Birthday Bouquet
Framed: 37 11/16 × 33 11/16 × 3 inches (95.73 × 85.57 × 7.62 cm)
Florine Stettheimer, Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 1–November 17, 1946, no. 46.1463, as Flowers with a Snake.
Exhibition of Paintings by Florine Stettheimer, Arts Club of Chicago, January 3-25, 1947, no. 24, as Flowers with a Snake.
Paintings by Florine Stettheimer, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, February 10–March 3, 1947, no cat.
The Flowers of Florine Stettheimer, Durlacher Brothers, New York, February 2-28, 1948, no. 19, as Flowers with a Snake.
Florine Stettheimer: Still Lifes, Portraits and Pageants, 1910–1942, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, March 4-April 27, 1980; Marion Koogler McCay Art Institute, San Antonio, TX, July 7-August 15, 1980; Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, NY, September 28–November 9, 1980, no. 30.
Florine Stettheimer: Manhattan Fantastica, Whitney Museum of American Art, July 13–November 5, 1995, no. 62, as Birthday Bouquet/Flowers with a Snake.
Florine Stettheimer, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, September 27, 2014-January 4, 2015, no. 53.
Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry, The Jewish Museum, New York, May 5-September 25, 2017; Art Gallery of Ontario, October 21, 2017-January 28, 2018.
American Art Deco: Designing for the People, 1918-1939, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, July 9, 2022–January 8, 2023, no cat.
Each year on her birthday, Florine Stettheimer picked a bouquet of flowers for her self and often commemorated the event in paint. Stettheimer referred to these annual floral still lifes as "eyegays" for the visual, rather than olfactory, appeal of small bouquets known as nosegays. In addition to petunias, a cactus dahlia, pompon dahlias and delphinium, this eyegay features portraits of the artist's mother and two sisters as well as Stettheimer herself arranging flowers at the lower right.
Stettheimer's unconventional manner of painting was likely encouraged by prominent modern artists, like Marcel Duchamp, who comprised her chic circles. Naive-looking but sophisticated, Stettheimer's style inspired comparisons to folk art, which was widely celebrated in the early 20th-century.
With the artist, 1932-1944 [1];
R. Kirk (1903-1974) and Constance (1895-1984) Askew, Jr., New York, by 1946-1979 [2];
Constance Askew’s gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1979.
NOTES:
[1] The painting can be seen hanging on the wall in the artist’s studio bedroom in a 1944 photograph by Peter A. Juley & Son, Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Photograph Study Collection, Washington, DC, no. J0118501.
[2] R. Kirk and Constance Askew, Jr., lent this painting to the exhibition Florine Stettheimer at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1946.
Carl Van Vechten, “The World of Florine Stettheimer,” Harper’s Bazaar 79 (October 1946), 356, as Flowers with Snake.
Henry McBride, Florine Stettheimer, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 55, as Flowers with a Snake.
Exhibition of Paintings by Florine Stettheimer, exh. cat. (Chicago: Arts Club of Chicago, 1947), unpaginated, as Flowers with a Snake.
The Flowers of Florine Stettheimer, exh. cat. (New York: Durlacher Brothers, 1948), unpaginated (as Flowers with a Snake).
Parker Tyler, Florine Stettheimer: A Life in Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1963), 77, 153–54, opp. 179, (repro.), as Flowers with Snake.
Edward Sozanski, “Florine Stettheimer Retrospective,” Providence (R.I.) Journal, April 30, 1980, clipping, Nelson-Atkins curatorial files.
Elisabeth Sussman, Florine Stettheimer: Still Lifes, Portraits and Pageants, 1910 to 1942, exh. cat. (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1980), unpaginated, (repro. fig. 15).
Donna Bachmann, “Hidden Treasures by Women at the Nelson,” Forum (Summer 1983), 7–8.
Barbara J. Bloemink, “Florine Stettheimer: Alternative Modernist,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1993, 1: xiv, 253–54, 2: (repro., fig. 198), as Flowers with Snake.
Elisabeth Sussman, Barbara J. Bloemink, and Linda Nochlin, Florine Stettheimer: Manhattan Fantastica, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995), 26, 51, 141, (repro.).
Patricia Pate Havlice, World Painting Index: Third Supplement, 1990-1999, I: Bibliography, Paintings by Unknown Artists, Painters and Their Works (Lanham, MD and Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2003), 1053.
Margaret C. Conrads, ed., The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: American Paintings to 1945, 2 vols. (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2007), 1: 21, 501-4, 502; 2: 226 (repro.).
Matthias Mühling, Karin Althaus, and Susanne Böller, eds., Florine Stettheimer, exh. cat. (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 2014, 82, (repro.).
Stephen Brown and Georgiana Uhlyarik, Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry, exh. cat. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), cover, 93, 128, (repro.).
Jack Bankowsky, “Features. Best of 2017,” Artforum 56 (December 2017), 169, (repro.).
Barbara J. Bloemink, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 200–202, (repro.), as Birthday Bouquet (Flowers with Snake).
