Florine Stettheimer: New Directions in Multimodal Modernism

This collection of essays explores the multimodality of the work of Jazz-era New York saloniere, painter, and poet Florine Stettheimer, allowing readers to discover why Andy Warhol once called her his favourite artist. Florine Stettheimer: New Directions in Multimodal Modernism brings to light the prescient theorizing of a dissolution between high and low art that Stettheimer’s highly original and boldly interdisciplinary aesthetic pioneered and that artists like Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O'Keeffe and Warhol understood and admired.

Conceived of as a companion collection to the 2010 edition of Stettheimer’s Crystal Flowers: Poems and a Libretto, this book considers the paintings, poetry, set design, and salon culture cultivated by Florine Stettheimer and her sisters Carrie and Ettie in New York between 1915-1935. It also considers the use of art to expand the boundaries of gender, age, and identity through self-representation. Through diverse theoretical lenses, leading international and emerging scholars shift our understanding of women’s modernism and the history of women’s art by focusing on a distinct multimodal aesthetic that includes visual images, literature, and queered bodies and culture. These essays situate Stettheimer in terms of the renewed interest in her work resulting first in the 2010 edition of her poems, and then two widely acclaimed 2017 Stettheimer retrospectives at The Jewish Museum in New York City and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

With contributions by Barbara Bloemink, Georgiana Uhlyarick, Chelsea Olsen, Zach McCann-Armitage, Patricia Allmer, Lesley Higgins, Aaron Tucker, Melba Cuddy-Keane, Jason Wang, Cinti Cristia, David Dorenbaum, Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo.