To All Tomorrow's Parties

- Andrew Russeth

At Florine Stettheimer’s funeral, in 1944, her longtime friend Georgia O’Keeffe delivered a eulogy. Referring to Florine’s sisters, Carrie, who ran the family salon and built a famous dollhouse, and Ettie, a novelist who held a Ph.D. in philosophy, O’Keeffe said that Florine “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.”

What Stettheimer put into visible form was her wealthy family’s dazzling parties at their Manhattan home, attended by the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Carl Van Vechten, Henry McBride, and Viola and Elie Nadelman; luxurious flower arrangements, which she called eyegays; rollicking scenes at the segregated beach in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and on the water at Lake Placid in Upstate New York; and wry portraits of her sisters, their teacher, their nurse, and their friends, and best of all, herself—once as a floating pixie in a fire-red cape and black cap, another time, in 1915, as Manet’s Olympia, naked on a bed, gazing at the viewer, a painting that scholar Barbara Bloemink believes could be the first nude full-body self portrait by a professional woman artist.

In 1946 Duchamp oversaw a posthumous Stettheimer retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with more than 50 of her inimitable paintings—resplendent with the whites, pinks, and yellows she applied like cake frosting, and filled with people who are sinewy, flowing shapes, almost always engaged in some form of pleasurable activity. And then, as the story goes, Stettheimer’s name faded from view.