The Interior World of Florine Stettheimer

Though she was a highly prolific painter and an exceedingly well-connected individual, Florine Stettheimer only participated in one solo exhibition at a traditional gallery during her career; relatively early on. Subsequently, she preferred to house her paintings within the confines of her two midtown Manhattan apartments: Her artist’s loft on West 40th Street and the larger residence she shared with her mother and sisters at the famous Alwyn Court building on West 58th Street. These apartments served a dual function as private residences and semi-public gallery spaces; sites of congregation where her paintings were on permanent display for the viewing pleasure of interwar New York’s avant-garde intelligentsia. The use of her homes as self-run galleries granted Stettheimer the unique advantage of complete aesthetic control over her exhibition space. Stettheimer used this advantage to display her paintings within elaborately lacquered and gilded interiors almost fully furnished with frames and furniture of the artist’s own design. Additional decorations included copious amounts of lace, cellophane, and artificial flowers. In her interior and furniture design, Stettheimer invented a singular visual language that synthesized elements of various European and American avant-garde movements with Rococo design and American mass culture. She also achieved a totally immersive exhibition style that integrated the world of her paintings into the third dimension; an early American implementation of Richard Wagner’s notion of Gesamtkunstwerk and perhaps a premonition of the rise of installation art in the mid-twentieth century.