The Stetties: Florine Stettheimer and Her Sisters
Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944), painter, poet, designer, and the subject of the Jewish Museum’s current exhibition Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry, was the fourth of five children born to a wealthy Jewish couple, Joseph and Rosetta Walter Stettheimer. The father, a banker, deserted the household early on, but thanks to Rosetta’s inheritance the family continued to live in comfort and independence, spending significant time living abroad before settling in New York City in 1914 after the onset of World War I.
Florine Stettheimer’s relationship with her sisters Carrie (Caroline, 1869–1944) and Ettie (Henrietta, 1875–1955) revolved around their shared love of the arts. Despite their privilege and wealth, the sisters held a marginalized position in their social sphere as Jewish women and were forced to carve out their own space. As a family they hosted salons in their Manhattan apartment that brought together some of the brightest avant-garde American and European expatriate artists at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The three Stettheimer sisters, referred to fondly as the “Stetties,” were empowered to pursue their unique paths. They were the definition of the new woman — the first feminists of the early-twentieth century — who “declared men impossible but worthy of flirtation…they wore pants, smoked cigarettes, disdained marriage, romance and children, and were constantly surrounded by artists,” as one critic noted.
The sisters never married and lived in a lavish apartment in Alwyn Court on West 58th Street together with their mother from 1926. They regularly organized sumptuous parties for friends that were part art exhibition, part intellectual salon, with such illustrious guests as the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, the society photographer and Harlem Renaissance patron Carl Van Vechten, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, and the photographer and modern art gallerist Alfred Stieglitz.
A trio of portraits by Florine depicts herself and her two sisters circa 1923, represented in attitudes that express their inner selves — an idea with roots in Symbolist painting of the late-nineteenth century. Florine was already 52 years old when she painted Portrait of Myself, an idealization of the artist as a sort of priestess: hovering on her red cape against a milky white background punctuated only by a stylized sun, a bouquet of flowers, and her name written in twirling script in the sky.
Stettheimer’s portrait of her younger sister Ettie places her in a dark, starlit setting in front of a combination burning bush-Christmas tree, perhaps to signify the family’s cultural assimilation as Jews who celebrated Christmas. Like Florine, the subject also appears to be floating in space, lounging on a red fainting couch. An ornament on the tree, a red book inscribed with the name “Ettie,” represents Ettie’s role as the author and intellectual of the family. All three Stettheimer sisters were extremely intelligent but Ettie was highly educated—collecting degrees at Columbia College, Barnard, and a Ph.D. at the University of Fribourg. To conceal her gender, Ettie authored novels under the pseudonym “Henrie Waste.”
Stettheimer presents her elder sister Carrie in a formal gown posing near her dollhouse, framed by theatrical curtains. In the background, the family sits together at a long table while a country estate recedes in the distance. While Florine painted and Ettie wrote novels, Carrie’s lifework was maintaining the family’s affairs, acting as the gracious host and caretaker. In the 1920s, Carrie began work on a dollhouse-sized recreation of the Stettheimer home in minute detail and continued to work on it for over 25 years. Now on permanent view at the Museum of the City of New York, the dollhouse is complete with original works of art from their artist friends, including a miniscule copy of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, weaving together the fashion and style of New York’s Jazz Age in miniature form.
The quiet luxury of the Stettheimers’ lives was infused with fantasy in Florine’s colorful paintings or, perhaps the reverse was true, and the power of the three sisters’ whimsy was captured in her paint. The importance of Florine’s social sphere and especially the tight bond with her sisters is inextricably tied to her body of work. In fact, if it weren’t for Ettie, very little of Florine’s art would survive today. On her deathbed, Florine instructed her sister to destroy all of her paintings, the record of their lives. But in an act of defiance characteristic of the youngest child, Ettie ignored this request and devoted herself to her sister’s legacy, bequeathing the works to schools, museums, and of course, friends, now reunited in the exhibition of more than 50 paintings and drawings at the Jewish Museum.
THEY LIKE A WOMAN
They like a woman
to have a mind
they are of greater interest
they find
They are not very young
women of that
kind– Florine Stettheimer
Florine Stettheimer: Paining Poetry is on view at the Jewish Museum through September 24. All summer, celebrate Stettheimer and the Jazz Age on 5th Ave with complimentary same-day admission to the Museum of the City of New York (on 5th Ave at 103rd Street) to view the Stettheimer Dollhouse with same-day Jewish Museum admission ticket. Jewish Museum Members can enjoy complimentary admission to the Museum of the City of New York and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (on 5th Ave at 91st Street), now featuring the exhibition The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s through August 20. Present a valid Jewish Museum membership card for complimentary cardholder admission (regular ticket prices apply for guests of members).
– Victoria Reis, Digital Marketing Associate
