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Kids who dream of being artists have no clear sense of where the solitary making-something-out-of-nothing aspect of the artist's life ends and the freewheeling community aspect of the artist's life begins. They see the artist as a romantic figure in a romantic setting, and that image may be so indelibly marked in their minds, and may retain so much of the comforting force of primal fantasy, that they still believe in it as adults, long after logic or experience has told them that it isn't so. Watteau is probably the only artist who's made masterpieces out of a grown-up's against-all-odds insistence on the fantastic idea that there's a seamless unity between the art, the artist and the artist's life; he made his case by analogy, using a steely delicacy and veiled yet unsparing irony to paint actors and musicians for whom being on stage and being off stage are one and the same thing. But there are artists with not a hundredth of Watteau's tarnished-silver poetry who've also made something charming out of this Peter Pan view of la vie boheme, and certainly what attracts people to the paintings that Florine Stettheimer was doing in New York in the '20s and '30s is the fun of seeing a Watteauish kind of easygoing bohemian elegance reframed in twentieth-century terms.
Stettheimer isn't a painter with whom people are generally familiar. The retrospective that's up at the Whitney Museum until November is the first museum show in New York since a memorial exhibition was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, two years after her death. But what Stettheimer lacks in name recognition is more than made up by the intensity of feeling that she's inspired from her time down to our own among a narrow band of admirers who recognize her jazz-age pastoral fantasies as precisely their own.
Stettheimer was always inclined to feel that the best audience for her work was an audience of friends, and although she exhibited in group shows she turned down a number of offers for gallery exhibitions, preferring to unveil new paintings at teas in her double-height studio in the Beaux Arts Building at 80 West 40th Street, overlooking Bryant Park. The critic Henry McBride--who wrote about her work,...