Florine Stettheimer : “Heat” (1919)

Florine Stettheimer defies easy categorization. Growing up in a wealthy family of strong, educated women, she received extensive training in art beginning at age 15. She learned to paint traditionally at the Art Students League in New York from 1892-1895. In 1906 she traveled to Europe with her family, where she encountered the modernists and experimented in a variety of newer styles, including Symbolism, Fauvism and Pointillism. Following a 1912 production of L’Aprés-Midi d’un Faune by the Ballets Russe in Paris, she embarked on an inventive career as a theatrical designer.

She returned to New York in 1914. Following an unsuccessful solo exhibition in 1916, she developed a uniquely feminine, faux naïf style, characterized by elongated figures, stage-like settings and bold, unmixed color. These mature works, beloved for their idiosyncratic subjects and eccentric humor, reflect her experiences and observations of fashionable urban life in Jazz Age America. Her financial independence allowed her to shun the art market, but at the expense of publicity for her work.

According to The Brooklyn Museum, Heat “shows the five women of the Stettheimer family. Mother Rosetta appears at the top in a black dress, and she’s accompanied by her four daughters: Stella (also in black), Carrie (in yellow), Ettie (in flowered pink) and Florine herself (in white). All five women look like they’re drooping from the heat, and so are the branches of the willow trees behind them and the cherry blossoms in a vase on the table. Stettheimer painted Heat to commemorate the summer of 1918, which the family spent at a rented country house in Bedford Hills, New York. Although she was inspired by a specific date and occasion — her mother’s birthday, as noted on the cake at the bottom! — time and place are ambiguous in this scene. The Stettheimer sisters appear ageless, or at least much younger than they really were in 1918.”