Love Flight of a Pink Candy Heart: Paintings by Florine Stettheimer from the Columbia University Collection

A new exhibition, Love Flight of a Pink Candy Heart: Paintings by Florine Stettheimer from the Columbia University Collection, presents paintings and watercolors by the American artist Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) that show how this idiosyncratic avant garde artist bridged the realms of high art and high fashion.

Her own private, privileged world inspired a personal and very private art that was seldom seen by the public in her day. But the impressive salon she cultivated for leading figures in the arts in New York brought her work respect and admiration. A full retrospective exhibition was mounted at the Museum of Modern Art two years after her death. 

On display are 24 works drawn from the collection received by the University in 1967 from the bequest of the artist's sister Ettie. The exhibition has been organized by Leah Dickerman, Karin Miller and Susan Tandler, graduate students in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, and Johanna Drucker, assistant professor.

Florine Stettheimer was born in Rochester, N.Y., and received artistic training in Europe. with her mother and two sisters, Carrie and Ettie, she settled in Manhattan just before World War I. Frequent visitors to their Alwyn Court apartment in the period of artistic ferment from 1914 to 1944 included Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Virgil Thomson and Cecil Beaton. The artist gained her widest public attention when Thomson invited her to design the sets and costumes for the 1934 premiere of his operatic collaboration with Gertrude Stein on "Four Saints in Three Acts."

"Intensely private, she chose as her subjects the people and obiects that constituted her household, often sketching throughout family gatherings," said Professor Drucker. "She was reluctant to part with any of her highly autobiographical work and never sold a painting. She said that 'letting other people have your paintings is like letting them wear your clothes.'"

In the only solo exhibition held during her lifetime, at M. Knoedler & Co. in New York in 1916, she insisted that the gallery be redecorated to recall her family home, complete with a copy of the diaphonous fringed canopy over her bed. In addition to the Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 1946, exhibitions since her death have been held at Durlacher Bros. Gallery in 1948 and at Columbia in 1973. Her paintings are in a number of public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.

"Stettheimer's work challenges the conventions of art history," said Professor Drucker. "She traveled in avant-garde artistic circles, but she was aloof from the artistic mainstream."

Included in the exhibition are "Family Portrait No. 1" and two versions of the family's summer home, Andre Brook, works demonstrating her preoccupation with domestic life. "Spring," "Bathers," "Parasols" and a study for "Love Flight of a Pink Candy Heart" reveal her fascination with the stylistic modes promoted by fashion magazines, while the evening boating party depicted in "Fete on the Lake" shows her involvement with the life of what would today be called "the beautiful people." The startling, stylized portraits of herself and her sister Ettie make use of decorative details in her characteristic display of brilliant color.

Concurrently with the Wallach show, a group of Stettheimer landscape paintings will be on view in the Florine Stettheimer Gallery (Rare Book Reading Room) in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia.