By Jann Haynes Gilmore, PhD, AWA Board Member

If one is an art collector in an urban space where every wall is hung with art, one is prompted to overcome one’s passion (illness) for collecting because another purchase demands precious placement. On the other hand, an incredibly good “find” cannot be simply overlooked because of such a minor problem of wall space.  Such is the case of my recent auction purchase of a painting by American artist Carl Sprinchorn (1887-1971). While mindful that a friend collects Sprinchorn, I looked more closely at the photograph of the verso of the work in the catalogue. I was shocked to learn that, in his own writing, Sprinchorn had identified the image as that of his friend Caroline “Carrie” Stettheimer (1869-1944), the eldest of the three notorious Stettheimer sisters who have been almost lost to history after their lifetimes.  There were no bids on the painting, so I bought it for the estimated price.

 

 

Describing the long-ignored Stettheimer sisters is like finding more space to hang paintings; there is now a plethora of information, yet in the wider art world, they are still relatively unknown, discarded after their lifetimes spent in the avant-garde art and cultural world that swept New York City between the wars.  And why was Carl Sprinchorn painting this sister? He is best known for his scenes of northern Maine and the lumberjack working class that populated that area. My question was answered quickly when reading through his biography.  Sprinchorn was a sophisticated Swedish-born artist and student of Robert Henri, who took “abstraction to the eleventh degree”, lived off and on in New York, and energetically participated in its bohemian milieu. He is quoted as remarking, “I am a city boy-city minded.” His oeuvre, in a reserved palette, exhibits an emotional intensity that captures many “impressions of personalities” whom he knew during his lifetime. ¹

 

Carrie, Florine, and Ettie Stettheimer were from a wealthy, sophisticated Jewish background and typically traveled through Europe as so many of their class, but returned to their native state and New York City in 1914 at the start of World War I.  The sisters settled along with their mother, Rosetta, in the city as a family.  Their father, of dry goods wealth, had mysteriously abandoned them early in life, and two other siblings settled in California. Described in “perpetual maidenhood” within a “virgin culture”, the three sisters always remained girlish in nature, celebrated their birthdays without acknowledging their ages, and as good friend and composer Virgil Thomson described them: “They were preserved like royalty.” ²

The Stettheimers settled in a second floor, 14 room with 5 baths, French Renaissance apartment building called Alwyn Court at 180 West 58^th Street, near Central Park and the art hub of West 57^th Street. None of the sisters married but instead, never forgot abandonment by their father and cared for their mother until her 1944 death.  Carrie managed the household and served as hostess for the family’s many parties, inventing menus for lavish dinners including feather soup and oyster salad.  Their affairs were mostly by  invitation only in an apartment replete with gold moldings, red curtains, velvet, fringe, lace, crystal, chandeliers and Aubusson rugs.  Guests included celebrated cultural figures of the era  including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Henry McBride, Carl Van Vechten, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Alfred Barr, Marsden Hartley, Gaston Lachaise, Charles Demuth, Marguerite and William Zorach, Edward Steichen, Maurice Sterne, Elie Nadelman, Virgil Thomson, Louis Bouché, Albert Gleizes, Archipenko, Avery Hopwood, Rockwell Kent and Muriel Draper, to name just a few.

 

 

Carrie, as the eldest was the most conservative, choosing to live in the past by wearing gold and white Empire dresses, rhinestone tiaras, pearl dog collars, satin slippers and sometimes a white turban. Her personality has been compared to Olga’s “moral depression” in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a practical personality plagued with frequent headaches, indigestion and martyrdom as the stay-at-home sibling who allowed her two younger sisters independence to create in their personal worlds. Carrie corresponded with dough boys during the war but it amounted to little and while described as “warm” there exist little more about her
personality. ³

Florine (1871-1944) became the best known of the three as she left a legacy in art, theater, and poetry. [She warranted a biography published in 2022 by Yale].  Art historian Linda Nochlin is credited with reclaiming Florine’s importance in the 1960s. Florine had first studied academic art in Stuttgart, Germany when traveling with her family and is said to have been greatly influenced by the avant-garde modernism of the Ballets Russes in Paris in 1912. When the sisters returned to New York City as émigrés in 1914, Florine studied with Cox and Mowbray at the Art Students League, kept her own separate studio, became a feminist, while falling in love with the city and its many privileged indulgences. Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker quotes Florine’s pean to the city at the time:

Then back to New York
And sky towers had begun to grow
And front stoop houses started to go
And life became quite different . . .
Which I think is America having its fling
And what I should like is to paint this thing. ⁴

Gopnik points out that in the time into which the Stettheimers settled in New York they witnessed the precursor of Pop Art with its fascination for commercial culture: billboards, advertisements, performances, and department store windows, all of which influenced Florine’s artistic output, this, during the Jazz Age of Cole Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gerald Murphy.  Described as a “faux-naif”, Florine wore black velvet harem pants, often with a powdered face, and professed firm aesthetic principles.  With her magical and fantastical style, Florine’s paintings of both her beloved New York City and those within her family setting have now become recognized. Florine’s Spring Sale at Bendel’s records women grabbing for the latest fashions [one of the coterie of Stettheimer friends was Henry Bouché, the window designer at Wanamaker’s. At the time Bendel’s was considered THE department store in New York City]. In Florine’s family portraits and party scenes of the Stettheimers’ notable friends, such as Bendel’s, figures inhabit attenuated human forms with a wit and vision that seem to lampoon their entitled world. ⁵

 

Florine had one unsuccessful show of twelve works at Knoedler Gallery in 1916 where nothing sold, even though critics praised her work. She vowed never to show her work again, even with the urging of Alfred Stieglitz, simply because she did not need to do so. She wrote her own Russian Ballet, she wrote her own opera which was never produced, but much later she participated with Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson in designing the set [she introduced cellophane as a design feature] for the opera: Four Saints in Three Acts with an all Black cast.  John Housman directed the hit production that premiered in Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum and traveled to success on Broadway. With theatrical interest ever present, many of Florine’s paintings appear as stage sets, framed by curtains. ⁶

 

 

Sebastian Smee, art critic for the Washington Post, called Florine an emancipated eccentric, comparing her frenzied depictions of New York City to the later work of Saul Steinberg. Smee noted that after many years of obscurity, Florine is considered “an original” today. ⁷ It is through Florine’s artwork that the sisters’ legacy is now largely recognized.

 

 

Ettie Stetthiemer (1875-1959) was the youngest and most intellectual of the sisters, graduating from Barnard College in philosophy and attaining a PhD in Germany.  She chose personal apparel such as black velvet capes, puffy red taffeta skirts, small black brimmed hats and occasionally a red wig.  She had suitors and had romantic flings with Marcel Duchamp and Elie Nadelman but dismissed them both as shallow and narcissistic.  She preferred her power and freedom and was described as something of a recluse.  She wrote one obscure novel titled Love Days. While each sister prepared for their sought-after entertainments [Florine designed the lavish floral settings], Ettie directed the evening’s conversation, naturally encouraging juicy gossip. ⁸

 

 

Along with Florine’s artwork, the two-decades passion of Carrie Stettheimer advances the Stettheimer sisters’ legacy today.  Perhaps acting out her own inventive needs, in 1918 Carrie began a dollhouse creating in miniature the sisters’ 1920s New York avant-garde settings and artistic circle in the early 20^th century. Inspiration for the project had originated when the family summered in upstate New York and created miniature houses as a fund-raiser for young polio patients. Carrie’s dollhouse was created between 1916 to 1935 as a two-story residence containing twelve rooms that such-featured miniature artworks by such friends Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, Gaston Lachaise’s alabaster Venus sculpture, and tiny works of Alexander Archipenko, George Bellows and Marguerite Zorach.   The dollhouse contains bedrooms, a ballroom with piano, a bathroom, nursery, an elevator, and a kitchen stocked with cooking items. Carrie wove miniature rugs, carved sofas out of chalk, and re-upholstered minute furniture from F.A.O. Schwartz. She also designed Empire-era wallpaper to be compatible with the late-Victorian furniture.  As the project grew, Carrie was forced to move it to a hotel studio.

 

 

Carrie stopped working on the dollhouse upon the death of Rosetta in 1936. Serendipitously, sister Ettie, survivor of both Carrie and Florine, donated the dollhouse to the Museum of the City of New York in 1945 (the year after Carrie’s death) and completed the unfinished Ballroom and the Dining Room.  The dollhouse sparked an Empire style revival in interior design. That same year, the Museum hosted a housewarming party for the dollhouse attended many friends who had experienced Bohemia with the Stettheimers. In 2020, the Museum of the City of New York updated the exhibition by installing new rooms showcasing the dollhouse with extensive reinterpretation and intimate views, titled “Up Close.” ⁹

Fellow artist and friend Georgia O’Keeffe spoke nostalgically of all the sisters at Florine Stettheimer’s eulogy in 1944: she “put into visible form in her own way something that they all were, a way of life that is going and cannot happen again, something that has been alive in our city.” ¹⁰ The Stettheimer sisters deftly navigated the “New Woman” movement in the liberating years of the early 20^th century.  They were sophisticated, powerful and wonderfully eccentric.

Carrie, Florine and Ettie left a unique legacy which is now reclaiming its deserving place in American cultural history. Florine penned a telling poem which speaks to each sibling’s radiant  virtues as compared to men’s dull power:
We are the sunbursts
We turn rain
Into diamond fringes
Black clouds
Into pink tulle
And sparrows
Into birds of Paradise. ¹¹

My Sprinchorn portrait of Carrie Stettheimer now hangs in privacy behind a master bathroom door, a perfect location which I think Carrie would approve.

 

ENDNOTES:

1. Carl Sprinchorn, en.m.wikipedia.org
2. Watson, Steven, “Three Sisters,” Arts & Antiques, May 1992, 60-67.
3. Ibid.
4. Adam Gopnik, “What Florine Stettheimer brought to American Art,” New Yorker, February 28, 2022, 74-78. [Florine’s artwork often has been compared to the New Yorker’s famous magazine covers]
5. Ellen E. Roberts, O’Keeffe, Stettheimer, Torr, Zorach: Women Modernists in New York, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, 2016, 56-82.
6. Gopnik, p. 78.
7. Sebastion Smee, “A Sense of Liberty, but also a sense of it for artist,” Washington Post, June 11, 2023, p. E-6.
8. Watson, p. 66.
9. Katie White, “A Dollhouse Hung with Original Art, including a Tiny Duchamp, Is One of the Art World’s Best-Kept Secrets. Here’s Why,” Art History, artnet, artnet.com.
10. Roberts, Endnote 55 (Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven), p. 80
11. Gopnik, p. 78.

 ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. Carl Sprinchorn, Carrie Stettheimer, watercolor, n.d., Gilmore and Puckett Collection.
2. Florine Stettheimer, Portrait of My Sister, Carrie W. Stettheimer, oil on canvas, 1923, Avery Library, Columbia University, New York.
3. Florine, Stettheimer, New York/Liberty, oil on canvas, 1918-1919, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, whitney.org.
4. Arnold Genthe, Carrie Stettheimer, portrait photograph, elisarolle.com.
5. George Louis Robert Bouché, The Three Sisters, graphite on laid paper, 1918, Brooklyn Museum, New York.
6. Florine Stettheimer, Soirée, [bottom left: Gaston Lachaise and Albert Gleizes, Avery Hopwood and Leo Stein seated in center, Maurice Sterne upper left, and unidentified Hindu poet upper right. Florine’s nude self-        portrait stands on easel in background], oil on canvas, 1917, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Florine and Ettie Stettheimer Papers, New Haven.
7. Stettheimer Dollhouse, Carrie Stettheimer, 1945, Museum of the City of New York, mcny.org.
8. Stettheimer Dollhouse-Ballroom hung with original art, news.artnet.com.
9. Stettheimer Dollhouse: Close Up [installation], www.mcny.org.
10. Robert Henri, Portrait of Carl Sprinchorn, oil on canvas, 1910, Herbert F. Johnson. Museum of Art, Cornell University. [Sprinchorn contributed a watercolor reproduction of his painting Nijinski and Pavlova in Les Syphides, 1914, to Carrie’s dollhouse which hung over the ballroom fireplace].