Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry

The Jewish Museum has just opened a show on the life and works of Florine Stettheimer. New Yorkers may know the spare, twee, peopled paintings which are sprinkled around the top institutions in town.

This exhibit gives a full portrait of woman who was academy-trained but adopted a faux-naif style to comment on the scene around her. She was born into wealth and lived her life with her mother and single sisters, after the patriarch abandoned them. She cultivated a life among the most important artists of her day, including Marcel Duchamp, who appears in several of the paintings, (even shown as his female alter ego, Rrose Selavy.) She also designed the sets and costumes for the (in)famous

Four Saints in Three Acts, Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three acts, with an

all-Black cast.

Broadway opera where the Catholic saints were portrayed by an all-Black cast.