page_title: Florine Stettheimer
section_title: Feminism
hierarchical_section_title: Florine Stettheimer / Feminism
caption_attribution_description: painting by Florine Stettheimer
context_page_description: Florine Stettheimer was an American modernist painter, feminist, theatrical designer, poet, and salonnière.
  Stettheimer developed a feminine, theatrical painting style depicting her friends and experiences of New York City. She painted the first feminist nude self-portrait, executed paintings depicting controversial issues of race and sexual preference, depicted the leisure activities and parties of her family and friends. With her sisters, she hosted a salon that attracted members of the avant-garde. In the mid-1930s, Stettheimer created the stage designs and costumes for Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's avant-garde opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. She is best known for her four monumental works illustrating what she considered to be New York City's "Cathedrals": Broadway, Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, and New York's three major art museums.
  During her lifetime, Stettheimer exhibited her paintings at more than 40 museum exhibitions and salons in New York and Paris. In 1938, when the curator of the Museum of Modern Art sent the first exhibition of American art to Europe, Stettheimer and Georgia O'Keeffe were the only women whose work was included.
context_section_description: During her twenties and thirties, Stettheimer engaged in flirtations and romantic relationships, and her paintings, diaries, and poems reveal her admiration for the male anatomy. However, they also demonstrate that she adamantly opposed the idea of marriage, believing like many feminists that it constricted women's freedom and interfered with creativity.
  She wore white pantaloons, which at the time were only worn by feminists and suffragettes and also provided freedom for working on larger canvases. During her years in Europe, Stettheimer and her sisters sought out theatrical productions that featured feminist themes and women performers. Among the flyers in the family scrapbooks is a copy of the proceedings of the First International Feminist Congress held in Paris in 1896. 
  In 1915, at the age of 45, Stettheimer painted a naked, over life-size self-portrait, A Model (Nude Self-Portrait). Combining elements of past controversial nudes including Manet's painting of the prostitute Olympia and Goya's Nude Maja, Stettheimer's Nude Self-Portrait is only the second known nude self-portrait by a woman that exists. Holding a flower bouquet above her blatantly painted pubic hair, Stettheimer's humorous, mocking expression in the portrait markedly contrasts with traditional paintings of nudes, making it the first openly feminist nude painted from a woman's point of view, rather than for a man's pleasure.
  The artist painted several works of unusual, female-oriented contexts such as her monumental 1921 work Spring Sale at Bendel's, in which she humorously captured wealthy women of varying body shapes trying on clothing in an expensive department store; or Natatorium Undine, which portrays nude women riding on floats or swimming on half-oyster shells. On the right, in a sexual reversal from traditional subject matter, a group of women dances around a handsome male exercise instructor whom they admire for his physical appearance.
caption: Spring Sale at Bendel's, 1920, oil on canvas
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