{"data":{"id":"1288","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":1288,"topgoose_id":781,"tms_id":1288,"display_name":"Florine Stettheimer","sort_name":"Stettheimer Florine","display_date":"1871–1944","begin_date":"1871","end_date":"1944","biography":"\u003cp\u003eA painter, poet, and designer, Florine Stettheimer was a central figure in the modernist avant-garde circles of New York between the two world wars. She began her formal training at the Art Students League in 1892 and continued studying art in Europe, where she absorbed Symbolist and Post-impressionist styles and developed a unique figuration that drew on the ornamentality of Art Deco patterns. With war impending, Stettheimer returned to New York in 1914 and soon began hosting a salon with her two sisters in their Upper West Side apartment. The salon cultivated a vibrant community of artists, literati, and European expatriates, many of whom appear in Stettheimer’s portraits, including\u0026nbsp;\u003ca href=\"/artists/1715\"\u003eMarcel Duchamp\u003c/a\u003e,\u0026nbsp;\u003ca href=\"/artists/1075\"\u003eMan Ray\u003c/a\u003e,\u0026nbsp;\u003ca href=\"/artists/344\"\u003eCharles Demuth\u003c/a\u003e,\u0026nbsp;\u003ca href=\"/artists/1276\"\u003eEdward Steichen\u003c/a\u003e, and\u0026nbsp;\u003ca href=\"/artists/13244\"\u003eCarl Van Vechten\u003c/a\u003e.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStettheimer created fantastic urban scenes in a decorative style that was, in many ways, opposed to the abstract and geometric forms prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s. \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/2997\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eSun\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e, for example, depicts an airy riverside promenade or rooftop with a towering bouquet of flowers radiating from its center. Rendered in curvaceous lines and intense, saturated colors, the flowers are a powerful focus of the scene and, with “Florine” written on the bow that snakes around the bouquet like a vine, suggest a stand-in for the artist herself. Indeed, Stettheimer picked a bouquet of flowers for herself each year on her birthday, and flowers often appear in her work as a kind of self-portraiture. Because she exhibited her paintings only rarely during her lifetime and refused to sell any, Stettheimer remained in relative obscurity for much of the twentieth century.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\"gray\"\u003eDana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg,\u0026nbsp;\u003ca href=\"https://shop.whitney.org/products/whitney-handbook-of-the-collection\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eHandbook of the Collection\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 367.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":true,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500011029","wikidata_id":"Q5461886","created_at":"2017-08-30T15:51:57.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-24T01:32:01.662-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/1288/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/1288/exhibitions"}}}}