September 1980): 64-83. 10 Nochlin, “Florine Stettheimer: Rococo Subversive,” in Florine Stettheimer: Manhattan Fantastica, eds. Elisabeth Sussman and Barbara J. Bloemink (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995), 113-114.

11 Such receptions of her work can be traced back to statements made by acquaintances during her lifetime and right after her death in 1944.An example of such early statements by acquaintances can be found in Marsden Hartley’s article to Creative Art Magazine of Fine and Applied Art. Hartley was a close friend to the Stettheimer family and frequently attended their salons. For more information please see, Marsden Hartley, “The Paintings of Florine Stettheimer,” Creative Art Magazine of Fine and Applied Art, July 1931, 19.

12 Jui-Ch'i (Rachel) Liu, "Carnival Culture and the Engendering of Florine Stettheimer" (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1999), ii. 4

en abyme technique found in Velázquez’s painting. In that work, Velázquez depicts himself painting a double portrait of King Philip IV and Queen Mariana of Spain—a subject that is discernable to viewers only in the form of a reflection in a mirror. By extension, Liu suggests that Stettheimer’s portrayal of herself in two places in Studio Party (in “reality” and as the subject of a painting) speaks to diasporic Jewish identity. Unlike Las Meninas, Stettheimer does not compose her scene to enable a reading that can unite these subjectivities, but instead inserts multiple perspectives and oscillating viewing patterns, quite literally creating a floating world that destabilizes the painting’s logic.13 Liu argues that this fragmented logic impedes normative gender roles and, so, challenged the masculinity of modernism.14

These scholars attend to Studio Party’s style and subject matter and analyze these elements within the history of art. However, it remains to be seen how the piece emerged from, and commented upon, the art world in its own moment. Through my approach, I locate

Stettheimer and Studio Party within the New York avant-garde after World War I and in relation to ideas about originality and community that circulated within it. As such, my thesis reveals how Stettheimer’s painting challenged ideas about the so-called “male genius” at the level of style, but also subject matter and even construction. The first chapter explores the implications of

Stettheimer’s depiction of identifiable salon guests all together in this specific space. Drawing on the history of group portraiture, I argue not only that this painting falls in this tradition, but also that Stettheimer uses this group and the salon to make a claim about art-making practices among the New York avant-garde. Studio Party illustrates the critical role that community and feedback play in her work.

13 Liu, "Carnival Culture and the Engendering of Florine Stettheimer," 177-181.

14 Liu, "Carnival Culture and the Engendering of Florine Stettheimer," 180.

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Chapter two examines how Stettheimer represents her studio and argues that she posits it as a space of sociability. Artists traditionally depict their studios as sites of laborious production with their props and tools on display. Stettheimer deviates from these normative representations by underscoring the presence of the guests and their interactions rather than the artist and the images she displayed in her studio. Stettheimer puts forward new ideas regarding artistic practice in the studio by demonstrating the significance of guests and conversation in a space for art making. Studio Party counters modernist notions about artistic autonomy that were promulgated in the lives and works of male artists.

Throughout her mature career, Stettheimer cultivated a faux-naïve style that evacuated all evidence of her academic training. The third chapter explores the significance of this choice for

Studio Party. In this chapter, I argue that as much as the work’s subject matter challenged notions of the autonomous artistic genius, so, too did the work’s style. Starting in 1915 when she moved back to America, Stettheimer turned her back on her academic training in favor of a more

“authentic” approach. In doing so, her style, as expressed in Studio Party, aligns with the objectives of many other modern artists in the early twentieth century.15 Like Gauguin, the

Fauves, and Die Brücke, Stettheimer crafts a faux-naïve style as a challenge to American art academies and the notions of genius associated with them.

15 The majority of scholarship looking to Stettheimer analyzes the avant-garde influences on her style rather than how it makes an impact on the greater avant-garde community. These scholars often compare Stettheimer’s post- 1915 style to the European Fauves, Symbolism, as well as relate her style rise in popularity of styles that look to “primitive art,” art inspired by children, and folk art. Art historian Melissa Liles coins the term “conscious naiveté” to describe the manner in which she abandons her previous artistic education in favor of a style that rejects her past use of academic skill as well as the many modern or avant-garde trends in style. For more information on her style, please see Elisabeth Sussman, “Florine Stettheimer: A 1990s Perspective,” in Florine Stettheimer: Manhattan Fantastica, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995), 41-67. Further study of her style can be found in Melissa M. Liles, "Florine Stettheimer: A Re-Appraisal of the Artist in Context" (Master’s thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1994), 25-44.

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Ultimately, then, I argue that Studio Party is a group portrait that represents the impact of salons—and Stettheimer’s own salons in particular—on artistic practice. Stettheimer not only countered traditional notions of the lone male artist-genius, but she also championed her own developing contributions to the New York art world. She could have chosen to represent her studio without guests and with the tools of artistic production, or she could have painted one of her family’s salons that took place in their apartment. By depicting a salon in her studio, Studio

Party attests to her new, dual roles as an avant-garde artist and as a salonnière. In Europe,

Stettheimer had absorbed artistic inspiration; in New York, she stimulated it. As a salonnière and avant-garde artist, she facilitated important conversations about art—what it was, how it was made, and the functions it could serve.

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CHAPTER 1

AUTHORSHIP IN THE NEW YORK AVANT-GARDE

By all accounts, Florine Stettheimer maintained a tight lock on her studio. According to art historian Barbara Bloemink, she kept her art-making and its labor furiously hidden from others. Stettheimer even prohibited her family from entering without invitation.16 Indeed,

Stettheimer invited people, usually around twenty to twenty-five guests as Georgia O’Keefe recounted, into her studio only for a salon when she completed a painting.17 Studio Party likely does not depict a particular event but rather an imagined one since the new work is hidden from our view.18 Several other works by Stettheimer are visible, however. Along the left side wall, the lower right corner of Family Portrait Number 1 (1915) (figure 4) is evident. At the upper right, on an easel facing towards us, is one of Stettheimer’s boldest works, Nude Self-Portrait (ca.

1915-16) (figures 5 & 6). A third work, at the lower left, faces into the studio, such that its subject is ostensibly visible to the salon attendees but not to the audience of Studio Party.

As the only painting Stettheimer made of her studio, Studio Party provides important insight into her understanding of this space and the activities that took place therein. In this chapter, I argue that the painting is less about the work that Stettheimer revealed and more about the people gathered to discuss it: the work should be understood as a group portrait that demonstrates the significance of conversation to Stettheimer’s art-making process. Ideas about authorship were a common and important topic among artists and at salons at this time. By

16 Bloemink, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 98.

17 Note 15 in Bloemink, The Art and Life of Florine Stettheimer, 263.

18 Bloemink, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer, 263 note 15.

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acknowledging the role of the group, Stettheimer’s painting rejects the notions of individualism art historians associate with modernism.

The Guest List

Studio Party depicts figures from the avant-garde community that formed in New York at the end of World War I. Artists Albert Gleizes and Gaston Lachaise study a large painting on an easel, likely a newly completed painting by Stettheimer. Maurice Sterne, Ettie Stettheimer,

Isabelle Lachaise, Juliette Roche Gleizes, and Florine Stettheimer gather around the perimeter of the room, with Leo Stein and Avery Hopwood visually uniting the groups of guests as they talk to one another. As evidenced by their own work, these figures were invested in avant-garde styles and practices. Gleizes co-wrote the unofficial manifesto for the group of cubists that exhibited exclusively in the Salon des Indépendants in Paris.19 His wife, Juliette Roche Gleizes, participated in the Dada movement with her poetry. An active member of art societies and communities of creative intellectuals, Lachaise sculpted figures of voluptuous women that rejected academic conventions in sculpture.20 Fellow sculptor Sterne is best known for his marriage to salonière and art patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, which lasted from 1916 to 1923.21

Not all the guests at Stettheimer’s salons identified as artists, however; some were creative intellectuals. Ettie Stettheimer held a doctorate in philosophy and published two novels,

19 The manifesto “immediately became a reference work on contemporary art for commenters across Europe,” as described by David Cottington, “Cubism, the Avant-Garde and the Liberal Republic,” in Cubism and Its Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 5.

20 Shirley Reece-Hughes, “Embracing American Folk,” in A New American Sculpture, 1914-1945: Lachaise, Laurent, Nadelman, and Zorach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 20.

21 Notably, Sterne spent almost four years traveling or living in various locations across the south and southeast Asia including India, Burma, and Bali. Ettie Stettheimer identified this figure in Studio Party as Sankar, a Hindu poet. Despite the lack of evidence regarding his existence or reason for attendance, it can be assumed he is an associate of Sterne who had spent significant time abroad. For more information please see, Ettie Stettheimer’s labeled photograph in Box 2 Folder 1 of Florine Stettheimer Papers; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

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unrelated to art, in her lifetime. Despite this, Ettie guided conversations at the salons and was known for her coquetry.22 An exceedingly successful playwright, Hopwood’s accomplishments included 24 Broadway plays.23 He mainly wrote farces, but many of his plays—such as The

Demi-Virgin (1921), which featured female actors stripping to their undergarments—pushed the boundaries of acceptable behavior in the teens and twenties. Leo Stein was the brother of the famous collector, salonière, and writer Gertrude Stein. An art critic, he, like his sister, also collected new works of modern art and partook in the Stein salon prior to World War I.

Many of the depicted guests were affiliated with the same groups and showed in the same exhibitions as Stettheimer. Albert Gleizes became one of the founding organizers of the Society of Independent Artists, which was based on the French Société des Artistes Indépendants. The

Society of Independent Artists provided a space for artists to exhibit in unjuried shows. Gleizes exhibited the first year in 1917; Lachaise exhibited from 1917 to 1922; Maurice Sterne in 1917,

1936, and 1941; and Stettheimer showed work there from 1917 to 1926.24 In 1922, Stettheimer and Lachaise both joined the Modern Artists of America, Inc., a short-lived group of artists that formed from their association with the Society of Independent Artists.25 All of these individuals, then, knew one another well, at least professionally, and associated with one another on a regular basis. Indeed, they were the crux of the New York art world.

22 Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun, Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 131.

23 Jack F. Sharrar, Avery Hopwood: his life and plays (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1989), 220.

24 Clark S. Miller, The Society of Independent Artists: The Exhibition Record 1917-1944 (Park Ridge, New Jersey: Noyes Press, 1984).

25 Modern Artists of American Incorporated catalog for show of members, April 1 – April 30, 1922, and Henry McBride, “Notable Display of Contemporary French works in the Sculptors' Gallery and the Colony Club Houses Pictures by Some of the Liveliest Americans,” April 22, 1922 found in flat box 212 in Florine Stettheimer Papers; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.

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Picturing Conversation

Traditionally, conversation about art was the key draw of a salon.26 As Stettheimer’s friend and art critic Henry McBride wrote, the Stettheimer’s salon guests, particularly the artists, came to the events because they were interested in the artist’s work.27 It can be expected that the conversations of the evening would center around the artwork on display and on the general artistic theories or ideas of the time. In Studio Party, we can only see the back of the new work presumably revealed on this occasion, but we can see the work on the back wall. In the background of the room, Stettheimer exhibits a nude painting of herself that she completed between 1915-1916. This life-sized painting features Stettheimer laying on a bed with her right arm propped comfortably on a pillow as she stares directly at the viewer. In her left hand, she holds a bouquet, and a necklace lays on the bed in front of her. Stettheimer paints curtains in a trompe l'oeil effect pulling them to either side of the canvas, hinting at a scandalizing subject that may need to be covered for certain audiences.

In Studio Party, the viewer encounters a self-portrait of an upper-class woman,

Stettheimer, appropriating two of the most renowned works of modern art, namely, Manet’s

Olympia from 1863 (figure 7) and Goya’s La Maja Desnuda from 1797-1800 (figure 8).28

26 Bilski and Braun, Jewish Women and Their Salons, 2.

27 Henry McBride, Florine Stettheimer (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 10.

28 Studies for Nude Self Portrait indicate that Francisco Goya’s La Maja Desnuda (1797-1800) and Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) inspired Stettheimer. For example, both Stettheimer’s and Manet’s figures prop up their upper bodies with her right arm while Stettheimer’s holds the bouquet that the servant in Manet’s painting presents to Victorine Meurent as Olympia. Both Stettheimer and Manet’s figures prop up their upper body with her right arm while Stettheimer’s holds the bouquet that servant in Manet’s painting shows to Olympia. The other figure in the sketch appears to be more explicitly inspired by Goya’s painting but flipped to lay on her opposite side. Both the study and Goya’s figure are represented with their hands behind their heads in a manner that pushes their breasts to the forefront. Stettheimer even copied the line of hair that runs from Goya’s model’s pubic hair to her belly button.

These paintings enabled Stettheimer to take up the issues of authorship circulating the New York avant-garde at this time. She likely saw La Maja Desnuda and Olympia in person during her numerous trips to the Museo del Prado and the Louvre, who possessed the painting from 1907 until 1947. Both paintings caused controversy for their 11

Neither Studio Party nor Nude Self-Portrait were exhibited publicly in the artist’s lifetime. As evidenced by Nude Self-Portrait’s prominent depiction in Studio Party, Stettheimer’s intended audience for these works were the creative intellectuals and artists that attended Stettheimer’s salons, who too were also likely influenced by Manet’s Olympia and Goya’s La Maja Desnuda.

Stettheimer chose not only to depict Nude Self-Portrait in her painting of her salon, but also a highly intrigued and even shocked reaction to it on the part of Juliet Roche Gleize.

Stettheimer’s focus on conversation in Studio Party comes into sharper focus through comparison with another depiction of a Stettheimer salon. In 1944, upon hearing of Stettheimer’s passing, her friend, artist Carl Sprinchorn, created a watercolor and ink drawing of a salon at the

Stettheimer apartment (figure 9).29 Likely created to help process his grief, his drawing may combine multiple memories of Stettheimer salons into one composition. With its compressed space and voluminous number of guests, Sprinchorn’s drawing depicts the salon as an opportunity for social interaction rather than intellectual exchange. It is primarily attended by finely dressed women, although Sprinchorn depicts numerous men in the margins of the composition. These figures range in size, body positions, and activities, even as none appear specific enough to identify as particular individuals, as in Stettheimer’s painting. Stettheimer, by contrast, specifies the salon’s setting, renders most of the figures identifiable, and arranges them in an orderly manner, which underscores the intellectual nature of the gathering. While

Spirnchorn’s scene is too disorganized for guests to converse or show their association with one

nonclassical depictions of a nude. She takes a famous image that already exists and recreates it in her style, but still distinctly identifiable by those in her circle as a reference to Olympia. Doing so complicates the understanding of authorship as one determines the original versus Stettheimer’s deviations. In turn, we can understand her interest in quoting Manet in a work of her own.

29 Carl Sprinchorn, letter to Ettie and Carrie Stettheimer, May 18, 1944. Florine and Ettie Stettheimer Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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another, Stettheimer places Hopwood and Stein engaged in conversation in the center of the canvas. Studio Party visualizes the conversations that took place there.

These events were not something easily capturable, however, for their most memorable or significant qualities center around an oral form of communication, something not easily reproduced or recorded at this time. Stettheimer paints playwright Avery Hopwood in the moment before he speaks to art critic Leo Stein, who pulls his hearing aid away from his left ear in order to hear only through his good ear on the right. Isabelle Lachaise appears mid-movement as she raises her arm dramatically to take a drag of her cigarette. Painter and poet Juliette Roche

Gleizes pulls her arm into her chest as she gasps in shock of her recognition of Stettheimer as the model for the reclining nude portrait on the easel behind the Hindu poet’s head. Importantly, she ensures that these figures are recognizable. In this way, viewers will understand the guests, their investment in art, and their reasons for coming. Their interest in art, art theory, and conversation about these topics unites them on a personal, professional, and—in Studio Party—visual level.

The Group Portrait

The cohesion of Stettheimer’s figures, which in this case revolves around conversation, posits the work as a group portrait. This genre flourished in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, when new artists advanced innovative approaches to the genre. In the early-

20th century when Stettheimer was working, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642) (figure 10) was the most famous example. Stettheimer was well acquainted with many of Rembrandt’s portraits since his work was included in the required curriculum at the Art Students League and because she later studied some of the works first-hand at the Louvre. 30 The Night Watch depicts the Militia Company of District II of Amsterdam and its collective energy as the group prepares

30 Bloemink, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer, 17 & 37.

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to leave the guild hall. In the center, Captain Frans Banninck Cocq extends his hand out toward the viewer as he turns to speak to his lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch. Behind this pair of leaders, guardsmen move into formation so as to prepare for a parade. Rembrandt spotlights the two leaders and the young woman to their left, who serves as the guardsmen’s mascot, while the other figures lack this dramatic lighting. While the captain and lieutenant stand out from the group, the painting was intended to honor the company as a whole and the role that each person played within it.

The figures are unified by the professional relationships of the depicted figures, in addition to Rembrandt’s formal cohesion of the figures within the composition. Rembrandt paints most of the composition in a harmonious palate that creates a cohesive, uninterrupted viewing of the group with the exception of the illuminated young girl. He places his subjects in the foreground to the scene, dynamically posing them in a variety of activities such as adding gunpowder to a musket or raising a banner. Rembrandt emphasizes the collective purpose of the company by putting them in action, rather than representing them standing still in a formal formation, as was typical of group portraits of militia companies. Instead of suggesting a sense of individualism and physical space between the figures, Rembrandt’s placement of the figures demonstrate their collective energy as they come together to leave their guild hall. By formally unifying the men, Rembrandt informs viewers of the company’s collective purpose to defend and honor their city in parades.

Although Stettheimer may not have seen The Night Watch in person, surely she would have read Alois Riegl’s The Group Portraiture of Holland (1902)31: Ettie wrote that Florine

31 Originally published as Alois Riegl, “Das holländische Gruppenporträt,” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 23, nos. 3-4 (1902): 71-278.

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“read everything concerning art published in English, French, and German up to that time.” 32 In the early-twentieth century, Riegl gained prominence and influence within the emerging field of art history, particularly in Austria and Germany. The Group Portraiture of Holland explored the formal qualities that unite the many figures in a painting while acknowledging the action of the beholder or the viewer’s activation of the painted figures as subjects. In turn, these group portraits meet Riegl’s concepts of “internal coherence” and “external coherence." The artist devised a controlled process of viewing the composition that enables the artist to maintain authority over the painting’s interpretation of the action and unity of the figures. At the same time, these artworks engage and activate the viewer involving them in the scene usually through figures staring through the composition and picture plane to the viewer.33

Stettheimer introduces these strategies into Studio Party, where coherence among the depicted guests is expressed both formally and conceptually. The figures are not static, and certainly not passive, as they study her artwork or lean in whisper into to the ear of another. But, importantly, it is the suggestion of conversation and this activity that unites the guests in their purpose. Their collective purpose to gather together and talk about the art becomes apparent in the work. Indeed, this focus on the immaterial relationship between figures mirrors the objectives of Dutch group portraiture. The painting’s viewers follow the path of the guests in her studio, starting from the men studying the painting in the lower left and following the rest of the composition in an N-like pattern. Stettheimer activates the viewer’s attention through the

32 Ettie Stettheimer, “Introduction,” in Crystal Flowers: Poems and a Libretto, Florine Stettheimer (Toronto: Book Thug, 2010).

33 Wolfgang Kemp, “Introduction,” in The Group Portraiture of Holland, by Alois Riegl, trans. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 11-14.

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viewing experience and holds onto this attention through the two representations of herself in the painting—as the subject of Nude Self-Portrait and as a person at the salon.

In Studio Party, Stettheimer foregrounds the group and its role in the art-making process.

Stettheimer’s painting forms an association between these figures not just at the level of their attendance, but also via the conversations among them. In thinking of this gathering in her studio as a group portrait, we can understand Stettheimer as representing a critical aspect of her artistic identity—her relationship to her guests and the larger avant-garde community. Reigl argues that the group portrait held the viewer’s attention and created a relationship between the painter and the viewer. When considering that the painting’s viewers in Stettheimer’s lifetime were her own salon guests when they came to her studio, this attention and relationship found in a group portrait is taken a step further. Stettheimer’s work emphasized to viewers the significance of their physical presence and conversational activity in her studio.

Authorship Redefined

By presenting the salon in her studio as a group portrait, Stettheimer suggested the important role that conversation played in her art-making practice. At this time, the New York avant-garde in general was rethinking conventionally-related ideas of art-making, authorship, and originality. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp produced Fountain (figure 11), a work that tackled these issues head on. Duchamp is understood to have been quite close with the Stettheimer sisters, so his work is a particularly apt point of comparison.34

In 1917, Duchamp purchased a urinal from the showroom of a plumbing fixture store called J.L. Mott. He took an ordinary found object, made by another, anonymous, person,

34 Barbara Bloemink suggests that the unidentifiable Harlequin figure in Studio Party may be a reference to Marcel Duchamp since by the time Stettheimer made this painting, Duchamp who had likely left the United States, but still kept in contact with Florine Stettheimer and her sisters. See Bloemink, The Life And Art of Florine Stettheimer, 98.

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obfuscated a urinal’s typical positionality by laying it on its side, and declared it to be a work of art called Fountain. While artistic authorship is claimed for the work, it is not Duchamp’s per se, but rather that of the fictitious “R. Mutt” (inspired in part by J.L. Mott) with which Duchamp signed Fountain. In this way, Duchamp challenges the traditional conventions of authorship in which an object is the direct product of a single, self-identified author. The “true” author of

Fountain is not readily identified for the viewer, and the idea of originality cannot easily be affixed to it as a mass-produced consumer product.

The Blind Man, a journal published by the New York Dadaists, featured three different responses to Duchamp’s readymade—all of which defend the piece’s take on authorship, originality, and the like. An anonymous entry, likely written by Duchamp himself, champions

Fountain and the idea that art did not have to be hand-made; “whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it.”35 By this count, giving a work a title or otherwise framing it as art made it so. Dada writer and translator Louise Norton called for the reader to recognize “how scared is the marriage of ideas” by underscoring the presence of these pluralist ideas on authorship percolating in avant-garde circles.36 Here, Norton promotes the concept that more than one person or mind can be involved in a work of art. Institutions of art traditionally valued works characterized as original or innovative as a result of its single creator.

Duchamp threatened this principle by not only choosing an object already made, but he attributes the artwork to a fictional artist, Richard Mutt. He challenged the idea that art had to be something hand made by a recognizable person. Duchamp’s Fountain and the Blind Man articles

35 “The Richard Mutt Case,” in The Blind Man No. 2 (May 1917): 5.

36 “’Buddha of the Bathroom,’” in The Blind Man No. 2 (May 1917): 5.

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demonstrate the New York avant-garde’s interest in challenging traditional artistic values and institutions.

When Stettheimer made Studio Party sometime between 1917 and 1919, these ideas of authorship, originality, and art-making were gaining increased prominence, even in Stettheimer’s own work. For Stettheimer, this meant that her work did not have to the be direct product of her own “inner genius,” but rather that she could look elsewhere for inspiration. In this way, we can read the conversations at the salons, as represented in Studio Party, as countering the isolation associated with art making. Stettheimer’s references to Manet and Goya underscore these themes in her own work and, by extension, in the entire New York avant-garde community. For

Stettheimer and her peers, art could be the product of multiple voices.

Conclusion

For Stettheimer, conversations about art—her own and those of others—played a significant role in her art-making process. Stettheimer formally unites the guests of Studio Party through the suggestion of their salon conversations, and she underscores the salon conversations by placing Leo Stein and Avery Hopwood in the center of the composition talking to one another. Stettheimer introduces a sense of formal and conceptual cohesion to her painting that unites the figures as a group. Salons and their conversations played a significant role in the New

York avant-garde, with Stettheimer involving her fellow artists and creative individuals in an important step of her artistic practice. As McBride later wrote for the exhibition catalogue to her posthumous retrospective at Museum of Modern Art, the Stettheimer family “presided over a salon that had considerable to do with shaping the intellectual and artistic impulses of the period just past.”37 However, only works that exhibited conventional notions of individuality and

37 See Henry McBride, Florine Stettheimer (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 10.

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originality were included in this retrospective. Neither Nude Self-Portrait nor Studio Party were shown publicly during the artist’s lifetime, and neither were they included in the Museum of

Modern Art’s major retrospective of Stettheimer in 1946 after her death. The reactions to her direct and challenging subject matter, like the shock of Mme Gleizes in Studio Party, continued even after Stettheimer’s death.38

38 This show was organized by her friends Marcel Duchamp and Henry McBride, prominent figures in the New York avant-garde who likely wanted to hide any works that might challenge the genius narrative they were formulating for themselves later in their careers. See McBride, Florine Stettheimer, 54-55.

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CHAPTER 2

REDEFINING THE SPACES OF SOCIABILITY

Stettheimer hosted salons in her studio in order to premiere new works to her friends and to shape their conversations about the artwork. The studio did not function in this manner for most artists. The studio was normally a place of isolation that artists used in an effort to create an original work of art, free of the influence of others. While Stettheimer kept her physical act of painting hidden from others, she opened up her studio to guests in a way unlike her male counterparts. Artists like Henri Matisse or Gustave Courbet may have invited models or, in the case of Courbet, spectators, into their studios, but it was to receive praise. Stettheimer, by contrast, invited guests at a critical interval: when she unveiled her new work and was seeking feedback and inspiration for her next paintings. Studio Party quite literally depicts these aspects of her practice as its subject matter.

The painting argues that an artist’s practice is defined in part by the conversations around it. The art inspired and guided the salon conversations in her studio, activating the space in ways that departed from the approaches of other artists. Stettheimer takes up these themes in Studio

Party. While it was not uncommon for an artist to use their studio as subject matter,

Stettheimer’s salon in Studio Party is unique in that it posits the studio as a site of sociability.

Stettheimer and other artists in the New York avant-garde would likely have been talking about authorship and originality, for these topics were under debate in the art world. In this way, Studio

Party counters the perceived autonomy of artistic practice promulgated in paintings of lone male artists.

The Male Artist’s Studio

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While Stettheimer was not the first artist to depict their studio in a painting, her mode is unusual within the context of nineteenth and early twentieth-century portrayals of the studio. Art historian Rachel Esner notes that artists often depicted their studios as private spaces to work independently, apart from influences and interruptions.39 Esner, along with art historians Sandra

Kisters and Ann-Sophie Lehmann, suggest this understanding of the studio became even more ingrained at the turn of the twentieth century; at this time, “the artist was no longer a man who worked, but a man who conceptualized; his studio was no longer a workshop, but a private, even sacred, place – a place of inspiration rather than labor; and that which was produced by means other than with hands.”40 Male artists represented their studios in a way that perpetuated the idea of the lone artistic genius—to underscore their individuality and “divine” inspiration. Gustave

Courbet and Henri Matisse’s studio paintings exemplify this approach.

Like Stettheimer, Gustave Courbet represents visitors to his studio in his painting, but he depicts them as an awed audience versus Stettheimer’s engaged participants. In 1854-55 Courbet painted L'Atelier du peintre. Allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique et morale (The Artist's Studio, a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life) (figure 12), which shows the artist at work in his studio.41 On either side of

Courbet dozens of figures gather to witness him paint. Art historian Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu confirms that Courbet enjoyed holding an audience as he painted in order to show off his skill and technique.42 His use of a palette knife attracted numerous visitors to his studio including

39 Rachel Esner, Sandra Kisters, and Ann-Sophie Lehmann, eds., Hiding Making – Showing Creation: The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 122.

40 Esner, Kisters, and Lehmann, eds., Hiding Making – Showing Creation, 10.

41 I will refer to the painting as The Artist’s Studio for the rest of this thesis.

42 Chu, “Showing Making in Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio,” 66.

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French art critic and early supporter of Impressionism, Jules-Antoine Castagnary. He described

Courbet’s control of his medium and the beauty in his gestures, attributing his success to the fact that Courbet’s “hands were long, elegant and of a rare beauty. I took an extreme pleasure in watching him work. […] I saw how he used the [palette] knife and what marvelous effects he could create with it.”43 Many of the figures standing around the artist are stereotypical working- class figures that he painted in his social realist work, while others are middle-class spectators that locate the painting in Courbet’s present day. By showing so many people watching him paint, Courbet creates a spectacle of his creative process and puts forward a vision of his own creative genius.44

Other artists, like Henri Matisse, define the studio as an isolated space of creativity, as in

The Red Studio painted in the fall of 1911 (figure 13). On the right side of its composition, The

Red Studio depicts a painting Matisse appears to be in the middle of working on that takes up the plate on the table to as its subject matter. This plate features a figure likely inspired by the figurine wrapped in flowers and vines that is also on the table. In his studio, the tools of

Matisse’s labor are still present with crayons on the table and figurines placed throughout the room; however, his framing of such tools makes them secondary to the physical space of the studio, which mirrors the artist’s own mental landscape. The painting suggests that Matisse does not need live models or guests to inspire his work. Rather, his own work inspires new work, as evidenced in the painting of the plate. Matisse leaves little to no seating in his studio for others

43 “Il peignait avec une justesse merveilleuse. Je suivis le mouvement de son bras. Les mains étaient longues, élégantes, et d’une rare beauté. J’eus un plaisir extrême à le voir travailler. Pour la première fois je vis comment il se servait du couteau et quels effets merveilleux il en tirait.” Jules Troubat, Plume et pinceau (1878); Cited in Pierre Courthion, eds. Courbet raconté par lui-même et par ses amis (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1948-1950), 155-156. Cited in Chu, “Showing Making in Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio,” in Hiding Making – Showing Creation, 66.

44 Chu, “Showing Making in Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio,” in Hiding Making – Showing Creation, 66.

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beyond himself and the occasional model. By stepping back in his studio to capture himself on a break from another project, Matisse frames the solitary studio as the source of his creative production. His art only responds to itself.

The Artist’s Studio and The Red Studio promulgate the notion of the lone male artist at work without the influence of others. These paintings became important works in the genre of paintings of artists’ studios.45 Indeed, they helped promulgate values like originality and sole authorship. The studio paintings of Courbet and Matisse suggest that they do not need to rely on the outside world for inspiration. Rather, they can manifest their own independent ideas in insolation, thereby claiming for themselves the status of artistic genius.

Unlike her male counterparts who pictured their studios as sacred spaces, Stettheimer’s

Studio Party depicts the space as one for sociability and conversation. In Studio Party, conversation replaces traditional studio “props.’ Stettheimer designed her studio, both in reality and in the painting, to accommodate guests and social interaction. Her version of the artist’s studio emphasizes the salon’s place within the New York avant-garde community. Stettheimer’s focus on sociability destabilizes this notion of the studio as the place only for artistic production of a singular, masterful male artist. As new ideas on authorship and originality circulated among her community of friends and peers in the late 1910s, Stettheimer implemented these new ideas in her art’s subject and in her art-making process. Here, the artist does not only respond to his own work; she also responds to the visitors to this space.46 Stettheimer thus reimagines what the studio can be and can do.

45 Both Matisse and Courbet’s works gained widespread fame for their studio paintings’ exhibition venues with Courbet creating his own show called the Pavilion of Realism in 1855 and Matisse showing The Red Studio in the Armory Show of 1913. See Robert F. Reiff, "Matisse and ‘The Red Studio,’" Art Journal 30, no. 2 (1970): 146.

46 Esner, Kisters, and Lehmann, eds., Hiding Making – Showing Creation, 10.

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Stettheimer’s Studio

While Stettheimer did not invite guest to watch her paint, the salon and conversations that took place in her studio acted as a source for her ideas in her artistic pursuits. Photographs of her studio by Peter Juley, likely taken in the 1940s, represent it more like a domestic space rather than a space for the laborious activity of painting (figure 14 & 15). The similarities between the photographs and her painting indicate that Stettheimer represented her studio in Studio Party with close attention to her studio’s actual design that remained unchanged since the late 1910s.

The first photograph depicts a large room that is separated from another smaller, more formal sitting room by cellophane curtains and classic architectural elements. While paintings hang on the walls around the larger room, the art on the easel suggests that Stettheimer painted in this space. The second photo faces another direction into this room where in the corner a mirrored folding screen partially covers a cabinet on top of which a vase filled with paintbrushes rests.

Stettheimer’s studio showcases her finished products rather than her artistic tools. Unlike other artists, she does not leave out her tools or uncompleted paintings for guests to see. She designs and decorates the room to hide the materials used to create her artwork. Most of

Stettheimer’s studio space appears dedicated to areas for sitting or entertaining guests. Known for designing her own furniture, Stettheimer took great care to design and decorate her studio to achieve her aesthetic and professional goals. The logic behind the décor does not appear to be working, but hosting and socializing.

By hiding her art-making and the tools for it, Stettheimer fabricates a new way to define or interpret the artist and their studio that involve one’s community. The depicted paintings in

Studio Party serve as the singular indication of the space’s primary purpose as a place of artistic

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creation, as artists often displayed their completed works in their studios.47 The act of

Stettheimer applying paint and developing the painting in isolation still retained significance for her. However, she designs her studio and represents it in her paintings as a space not just for isolated activity, but also for conversation and sociability.

New York Avant-Garde and Their Conversations

When the Stettheimers returned to New York City, the city was ripe for salon culture. In the early-twentieth century, living in the city became an overwhelming and anxiety-inducing experience as one was increasingly alienated from their peers. As intellectual historian Thomas

Bender notes, this experience of “the modern metropolis not only creates the need for such conversation; it also provides the means for conducting it.”48 This conversation took place in the safety of the salon, where intellectuals could find comfort in its collective nature and come to terms with the modern world around them. These conversations and ideas about modernity influenced the work of most avant-garde artists in the early-twentieth century.49

These avant-garde artists gathered in the salons organized by the Stettheimers, Walter and Louise Arensberg, and others to discuss and refine their understandings of modernity and art’s evolving definitions and limits. In her groundbreaking discussion of the New York avant- garde in the early-twentieth century, art historian Amelia Jones exposes misconceptions about this group of artists. Jones writes that scholarship on the New York avant-garde “promotes the simplistic notion of the avant-garde as a group of heroic (almost always white male) individuals

47 Both Courbet and Matisse hang completed works on the walls of their studio and place uncompleted works on easels.

48 Bender, New York Intellect, 6.

49 Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada, 1915-23 (New York: Abrams, 1994), 22-23.

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fighting unequivocally against the evils of capitalism and the dumbed-down values of its mass bourgeois culture.”50

Jones revises and re-approaches the study of the New York avant-garde through her study of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. The Baroness lived an unorthodox life which not only influenced her art but became a major part of it. Jones argues that scholars often describe the work of female artists of the avant-garde as “irrational” and describe the artists themselves as

“neurasthenic,” which are not terms normally applied to male artists or their work. According to

Jones, the response of male avant-garde figures, such as visual artist Man Ray or poet William

Carlos Williams, to the Baroness demonstrated that despite the challenges to bourgeois culture and values in their art, in point of fact, their personal lives were still deeply rooted in it.51 Jones offers a new interpretation of modernism that challenges the heroic narrative traditionally affixed to the New York avant-garde and their works.

Stettheimer’s artwork and salons countered the masculine and individualistic narrative of the New York avant-garde within its own moment. Stettheimer places conversation at the center of the painting to illustrate its importance to the work’s overarching meaning. Such dialogue educated and empowered salon guests, since “opinion evolved through collective voices; it was not dispensed in prepackaged formulas.”52 It was in a salon that ideas were cultivated and later disseminated to the public sphere. Salons held a formidable place within the history of modern art, as events during which new ideas and techniques were shared and conceptually explored by participating artists.

50 Amelia Jones, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 19.

51 Jones, Irrational Modernism, 8.

52 Bilski and Braun, Jewish Women and Their Salons, 2.

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Studio Party challenged the idea of autonomy in paint as others challenged it through words. Setting the salon in her studio and incorporating these figures from the New York avant- garde, Stettheimer attests to the significance of conversation to her art-making practice. In the lower left side of the painting, sculptor Gaston Lachaise and painter and theoretician Albert

Gleizes study one of Stettheimer newest paintings. Stettheimer arrangement of figures suggests that the guests will discuss her works of art. The inclusion of Gleizes, an art theoretician, suggests the potential for the guests to enter into a dialogue about art in a more general or broad manner. In the case of Studio Party, the nature of their location will assuredly influence the evening’s conversation. More importantly, we must consider that if Stettheimer had represented the salon in her family’s apartment, the topics for conversation would not necessarily be apparent to the viewer. As evidenced in Stettheimer’s painting, the studio is not just the location for the lone artist genius to paint but its purpose is expanded and challenged to include the people and ideas to which artists are exposed.

Conclusion

Had Stettheimer chosen to represent her salon in her family’s home, Studio Party would not have the same significance and power that it now holds. In her studio, the salon attests to the significance of conversations to Stettheimer’s creative process. These conversations play a significant role in producing new works like Studio Party itself. Unlike her male predecessors, she does not picture her studio so as to make claims regarding her individual genius. Matisse and

Courbet depict their studios as sacred spaces in which they were inspired. While Courbet’s studio features guests like Stettheimer’s, his guests are there to watch and remain inactive participants. Stettheimer challenges these conventional understandings of the studio to represent

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the active role her guests play. While they are not physically adding to her paintings or instructing her how to compose them, Stettheimer speaks to the significance of their ideas.

For Stettheimer, the studio became the space in which she and her community of artists and creative individuals could discuss the critical issues and themes circulating within the New

York art world—issues like authorship and originality. The salon proved to be the starting point for the artist’s process of making art that engaged in these themes. By putting it at the heart of her studio and her painting, Studio Party championed a form of modernism that countered the heroic masculinity associated with depictions of male artists’ studios.

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CHAPTER 3

FAUX NAÏVE: A COLLECTIVE APPROACH TO STYLE

Characteristic of Florine Stettheimer’s work is her idiosyncratic style. Stettheimer relies on pastel pinks and curvilinear forms to create fantastical scenes. After her return to New York,

Stettheimer rejected any sense of realism or naturalism and depicted people and space as though she had never been trained to do so. For example, in Studio Party the people stand on impossibly small feet and ankles and their bodies are unnaturally thin and elongated. As evidenced by

Juliette Roche Gleizes’s neck and the depiction of Stettheimer’s own forearm, the artist relied upon line rather than form to communicate shape. She approaches the setting with efficiency and, yet, fancy. Against a backdrop of pink, carefully executed marks distinguish the bottom ruffle of the curtain where it meets the floor. A high horizon line negates a clear linear perspective of the studio. Instead, the perspective forces the subject matter close to the picture plane, underscoring how this scene is the product of memory and imagination rather than observation.

Starting in 1915, Stettheimer develops a faux naïve style that responded to the greater modernist search for “authenticity.” Studio Party serves as one of Stettheimer’s first paintings that fully embodies her new style. In adopting this style, Stettheimer rejected the academy’s focus on individual style and genius. Instead, she adopted an approach that undermined the idea of expertise and evoked folk art, with all its populist connotations. In this way, in addition to pushing back against gendered ideas about artistic genius at the level of subject matter, she also pushed back against them at the level of style. As she replaced the individual male artist painting with a salon of intellectuals conversing, so she replaced a clean polished style with an approach seemingly anyone could have made.

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The Academy and Skill

Stettheimer purposefully chose this faux naïve style. Indeed, she easily could have adopted a different approach: throughout her life she received extensive artistic training and honed her pictorial skills. In her teens, she began to copy other works of art to cultivate her draftsmanship. Early studies (figures 16 & 17) demonstrate her acute attention to the contours formed by light and shadow. Her later study of a nude (figure 18) demonstrates a significant understanding of the academic tradition. The model stands on a pedestal in a pose similar to classical sculptures. However, Stettheimer does not idealize her female subject. Instead, she presents a realistic human figure with a bulging belly and pubic hair. Stettheimer explores the gradation of color along the model’s body, highlighting her shins and the curve of her thighs. She captures her model’s height quite accurately with almost no disproportionate body parts.

Her early work demonstrated an acute awareness of, and talent for, the skills and techniques taught in academic institutions. Academic art emerged in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and held sway well into the nineteenth and even early-twentieth centuries.

When students first entered the École des Beaux-Arts, they perfected the skill of depicting light and shadow by studying and making copies of sculptures. After significant drawing practice, students entered the atelier of a master artist, where they began learning how to paint according to widely held standards, such as accurate linear perspective, idealized bodies and spaces, and imperceptible brushwork. The success and livelihood of these academically trained artists depended on recognition at the official Salon since the event attracted potential customers or patrons.

American academies espoused similar practices and conventions as their European counterparts. The National Academy of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

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functioned in a similar manner to the École des Beaux-Arts, where students started with intensive training in drawing and copying before beginning to study and depict live models. Art historian Joshua C. Taylor notes that the National Academy of Design formed in 1825 as “each young artist harbored the dream of becoming an American genius in the great procession of

Western culture.”53

Naïve Veracity

Stettheimer’s style countered this academic approach. The draftsmanship and emphasis on line of the early drawings discussed above were absent in her later style. Likewise, Studio

Party shows little evidence of an awareness of perspective, with the scene occurring close to the picture plane. Indeed, the back of the party appears just as close to the viewer as the table at the bottom of the composition. Her figures appear abstracted with minimal detail to their faces or bodies. The simple lines, lack of depth, visible brushwork, and non-natural color departed from the academic model and, instead, mimic the style of folk artists or artists that emulated the art of children.

Take, for example, The Quilting Party (figure 19), which is an unknown artist’s painted copy of an illustration from Gleason’s Pictorial (printed 1854). This painting depicts a quilting bee or a gathering of women to work collectively on a quilt in present day West Virginia.54

Despite the task at hand, this room is depicted as a space of sociability, with neighbors talking and interacting with one another. The unknown folk artist’s style avoids distinctive modeling of the figures’ faces, proper body proportions, and a realistic perspective. The style evokes the

53 Joshua C. Taylor, “The Academic Tradition,” in Academy: The Academic Tradition in American Art (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975), 28.

54 Nina Fletcher Little, American Folk Art from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection (Williamsburg, Virginia: Colonial Williamsburg, 1966), 15.

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artist’s fervor for the event; a naturalistic style is less important to the artist than one that conveys the overall nature or emotion of the scene. Rather than represent each figure according to their exact likeness, the artist instead places greater emphasis on depicting their actions or interactions with others. While it may be less to true to the naturalism of their physical likeness,

The Quilting Party offers a more comprehensive interpretation of the event. The artist documents the cooperative and collective nature of folk art and the way in which it is intertwined with a tradition of sociability. The artist’s style connotes a sense of “authenticity” through their lack of training. By mimicking this style, Stettheimer rejected her academic training and the notion of skill that the academy espoused. Stettheimer’s style turned to embrace the characteristics or qualities that looked like anyone could have made it. While Stettheimer likely looked to folk art as she developed her style, she also likely looked to theories and ideas outside of the discipline of art.

This idea of a “universal” or “collective” style that emerged in Stettheimer’s work at this time resonated with broader reconceptualizations of the self at the turn of the twentieth century.

In his 1890 book, The Principles of Psychology, American philosopher William James became one of the first American authors to attempt to define the self. This text became widely popular across the United States.55 Stettheimer would have been well aware of James’s work, for Ettie

Stettheimer, who held a bachelors and masters in psychology, wrote her dissertation on William

James at the Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg in Breisgau, Germany.56

55 Art Historian Barbara Bloemink mentions the widespread popularity in James’s psychology as Stettheimer and her family took up interest in the discipline. See Bloemink, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer, 55. See William James, “Consciousness of the self,” in The Principles of Psychology (New York: H. Holt, 1890).

56 Bloemink, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer, 12.

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James defines the self in epistemological terms. Writing in gender-biased terms, he understands one’s selfhood as the “sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account.”57 He then divides this expansive self into three separate components: the material self, the social self, and the spiritual self.58 The “material self” refers to one’s physical appearance as well as his family and property. James claims that one feels the same emotion or personal connection to say a family member as they feel to themselves. In society, each person had a definition of self, their social self as James termed it, that coincides with their friend or associate’s image or definition of oneself.59 Thus, one has numerous versions of oneself that corresponds to the number of individuals or groups that one interacts in. The last part of the self, the spiritual, examines one’s

60 subjective understanding of their personality, and unwavering values or morals. Studio Party exhibits this understanding of selfhood in both its subject and its style. Rather than display and foreground her training and skill, she adopted a faux-naïve approach that—like the group portrait it depicts—emphasized the significance of the group or collective.

Anti-academic styles like Stettheimer’s strove to connote authenticity as a means to challenge and deny the “corrupting” influence of Western civilization. For a modern artist like

Paul Gauguin, the search for authenticity informed his interest in, and paintings of, non-western cultures, which we now understand as primitivizing. This search drove the artist to leave Europe

57 James, “Consciousness of the self,” 291.

58 James, “Consciousness of the self,” 292.

59 James, “Consciousness of the self,” 293.

60 James, “Consciousness of the self,” 291-297.

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for the French colonial island of Tahiti to find a place free of the economics and “respectability” required in his Parisian bourgeois life.61 Indeed, one of his main goals was to avoid European economic conditions.62 As art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau writes, Gauguin’s hunt for authenticity in his artwork often mythologized its exotic subjects, and even the artist, as it falsifies their actual relationship and its exploitative nature.63 Indeed, Tahiti was more “civilized” than the artist expected and thus, his artwork manifests and visualizes the colonial and patriarchal sentiments powering his primitivist goals.

Many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists, including Stettheimer, looked to and appropriated “untrained” sources as part of a rejection of traditional conventions in

Western art. Seeing Western art and civilization as corrupt, these artists embraced any and all practices that they perceived to be “innocent” of these corrupting influences. Thus, Gauguin went to Tahiti, the Fauves studied African masks, and Die Brücke appropriated tribal art from

African and Oceanic cultures. Art historians Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten help us see the politics of this move. Although these artists valorized children, the mentally ill, the untrained, and cultures outside of the Western tradition, they did so because they saw them as simple,

“primitive,” and “uncivilized.”64

Stettheimer’s goal was to develop an approach that spoke to the “collective unconscious” and, in turn, reflected her the multiplicity of voices involved in her art-making process. While

61 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist Modernism,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, 313-330. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 315.

62 Paul Gauguin, Lettres de Gauguin à sa femme et ses amis, ed. Maurice Malingue (Paris: 1946), 184 quoted in Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native,” 320.

63 Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native,” 314.

64 Antliff and Leighton, “Primitive,” 217.

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Stettheimer adopted her faux-naïve approach with the seemingly harmless intention to tap into an anti-bourgeois style, we can now see the dangers of this approach. Working at the same time as

Stettheimer, fellow American art groups like the Ash Can School also rejected their academic training as a demonstration of their independence and freedom to express their subjectivity or artistic concepts.65 Ash Can School artist Robert Henri stated that skill, as taught by formal institutions such as the National Academy of Design, restrained artists from rooting their artwork in the world around them.66 While the Ash Can artists were interested in representing urban realities, Stettheimer was interested in tapping into a collective humanity. But for all these artists, the goal was to expand the possibilities of art making beyond academic strictures.

Challenging the Genius Model

Stettheimer employs this “authentic,” universal style to challenge ideas of the solitary genius artist. The academic tradition she operated within prior to 1915 did not account for the shared experiences of the artist with other members of the New York avant-garde community that influenced their artistic process. While skill or stylistic expertise served her male counterparts, Stettheimer approached her subject matter with a style that reflected the importance of other people to her art-making process. She engages this authentic style to uphold the collective values of her approach and thereby, challenges the individualistic nature of the male artist-genius’s artistic practice.

Art historian Linda Nochlin writes that it is not an inferiority of artistic skill or mind that continuously hinders the progress of female artists, but rather the institutions and societal

65 Robert Henri, “The New York Exhibition of Independent Artists,” The Craftsman 18, (1910): 160.

66 While he does not state the National Academy of Design by name, it was the reigning institution that guided Americans on the state and value of contemporary art. He became a member of the Academy in 1906.

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conditions.67 In turn, the qualities of “greatness” or “genius” are only available to male artists who can conform to the values of dominating powers in society. According to Nochlin, art history favors individual narratives of artists that credit them with genius qualities, but do not question the actual art-making conditions of their period. These male artists develop styles that epitomized skill, based on their access to institutions or other privileged support, which in turn enables them to develop an individualistic narrative around themselves and their art even if they remain a part of a group, movement, institution, etc. Thus, we see that the solitary lone male genius in the studio is a constructed myth. Via her faux-naïve style, Stettheimer rejected this model and prioritized the intuitive and the collective over the skilled and trained.

Conclusion

Studio Party became one of the first paintings Stettheimer completed in her new, faux naïve style. She carefully chooses this style in a conscious rejection of the academic art tradition and the skill academic institutions taught. She demonstrated that skill is not the be-all and end-all of art and, in fact, artists at this time explored how to divorce their style of its training to create one more “authentic.” Many artists, like Gauguin, employed formal devices appropriated from non-Western cultures to achieve an “authentic” style that rejected a connection to the bourgeois,

European tradition and economic conditions. Looking less so at the tribal art of African or

Oceanic cultures that male counterparts looked to, Stettheimer adopted a seemingly untrained style that anyone could employ that reflected her collective and shared practice. In turn, this style mirrors William James’s popular psychology that reconceptualized selfhood at the turn of the century. Stettheimer challenged the traditional notion of the lone male artist-genius in the studio

67 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTnews, January 1971.

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by offering an expanded interpretation of artistic practice, as it relates to style and notions of selfhood in the early twentieth century.

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CONCLUSION

This thesis provides essential insight into the influence and inspiration of conversation on the New York avant-garde. In Studio Party, Stettheimer exposes not only how important these salon gatherings were to artists as social outlets, but as arts incubators. Indeed, these salons, as depicted in Studio Party, demonstrate that Stettheimer was a force in establishing this type of salon among the avant-garde. As the community gathered at these New York salons, conversations centered on the most pressing issues in the art world at that time – such as shifting understandings of authorship, originality, and even art-making. At events like Stettheimer’s, the responses or actions by her guests informed her future work. If the reception of her other paintings at her salon inspired Studio Party, then we can assume that the salon in the studio inspired other works by Stettheimer even if they do not explicitly picture salons.

Through this study into Stettheimer’s engagement with the New York avant-garde in the early twentieth century, we can surmise that salons and their conversations played a role in the art-making process for other artists, too. Despite ideas about authorship and originality that circulated throughout this community, the scholarship on male artists, like Duchamp, prioritizes his work and creative genius. Only recently have scholars begun to uncover the role other artists played in his work. The history of art, including the art of the New York avant-garde, conventionally highlights works and artists that exhibit seemingly modernist values like originality and innovation. My study of Stettheimer provides an entryway into studying the New

York avant-garde in a way that prioritizes the role that community and conversation played within it.

Indeed, the scholarship on Stettheimer has relied on biography, asserted that she worked independently from any influences, and so, isolated her from the broader cultural milieu at the

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time. Studying the significance of the salon and the individuals in the painting offers new insight into the social and professional contexts in which Stettheimer operated. Previous approaches marginalized her from her community when, in fact, Stettheimer’s artistic practice directly involved her peers and other creative figures associated with the New York avant-garde in the early-twentieth century. Stettheimer directly challenged the traditions of male artists before her, and even around her, to create new styles and subjects that reframed artistic practice. While other scholars tend to distinguish her role as a salonière from her role as an artist, Studio Party enables us to see how her dual roles were mutually supportive.

As an artist and salonière working at the turn of the twentieth century, Stettheimer rejected academic training and so the constraints and values of male dominated institutions. In this way, her artistic pursuits were of a piece with broader socio-political movements at the time.

In 1920, Congress ratified the 19th amendment that endowed American women with the right to vote. From 1917 to 1919, women took a particularly active approach to campaigning for their rights, including organizing parades, protests, and picketing events outside government buildings such as the White House. Stettheimer painted Studio Party at the height of the movement’s activism, as the Suffragists fought for their cause more publicly. Whether Stettheimer chose to adopt her new style with these feminist imperatives in mind is uncertain. But her life and art championed intuition, community, and other values that departed from earlier artists’ emphasis on individuality, skill, and originality. As both an artist and a salonnière, then, Stettheimer played a critical role in the development of American modernism—one whose impact remains to be fully appreciated and underscored.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations are not reproduced in the online version of this thesis. They are available in the hard copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources

Center, Art Department, Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, D.C.

Figure 1: Florine Stettheimer, Studio Party, or Soirée, c. 1917-1919, oil on canvas, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Figure 2: Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas,1656, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid

Figure 3: Florine Stettheimer, The Cathedrals of Art, 1942, oil on canvas, Gift of Ettie Stettheimer, 1953, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Figure 4: Florine Stettheimer, Family Portrait Number 1, 1915, oil on canvas, Gift of the Estate of Ettie Stettheimer, 1967, Columbia University of the City of New York

Figure 5: Stettheimer, Studio Party, detail

Figure 6: Florine Stettheimer, Nude Self-Portrait, ca. 1915-1916, oil on canvas, Gift of the Estate of Ettie Stettheimer, 1967, Columbia University of the City of New York

Figure 7: Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Figure 8: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, La Maja Desnuda, c. 1797-1800, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado

Figure 9: Carl Sprinchorn, sketch of The Stettheimer Salon (1944), watercolor and ink on paper. Estate of Florine Stettheimer, Joseph Solomon, Executor

Figure 10: Rembrandt van Rijn, Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain

Figure 11: Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, [post 1950 reproduction of 1917 original], 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Gift (by exchange) of Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Figure 12: Gustave Courbet, L'Atelier du peintre. Allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique et morale (The Artist's Studio, a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life), 1854-1855, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay

Figure 13: Henri Matisse, The Red Studio, fall 1911, oil on canvas, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, The Museum of Modern Art 40

Figure 14: Peter Juley, interior of Stettheimer’s Beaux Arts Building duplex studio apartment. Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, the Photograph Archives of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Figure 15: Peter Juley, interior of Stettheimer’s Beaux Arts Building duplex studio apartment. Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, the Photograph Archives of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Figure 16: Florine Stettheimer, early drawings, late-1880s, Flat Box 269, Florine Stettheimer Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Figure 17: Florine Stettheimer, early drawings, late-1880s. Flat Box 269, Florine Stettheimer Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Figure 18: Florine Stettheimer, Nude Studies, 1890s, oil on canvas on mounted wood, Gift of the Estate of Ettie Stettheimer, 1967, Columbia University of the City of New York

Figure 19: The Quilting Party, 1854-1900, oil on paper, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection

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