Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) was a well-known New York City-based painter and designer whose studio in the Beaux-Arts building overlooked Bryant Park. With her sisters Ettie and Carrie, she held regular salons in their home on the Upper West Side, socializing with avant-garde artists and writers such as Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Stieglitz, and Leo Stein. Stettheimer initially studied at the Art Students’ League, then spent nearly 20 years in Europe with her mother and sisters, where she was exposed to early modernist art forms such as Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Expressionism, which all influenced her art. The family returned to New York with the outbreak of World War I, and in 1916 she had her first solo exhibition at Knoedler & Co. After 1918 she developed her own idiosyncratic, dance-like style that remains influential on artists today. Her paintings can be found in museum collections across the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. Paintings by Stettheimer from the Columbia University art collection have been shown in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Jewish Museum, New York, and recently at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, Germany for the first international exhibition on Stettheimer, to which Columbia was a major lender (Columbia Libraries Press Release).

Columbia University holds the largest collection of the artist’s works. The Stettheimer Collection includes over 65 paintings, drawings, and decorative arts housed in and stewarded by Art Properties, Avery Library. Highlights from the art collection include her highly-regarded 1923 portraits of herself and her sisters, and the ca.1915 painting A Model (Nude Self-Portrait). In addition, figurines for her productions of Pocahontas and Four Saints in Three Acts, as well as her sketchbooks and additional manuscripts, are housed in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Stettheimer Collection was a bequest to Columbia in 1967 from the estate of her sister Ettie, a graduate of Barnard College, and complements the Stettheimer Papers located at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The Stettheimer Collection in Art Properties is available for consultation by Columbia students, faculty, staff, and outside researchers, for curriculum-based and educational programs, research projects, and exhibition loans. For all requests and uses, contact Art Properties at artproperties@library.columbia.edu.

Click on this PDF document for more information on the art work by Stettheimer in the Art Properties collection.

To learn more about the materials housed in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, consult their finding aid (RBML Finding aid).

Print Resources

For more information about Stettheimer and her art work, consult the sample bibliography below. Links to records in CLIO have been provided for books in the Columbia University Libraries. This is not a complete bibliography; researchers also should consult periodical indexes and databases for more information. All books in Avery Fine Arts unless otherwise indicated.

Bloemink, Barbara J. Friends and Family: Portraiture in the World of Florine Stettheimer. Katonah, NY: Katonah Museum of Art, 1993. Exh. Cat.
ND239 St46 B62

Bloemink, Barbara J. The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
ND239 St46 B623

Bloemink, Barbara J. “Crystal Flowers, Pink Candy Hearts, and Tinsel Creation: The Subversive Femininity of Florine Stettheimer.” In Women Artists and the Decorative Arts, 1880-1935: The Gender of Ornament, eds. Bridget Elliott and Janice Helland. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, c2002.
N72 F3 W844

Bloemink, Barbara J. “Florine Stettheimer: Becoming Herself.” In Singular Women: Writing the Artist, eds. Kristen Frederickson & Sarah E. Webb. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
N72 F3 Si64

Columbia University in the City of New York. Florine Stettheimer: An Exhibition of Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings. New York: Columbia University, 1973. Exh. Cat.
ND239 St46 St46

McBride, Henry. Florine Stettheimer. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946. Exh. Cat.
N1000 N4M9 N48 1946f

Stettheimer, Florine, with Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo, eds. Crystal Flowers: Poems and a Libretto. Toronto: BookThug, 2010.
Butler Stacks: PR9195.72 S84 2010

Sussman, Elisabeth. Florine Stettheimer: Still Lifes, Portraits and Pageants, 1910-1942. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1980. Exh. Cat.
ND239 St46 F66

Sussman, Elisabeth and Barbara J. Bloemink, eds. Florine Stettheimer: Manhattan Fantastica. New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1995. Exh. Cat.
ND239 St46 Su82

Tyler, Parker. Florine Stettheimer: A Life in Art. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963.
ND237 S75 T9