Support Independent Arts Journalism As an independent publication, we rely on readers like you to fund our journalism and keep our reporting and criticism free and accessible to all. If you value our coverage and want to support more of it, consider becoming a member today. With her brighter-than-life color palette, deliciously unrealistic sense of proportion, and tendency to apply paint like cake frosting, it can be hard to believe that Florine Stettheimer depicted her real friends and everyday life in her paintings.
But for Stettheimer (1871–1944), there wasn’t much of a difference between art and life. Generationally wealthy and unmarried, Stettheimer enjoyed more freedom from the constraints of capitalism and patriarchy than the average woman her age. Her unconventional lifestyle led to close friendships with a number of artists, dancers, and art critics, many of whom were LGBTQ+, and while Stettheimer’s own sexuality is largely unknown to us today, her artistic and social life has been widely interpreted as embracing a kind of queer, Modernist utopia.
Stettheimer treated her studio in the Beaux-Arts Building in Manhattan, overlooking Bryant Park, like a three-dimensional extension of her painted worlds, filling it with her artworks and furniture she designed and often painted herself. Her bed, for example, was covered in a massive lace canopy, like the one she painted over her sleeping self-portrait in the c. 1920 painting “Music.
” These parallel details allow.