Portrait of My Aunt, Caroline Walter Neustadter

Artist Florine Stettheimer (American, 1871 - 1944)

Date1928

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsUnframed: 38 x 26 1/4 inches (96.52 x 66.68 cm)
Framed: 41 3/8 x 29 5/16 x 2 inches (105.09 x 74.45 x 5.08 cm)

Credit LineGift of Miss Ettie Stettheimer

Object number51-13

Signedleft edge, center: "FLORINE STETTHEIMER"

Inscribedright edge, center: "TO THE MEMORY OF AUNT CAROLINE / 1928 / F.S" bottom stretcher member, center: "1928"

On View

On view

Gallery Location

Collections

American Art

Terms

Exhibition History

Florine Stettheimer, Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 1–November 17, 1946, unnumbered;

The Art of Women: A Panorama of Achievement, Kansas Union, University of Kansas, Lawrence, November 7–26, 1974, no cat.

Florine Stettheimer: Still Lifes, Portraits and Pageants, 1910–1942, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, March 4–November 9, 1980 (traveled), no. 24;

Florine Stettheimer: Manhattan Fantastica, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 13– November 5, 1995, unnumbered.

Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry, The Jewish Museum, New York, May 5–September 24, 2017; Art Gallery of Ontario, October 21, 2017–January 28, 2018, unnumbered.

Gallery Label

Painted from memory, this portrait depicts Florine Stettheimer's aunt, who had died sixteen years earlier. Caroline Walter Neustadter stands tall in a velvet and silk gown dripping with lace — a material Stettheimer loved to paint. The lavish decor, which Stettheimer evoked in thick, swirling paint, reflects the interior design of 1910s high society, from the statue at left, a common and exoticized European depiction of a Black North African person, to the towering floral arrangement on an elaborately carved pedestal. These elements also contain bigoraphical clues. Look closely at these decorative details to find the artist's signature and message to her beloved aunt.

Provenance

Ettie Stettheimer (sister of the artist), New York, by 1946;

Her gift to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1951.

Published References

Henry McBride, Florine Stettheimer, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 43, 55.

Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4^th ed. (Kansas City, Mo.: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 257 (as Portrait of My Aunt . . .).

Parker Tyler, Florine Stettheimer: A Life in Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1963), unpaginated pl., 171.

Ross E. Taggart and George L. McKenna, eds., Handbook of the Collections in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, vol. 1, Art of the Occident, 5^th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 255 (as Portrait of My Aunt . . .).

Elisabeth Sussman, Florine Stettheimer: Still Lifes, Portraits and Pageants, 1910–1942, exh. cat. (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1980), unpaginated, fig. 16.

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:v, 13–14, 2: fig. 1 (as Portrait of Caroline Walter Neustadter).

Elisabeth Sussman, Barbara J. Bloemink, and Linda Nochlin, Florine Stettheimer: Manhattan Fantastica, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995), 45, 122, 140.

Barbara J. Bloemink, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 2–4, 163.

Margaret C. Conrads, ed. The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: American Paintings to 1945 (Kansas City, Mo.: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007), 1:498–500, 2: 225.

Matthias Mühling, Karin Althaus, and Susanne Böller, eds., Florine Stettheimer, exh. cat. (Munich: Lenbachhaus and Hirmer, 2014), 15, (repro.).

Stephen Brown and Georgiana Uhlyarik, Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with the Jewish Museum, New York, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2017), 66, (repro.).

Roberta Smith, “A Case for the Greatness of Florine Stettheimer,” The New York Times, May 18, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/arts/design/a-case-for-the-greatness-of-florine-stettheimer.html, (repro.).

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