Announcing a new essay by art historian Barbara Bloemink: “Florine Stettheimer: Feminist Provocateur” in Hyperallergic

From the publisher: “A feminist, Florine Stettheimer understood the provocative nature of basing her compositions on the rarely seen female point of view as well as the significance of her choice to create an overtly feminine style.”

Essay Excerpt: “Florine Stettheimer didn’t talk much. During her family’s Salons, attended by New York’s avant-garde during the 1920s-early ’40s, she let her sisters lead the discussion. However, she was an acute and opinionated observer of the people and rapidly changing world around her. A feminist, Stettheimer understood the provocative nature of basing her compositions on the rarely seen female point of view as well as the significance of her choice to create an overtly feminine style. She was confident enough of her artistic mastery to repudiate it in order to develop a new, unique style of painting. Decades before other artists, Stettheimer depicted a number of challenging subjects that remain controversial and relevant today. Yet more than one hundred years after she painted the first ever full-length nude self-portrait by a professional woman artist, she continues too often to be described as an eccentric spinster, so disheartened by not selling her work at an early exhibition that she stopped exhibiting publicly and only showed her work to friends at her private salon.”

Read the essay here: “Florine Stettheimer: Feminist Provocateur”