Florine Stettheimer: A Biography

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

This first full biography confirms Florine Stettheimer as one of the 20th century's most significant, progressive artists whose work remains highly relevant today. Stettheimer was a feminist, multi-media artist who painted several sexually explicit, political, identity-issue-based works and documented New York City's growth as the centre of cultural life, finance, and entertainment between the World Wars.

During her first 40 years in Europe, Florine Stettheimer studied academic painting and was aware of all the earliest modernist styles prior to most American artists. Returning to New York, she and her sisters led an acclaimed Salon for major avant-garde cultural figures including Duchamp, the Stieglitz circle, poets, dancers, writers, etc. During her life she showed her innovative paintings in over 46 of the most important museum exhibits and Salons, wrote poetry, designed unique furniture and gained international fame for her sets and costumes for the avant-garde opera, 4 Saints in 3 Acts.

Reviews

"Stettheimer's work, like her personal life, has suffered from a dearth of rigorous, good-faith appraisals, and because it isn't easily lumped in with the era's major movements, it was written off as lovely but ultimately unclassifiable and therefore a blip in art history. Barbara Bloemink's new biography, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer, rectifies this by engaging with the work on its own terms, rather than by stretching it to fit prefabricated discourses on American modern art."-- "The Nation"
"Bloemink produced one of the first definitive biographies, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer (1995). Now, with Florine Stettheimer: A Biography, Bloemink updates, corrects, and expands her previous opus. . . . Her writing is suffused with the joie de vivre often attributed to her subject matter."-- "Bookforum"

Author Bio

Considered the expert scholar on Florine Stettheimer's work, Barbara Bloemink has written extensively on her and co-curated the artist's 1995 Whitney Museum Retrospective. Formerly the director and chief of five art museums including the Smithsonian's National Design Museum and Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, she has curated over 70 exhibitions, published extensively, lectured and taught internationally on art and design. She received a Ph.D. from Yale University.