Florine Stettheimer
Wonderful Female Painters
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Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944)
Spring Sale at Bendel’s (1921)
Florine Stettheimer belonged to the intellectual circles of the New York society. And maybe she was better known for her social life than for her works.
With an independent spirit, doing something that looked like no style or movement in fashion, she dedicated to paint scenes of events, parties, picnics, big stores, the consumption culture and the unconcerned life of the society that enjoyed the delights of economic prosperity of the 20s.
But that society awoke from the beautiful dream with the economic crisis that unleashed in 1929, and so her representations turned out to be more ironic, critical. An example, in one of her works she calls the luxurious shops of the Fifth Avenue such as Tiffany’s “The Cathedrals of the Fifth Avenue.” Elegant, stylized, eccentric characters. And some of them androgynous characters of indiscernible sexuality, as the one at the bottom right of the painting we have chosen. Luminous colors and many details that “narrate stories” with touches of humor and sensuality.
Florine made something different, not commercial, and for that reason she was not very successful and was forgotten little after her death. Her great admirer, Andy Warhol, was who rescued her memory and defended appropriately in the 60s, as he was also obsessed with consumer society.
When we see in a painting the dominant social class enjoying without worries the pleasures of life, we think of Rococo (the painting before the French Revolution). Florine Stettheimer reproduced that Rococo but with a satirical tone (the satire is a mock or critic of the habits of a group or social class) which was called later “Rococo Subversive.” A decidedly appropriate name.
Recommended links:
Wonderful Female Painters: Remedios Varo.
Wonderful Female Painters: Olga Costa.
Wonderful Female Painters: Grandma Moses.
Wonderful Female Painters: Ángeles Santos Torroella.
Wonderful Female Painters: Paula Modersohn-Becker.
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