Cities and Projects of 2017

Anyone who has been following bklynbiblio for many years now of course will have noticed the general decrease in the number of posts coming from me. It's not intentional. Time (or lack thereof) has been a key factor, but I will admit that I've discovered a shift in my own attitude about life, which also has affected my blogging. That sounds a bit obnoxiously existential, but what I mean is that I find myself focusing more on living in the moment and enjoying experiences as they are happening, rather than attempting to record things afterward as a memory of an event or experience. I believe I've noted elsewhere, too, that as the world of social media has increased with various platforms, blogging is no longer my only online outlet. Facebook, Instagram, and work-related blog posts, all somehow now come together in conjunction with this blog to provide the snapshot of activities, thoughts, and events. (I still have a Twitter account, but I've largely dropped it; Pres. Tyrant has ruined it for me completely.)

I've also discovered, though, that as I'm getting older I'm having a more difficult time just remembering things the way I used to. I read a book and six months later sometimes I can't even remember the name of the protagonist. That never used to happen before, but I hear it is normal aging. (It better be!) In the spirit of commemorating good fortune over the past year, in that I have been able to see more of the world, this post is a revisit of my travels of 2017 (here is last year's post). I thought I would add this time a section of highlights of professional projects (some related to work) over the course of the year as well. I have a tendency to disregard my past professional activities, because I'm always looking toward the next one (and criticizing myself that I haven't done enough, despite what others say to me). So consider this post also an attempt on my part to slow down and recognize what I have actually done the past year, and why there have been fewer blog posts as a result. And to those of you who have been contacting me the past few months commenting how happy you are to see me blogging again, THANK YOU!

I do want to add that with all the travel either AA & I, or I alone, have done, some of the best memories have been celebrating events with family. For instance, this year AA's parents came out to celebrate Thanksgiving with us, and after that we went to Florida to celebrate Uncle Eddy's 89th birthday and then visit Epcot Center with my godchildren. Good times, indeed, were shared by all.

Here is the 2017 alphabetical list of visited cities outside of NYC...

Cambridge, England
Charlottesville, Virginia
Dieppe, France
Fairfield, Connecticut
Houston, Texas
Leicestershire/Northamptonshire, England
London, England (2 visits)
Mexico City, Mexico (well, technically, we haven't gone yet, but we will before the end of the year!)
Ogunquit, Maine
Paris/Versailles, France
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Portland, Maine
Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Rouen, France
Salem, Massachusetts
St. Petersburg/Palm Harbor/Tarpon Springs, Florida (3 visits)
Toronto, ON, Canada
Washington, D.C.

Professional Highlights of the Year (in no particular order):

• Co-taught with Prof. Robert Harrist an undergraduate, semester-long seminar at Columbia on "Public Outdoor Sculpture at Columbia and Barnard" (including watching a bronze pouring of sculpture at the Modern Art Foundry, which was utterly fascinating and almost transcendental; see the picture at left)
• Took a professional development course on "Basic Drawing Techniques for Art Professionals" at NYU
• Published an essay "Before Rome: John Gibson and the British School of Art" in the book The British School of Sculpture, c.1768-1837, eds. Burnage & Edwards (Routledge, 2017; this project took seven years to see to completion, if you can believe it)
• Published a review on the exhibition Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity, at the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands, in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (which you can read here)
• Took two research trips to the U.K. and did work at the National Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, Victoria & Albert Museum and National Arts Library, University of Cambridge, and in a private collection
• Gave a paper at the "New Scholarship in British Art History" conference at the North Carolina Museum of Art
• Gave two separate talks on the sculptors John Gibson and Auguste Rodin at the Florence Academy of Art in Jersey City
• Co-presented with Stephen Brown (The Jewish Museum) about artist Florine Stettheimer and her world for the EdelHaus Salon
• Organized & led a round-table discussion called "The Power of Political Protest Art" for the exhibition ...Or Curse the Darkness at the Atlantic Gallery
• Served on the selection committee & jury for the Graduate Student Symposium co-sponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art and the Dahesh Museum of Art
• Participated in a study day on Pre-Raphaelite art and design at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Participated in a workshop on the care and preservation of paintings, sponsored by the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts
• Attended the College Art Association conference in NYC
• Attended a Q&A talk with Jed Perl and the Calder Foundation on the release of the first volume of Perl's biography on sculptor Alexander Calder
• Had outpatient surgery with a relatively lengthy, painful recovery (okay, so this wasn't a professional event, but it did take its toll on me this year), and
• Went to see on Broadway Get on Your Feet!, Sunset Boulevard with Glenn Close, and Hello, Dolly with Bette Midler (again, not professional, but definitely worth recording as important events)

Books of 2017

The 100 Notable Books of 2017 from the New York Times came out just before Thanksgiving...rather early this year actually, especially since Thanksgiving itself was early. I usually find a couple of books on their list that pique my interest, but I have to confess that nothing really stands out for me this year. George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo won the Man Booker Prize, and as his first novel it has been received well, so perhaps that will go on the list. I'm not a big fan of modern sequels to literary classics, so even though Mrs. Osmond by John Banville made it on the list, I really don't want to read someone continuing the story of Isabel Archer. Last year when I blogged about the Books of 2016, I was reading Portrait of a Lady [1881]. The first half of the book moved slowly, but was interesting; the second half, however, turned into a page-turner in a way that startled me. It's a classic, just as it is, so I think I'll skip Banville's "sequel." I should add that I've discovered two new books published this year that are not on the 100 list, but have already gone on my Amazon Wish List. They are The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst and Amy Tan's Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir.

On last year's post, I noted some of the new books I was hoping to read. and indeed I did immerse myself in three of them. Lucy Barton's My Name Is Lucy was interesting, but I've been told her novel Olive Kitteridge is better, so I'll give that a go before passing further judgement. Julia Baird's biography of Queen Victoria was well-written and a good read, but I can't say it captured me as other biographies have in the past. I did find myself questioning Victoria and Albert's relationship in a new way, which is a testament to Baird's writing though. The third book on last year's "to read" list was Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad. This book was fantastic. It's painful to read at times, but it creatively weaves an imaginary actual underground railroad as a metaphor for the journey of a slave on the run, trying to find her freedom. I highly recommend it, and it certainly deserved both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.

In 2017 I read 33 books. Among the more noteworthy art history books I read were the following: Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry [2017], the catalog to accompany the exhibition at The Jewish Museum and, currently, at the Art Gallery of Ontario; The British School of Sculpture, c.1760-1832, edited by Jason Edwards and Sarah Burnage [2017], an excellent collection of essays that explore aspects of British nationalism in sculpture (and, as an aside, includes an essay by me entitled "Before Rome: John Gibson and the British School of Art"); How to Read Chinese Ceramics by Denise Leidy [2015], partly to help my curatorial eye better understand some of the Chinese art we have in the collection at Columbia University; and A Worldly Art: The Dutch Republic 1585-1718 by Mariët Westermann [1996], an easy-to-read introduction to art and material culture during the Golden Age of Dutch painting. All that said, my favorite art book read of the year was the book cover you see here: Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton & John Armstrong [2013]. This book did a great job making me--as a trained art historian and curator--rethink what art is all about, and how art by its very nature can be used as a form of psychological and emotional therapy, and conversely how examining art can teach us about the human spirit and mind. I've recommended this book to a number of people already.

Among my favorite fiction reads this year--aside from Whitehead and James, mentioned above--was the classic 1984 by George Orwell [1949], which shocked me with its frightening poignancy even today under the current Pres. Tyrant; The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes [2011], which I find myself still a bit unsettled by, perhaps because I'm not pleased with how the book ended; and My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier [1951], just so I could become familiar with the book before seeing the movie (I like Rachel Weisz, but the book was better). I also read The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy [1886] this year, which was my first foray into Hardy. What has struck me most about this novel has been how, of all the Victorian books I have read, this one captured best how I imagine my working-class, English, Victorian ancestors actually lived their everyday lives. I look forward to reading more of Hardy, even if he is a bit dark. Right now, however, I'm reading the book you see here: Lydia Davis's 2015 translation of Gustave Flaubert's French classic Madame Bovary [1857]. So far, I'm rather enthralled by the lush, lyrical descriptions, and it helps greatly that AA and I went to Rouen and Dieppe this past Spring, so I have a sense of the region Flaubert describes. Even though this is another one of those tragedies where you know how it ends, I look forward to continuing reading this on the subway and before bed over the next week or two...

Poem #1

Then back to New York
And skytowers had begun to grow
And front stoop houses started to go
And life became quite different
And it was as tho' someone had planted seeds
And people sprouted like common weeds
And seemed unaware of accepted things
And did all sorts of unheard of things
And out of it grew an amusing thing
Which I think is America having its fling
And what I should like is to paint this thing.

-- Florine Stettheimer, from Crystal Flowers: Poems and a Libretto, eds. I. Gammel & S. Zelazo (Toronto: BookThug, 2010)

For quite a while now, I have been wanting to start a series of posts about poems I encounter, and the meanings they have for me. This past week AA and I were in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and one of the books I read was this collection of poetry by the painter Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944), about whom I have blogged before. Returning to New York from our vacation, and seeing the incredible skyline with the new World Trade Center dominating lower Manhattan, I was reminded that no matter how much I enjoy travel and seeing other cities, it is so rewarding to come back home to my "City." Stettheimer's own words convey this same idea. In the mid-1890s, she and her mother and sisters went to Europe, and they only returned in 1914 when the Great War broke out. Almost 20 years had passed since she had been in New York and in that time "skytowers" grew up, taking over the brownstones, and people of all races and creeds and ethnicities seemed to be accepted for doing their own thing. This was for Stettheimer part of the American spirit: "America having its fling." It is a view of New York City that makes me smile. It is as relevant now as it was a century ago.

MWA XXVIII: Stettheimer's Model

One of the more interesting aspects of my job at Columbia University as Curator of Art Properties has been researching the art work of Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944). Columbia holds the largest collection of her art work anywhere in the world, so it has been an insightful journey to learn more about her life and art work crafted in and among NYC's artistic elite. She and her fellow "spinster" sisters Ettie and Carrie held a regular salon in their home on the Upper West Side of NYC (not too far from where I live), and Florine had a painting studio in the Beaux-Arts building overlooking Bryant Park. They befriended and hosted some of the leading artists, writers, and theater performers of the day, including Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Stieglitz, and Georgia O'Keeffe. The first international exhibition of Stettheimer's work opens later this month at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, Germany. Columbia is a major lender to this exhibition; you can read the official press release here. As a tribute, I've made September's Monthly Work of Art one of Stettheimer's most famous paintings from the Columbia collection: A Model (Nude Self-Portrait). The following is adapted from my own essay on this painting, which will be published in the catalogue for this exhibition.

"Odalisque: A Model (Nude Self-Portrait) by Florine Stettheimer"

Roberto C. Ferrari

By the time Florine Stettheimer returned to America in 1914, after spending more than fifteen years living abroad, the subject of the female nude in European art was not only a standard part of academic study, but also a means by which to experiment with Modernist practices. Stettheimer had studied at the Art Students League of New York during the 1890s, and she learned the academic practice of drawing and painting the nude female model. It is hardly surprising, then, that around 1915-16 she painted a large-scale reclining nude entitled A Model. Striking, however, is that the figure probably is a self-portrait, albeit a younger, idealized vision of herself, as she was in her mid-forties when she painted this work.(fn.1) In presenting herself as a nude, she offered the viewer a popular artistic subject, but in being painted by a woman the picture challenged its own historic origins. Stettheimer’s European contemporaries Paula Modersohn-Becker and Suzanne Valadon also painted nude self-portraits at this time. It is unknown if Stettheimer ever saw works by these women, but together they collectively introduced a modern image of how women artists could control representations of the female body.

Stettheimer’s choice of Chinese white paint makes the skin of her model modulate in tones from ivory to icy blue, and applications of palette-scraped excess over visible underpainting give texture to the curves of the model’s body. Her orange hair is short, and the playful grin on her face is held up by fragile Botticellian fingers. Her torso is frontal, showing level nipples on small breasts. She lies on an ornamental shawl with a necklace strewn nearby. Surrounded by a fringed canopy, she presents her body as if on stage. She is an odalisque, a reclining nude associated with the harem, intended for voyeuristic display.

The reclining nude has origins in Renaissance paintings like Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538; image here), a work Stettheimer greatly admired, describing it in her 1906 diary as “as beautiful as ever” after visiting the Uffizi.(fn.2) Stettheimer’s Model, however, is not a classical goddess; she shares more compositionally with the modernism of Edouard Manet’s Olympia (image right, Musee d'Orsay). Although Manet’s painting caused a sensation in Paris at the 1865 Salon for featuring a modern-day courtesan, Stettheimer’s painting shows us not a prostitute, but a modern-day woman. Both paintings show the flattening of the perspectival plane and the thrust of the nude into the viewer’s space.(fn.3) The black servant is missing from Stettheimer’s work, but the flowers remain a focal point. For Manet, these were a symbol of sexual commerce, but for Stettheimer the bouquet serves as a distraction. Stettheimer adored flowers, painting throughout her career bouquets that she called “eyegays,” instead of nosegays, because they delighted the eye.(fn.4) Stettheimer’s model holds an ornate “eyegay” in the center of the painting, intentionally distracting the viewer from the triangle of pubic hair below it, the private place that both Titian and Manet drew attention to by placing the woman’s hand directly on it.

Stettheimer’s contemporary Henri Matisse also painted reclining females such as The Blue Nude (1907; image here), which some may consider another source of inspiration. But, in fact, Matisse’s odalisques from the 1920s (e.g. image here) have more in common with Stettheimer’s painting in their depiction of the nude in an exotic setting.(fn.5) And both Matisse and Stettheimer arguably were inspired by another famous nude: J.-A.-D. Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814; image here), painted a century before Stettheimer’s work. The manneristic body for which Ingres is famous can be seen in Stettheimer’s model, who seems to lack a skeletal structure. Under ultraviolet light, one can see that Stettheimer overpainted the attenuated legs, which bear a striking resemble to those of Ingres’s odalisque. Thus, inspired by Titian, Ingres, and Manet, Stettheimer shared with Matisse the aesthetic experiment of using shocking colors and elongated forms to modernize the academic nude.

Although A Model is seen today as an important work in Stettheimer’s oeuvre, her contemporaries never acknowledged this painting in articles published during her lifetime.(fn.6) The painting was not shown at her 1916 exhibition at Knoedler, and it was excluded from her posthumous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946. Yet the painting clearly was important to her, for it is the only picture she proudly presented in its entirety when she painted Soirée (StudioParty) a few years later. This work shows the artist, her sister Ettie, and friends such as Leo Stein and the Hindu poet Sankar (seated beneath the model’s pudenda) in her studio. Juliette Gleizes, seated on the couch and gazing at A Model, is the only one who seems to wonder if the figure is Stettheimer herself, a comment perhaps on women’s intuition. It is this reimagining of the woman’s body, painted by a woman artist, that makes Stettheimer’s odalisque a significant contribution to the early history of modern art.

FOOTNOTES
1. Barbara J. Bloemink first argued this painting was a self-portrait, based largely on Stettheimer’s other self-representations with similar orange-colored hair, most notably Self-Portrait with Palette (Painter and Faun). The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 66–68. Parker Tyler dated A Model and Self-Portrait with Palette to the same period, ca. 1915–16, also drawing attention to the similar hair color and style in each figure. However, he did not suggest that they are both Stettheimer. Florine Stettheimer: A Life in Art (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Co., 1963), p. 22.
2. Florine Stettheimer, diary entry, May 30, 1906, Stettheimer Papers, YCAL MSS 20, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
3. For a more extensive comparison between Stettheimer’s and Manet’s paintings, see Bloemink, pp. 63–67.
4. Henry McBride astutely compared Stettheimer’s paintings of flowers to those of Odilon Redon for their mysticism, and to the biomorphic forms of Joan Miró for their abstraction: “The flowers in her flower pieces were . . . mere points of departure. They are, I believe, sufficiently botanical, but they are also unearthly. I never heard her speak of Redon, and she would not have thought herself related to him, yet there is a kinship between their flowers. Both imbued them with the occult, something reaching out of this world to that other; and of the two, Florine granted them more actual freedom, and the blossoms in her vases wriggled upward with a whimsicality in the stems that is not to be outmatched for waywardness in the ‘automatic’ paintings of Miro.” Florine Stettheimer (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946), pp. 15, 18.
5. After viewing Florine Stettheimer: An Exhibition of Paintings, Watercolors & Drawings, held at Columbia University in 1973, the composer Virgil Thomson wrote to the curator: “[Stettheimer] may be a better fauve than Matisse. Certainly she was a better painter.” Virgil Thompson to Jane Sabersky, February 24, 1973, Florine Stettheimer Papers, Box 1, Folder 6, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries.
6. Tyler, in his 1963 biography, is the first author to reference the painting. It was only with renewed interest in Stettheimer in the 1980s that art historians began to discuss this picture. Controlling her sister’s image, Ettie Stettheimer may have intentionally kept this painting away from public view because of its provocative nature.