Judith Henry: Beauty Masks, Portraits (Small Editions)

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Among images in American civic and cultural life, the subject of the human face remains dominant, though not always used for upright purposes. Certain police departments, for instance, are reported to employ super powerful surveillance cameras in the vain hope to track and match blurry s­­treet close-ups of faces with mug shots in criminal suspect files. Or take the recent fuss about the ease with which commercial and political operatives can hack into media, thereby injecting their clandestine interests into TV reportage of talking heads.  Consider also the growing animus of fake news and disinformation, which have elevated public mistrust—a sense that we’re not getting things right because they could be compromised in their transmission or history. During the coronavirus pandemic, employers found ways to monitor lapses in employee productivity with the workforce confined to their homes. The integrity of privacy became an equivocal phenomenon, subject to infiltration and real snooping, as self-interest encourages, and as certain apps provide.

At least selfies offer transparency of performance, within their context. Their playfulness is diary-like, nominally composed for or from a social occasion and conveniently transmitted to an audience, warmed or not by their personal content. In their modes of address, selfies act as tokens or reminders of connection, sometimes soliciting reply. Except, that is, when people were actually seen outdoors, as they were during the time I was writing this review, wearing surgical masks. As we know, this spectacle was sponsored by a protective state agency during an epoch of plague. But though a genuine response to a public health crisis, it evokes an atmosphere suggestive of widespread repression, forced isolation, and a social leveling hostile to individualism.

Artists are, of course, known as avatars of individualism and subjectivity. It is a stance that disavows any requirement that they verify something.  This imaginative condition applies even to appropriated material, in collage as well as installation art. Within such modes, a mundane object—say a humble tube of lipstick—may attain emblematic status by virtue of its contribution to the fictive assumption of the whole.

Judith Henry is a contemporary artist who is aware of the invasive disturbances of our situation and chooses to engage poetically with some of them and contends with others., Based in Brooklyn, Henry has roughly a —40-year career of multimedia work to her credit. It developed along themes that embrace theatrical metaphors illuminating social artifice. On her website these are given titles such as “Makeover,” “Casting call,” “Masquerade,” “Me as her,” “Rebirth,” and “Archive.”  They refer to phases of her practice that reveal a fascination with identity shifts, questionable environments, and metamorphoses of human life forms. In one of her photo projects, notable women like Emma Goldman and Virginia Woolf are shown at ease in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a place they probably never visited. This apparent testament to earlier heroines is titled ”Me as Her,” 2014. An indifference to their whereabouts runs through this artist’s world of characters –in the act of posing. They seem detached from any social milieu without knowing that they have been repositioned in one, other than the photo to which they originally consented. In Henry’s images, the standard protocols of portrait genres are at an enigmatic loss.

I’ve picked up these impressions from glimpses of her art over the past six or seven years (I have known her for much more of that time). My attention is now intriguingly drawn and focused on her latest project, an artist’s book titled “Beauty Masks Portraits.” It features scores of close-up color photographs of young, glamorous women’s faces, cut from fashion magazines into pages continuously suspended by the artist’s hands to cover her own face, the two of them acting as a pair of heads that almost reaches the nearby frame. Viewers are therefore asked to engage with a self-portrait matrix that conspicuously declares its intention to conceal its subject. (Though not completely, as Henry’s eyes are sometimes made visible through holes that resemble glasses.) This aspect of her theatre raises the question of how to regard a real, though very reticent human presence in these images, capable of staring back at you. In any case, the results are not beautiful, but they are certainly haunting.

When masquerades do their work, proposing alternate faces for the ones we know or might expect, their impersonations are not subtle. Rather, they actively reach out to signal that a charade is in order, and a role is being played. They can’t help but pull appraisal toward their own contrivance, as such. A viewer may then realize that the women’s faces of “Me as Her” were not “there” in Henry’s photos, but only their appearance, in someone else’s photos. And the artist’s hands, tremulous as they might be, are holding it up. This is not homage to women’s creative achievements so much as a statement skeptical of career status itself. Great care has been taken to conceal the actual masquerade, and this fact fosters the effect of seamless illusion that was originally intended. Underneath this iconography, the artist makes her debut but is nowhere to be found, except in the title of this project.

The new book with the word “beauty” in its title plays havoc with a notion of beauty by intermingling faces, such that they exist primarily as awkward physical components of each other—cheeks as dismembered chunks fitted in the wrong place. On one level, they take on the look of modernist grotesquery, familiar in museums. At the same time, I get another and more emotional input from the plenitude of media one offs, who display their improbable coiffures and toothy smiles. They consist of glamour pusses, cutie pies, high school seniors, and haute couture models—of different races. Henry’s elegant fingers everywhere get into the act with a stateliness that induces mirth or wonder, or sometimes both.  She seems to cooperate with the paper illustrations, as if she was of the same material existence as theirs. The spectacle of it inspires me to think of how Picasso would deal with photos of Audrey Hepburn.

More seriously, a survey of these faces generates a mood of longing, enacted by their maker, who functions simultaneously as partial subject and object. I’m thinking of multiple personality disorder, a condition in which individuals have lost their sense of self, and compensate by their pretension to be others. The thought of such ego transfers may infuse the beauty book, but mostly as a reckoning with a metaphor of a social thesis, rather than as a documentary on a psychic malaise. For my part, whether people are smiling or scowling under their half masks on the streets, this issue of public life contrasts with Henry’s delving into her private concerns.

Criticism has a habit of refining itself at short notice for purposes of isolating distinctions. We often use a device called the ‘’yes, but’’, as in: Are her young subjects coquettish?—Yes, but some are baffled or just vacant.  Is their moodiness a contribution to the narrative aspects of the project? Yes, but they are more pluralistic in psychic shading than you think.

I suggest that color has its own role to play in Judith  Henry’s outlook. The choreography of her palette includes movements into black and white, which contrast with flesh tones that dramatize her artifice. As  for the chromatic environment itself, how could it not reflect disparate sources from the cosmetic routines that fascinate her?

One may well ask: where did all these maneuvers come from; is there a pictorial tradition from which they stemmed? Though the answer is apparently negative, there does exist a scatter of previous self-portraitists who ventured into theatrical modes. Among them are Cindy Sherman, Lucas Samaras, Claude Cahun, and Hannah Höch. Judith Henry’s works are as disconcerting as theirs, as complicated psychologically, and of equally high artistic stature.

Beauty Masks, portraits, Judith Henry. Published by Small Editions (Brooklyn, 2020). All photographs were taken by Howard Saunders with an iPhone 8 Plus, indoors, with natural light. Introduction by Grace Graupe-Pillard. ISBN 978-0-578-64727-2. $40

Due to the pandemic, the book is not widely distributed. To order a copy, please visit the artist’s Paypal and be sure to include your mailing address with payment: http://paypal.me/beautymasks

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In 1919, John Singer Sargent’s monumental canvas, Gassed, went on view in London’s Imperial War Museum. The painting was lent to the exhibition, World War One and American Art, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2016, while “Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends” was seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a year earlier. After seeing Gassed in London recently, MAX KOZLOFF felt moved to dwell on the theme of Sargent and tragedy. The accompanying photos of hands in Sargent’s paintings were taken by DENNIS KARDON at the Met exhibition.

Background

The phrase “La Belle Epoque” rivals “The Gilded Age” as a salute to an historical period, from the “naughty nineties” to the outbreak of World War One, supposedly a fun time. But these two terms also seem bouncy when compared with the more substantial record inferred by Fin-de-Siecle, with its shifting cultural paradigms, some that sprouted, others that subsided. Of course, game changers among the early modernists outmatched the routines of fading traditionalists. Still, in this unstable moment a few conservative portrait artists briefly flourished by attracting clientele from an upscale social class. Their servitude to the vanity of their patrons earned them monetary benefits, but left little impression in the history of art.  Who today celebrates the names Giovanni Boldini, William Merritt Chase, Emile Carolus-Duran, or Mariano Fortuny?  In contrast, one of similar vintage, John Singer Sargent, still stands out and is much admired—for good reasons.

The cordial address of this American expatriate (1856-1925) was so resourceful that it exceeded any formulaic, professional obligation. He was hyper qualified in keenness of eye, and so confident in his skills as a performer, as to make them look exhibitionist, glib and tossed off. Actual entertainers, like gypsy musicians doing a number, were known as part of his repertoire. Sargent was well disposed toward overt role-playing, as demonstrated with splendor in his Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. He found or created countless examples of it, treating their artifice of transparent self-consciousness as a decorous norm of his genre, transmitted through body language as well as facial expression.

What made him highly popular among his patrons was the compliment his flippant virtuosity paid to their self-esteem. Sargent could position them in stances reminiscent of Gainsborough and Reynolds, while letting it be known that he was a friend of Claude Monet.  He was a rhapsodist of satin and chiffon, which billowed out in coils affected by the weight and posture of the female figure. Seductive, young ladies could expect to being treated as a little dangerous if identified with their portrait by Sargent. As for his palette, he subdued its range in drawing rooms, while outdoors he splashed his sitters with the shadows, reflections and leafy twirls of nearby plants. Sargent added to these broad energies of warm and cool the much smaller attractions and motivations of hands, as they flutter, twist or press against supporting surfaces. He was a master in portraying the nervous behavior of women’s fingers. Had neon lighting existed, he might have used a likeness of its shimmer to decorate the folds of gowns.

All this genteel restlessness was intended to declare that his act of seeing was as much on the move as the action he depicted. People are often visualized as doing something, not just sitting still. Robert Louis Stevenson was walking by (close action) when seemingly caught by Sargent’s brush (as if by thoughtless snapshot). In more formal portraiture, people appear to look out, first at their observer, and then, by implication at their unseen or unknown future viewers. One of the most common scenes in Sargent’s watercolors represents friends or colleagues sketching outdoors, scrutinizing nature, brush in hand.  They are in the midst of carrying on the kind of work that he has already concluded on his own. This note of the instantaneous moment lends an aura of disheveled, vivacious texturing to images that are often diaristic in character.  Where he went and whatever he saw, this traveling artist (again, with watercolor) acted like a gondolier paddling through canals of opulent sensation. He provided vignettes of them– as tourists would for their circuits back home.  His take on the monuments of Venice is liquefied by the multiple appeals of their kind, competing for the attention of viewers on a distracted schedule.

When Sargent accepted public commissions to paint murals for the Boston Public Library (1895-1919) and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, (1916-1925) his emphasis on ephemeral glimpses needed to be broadened.  These two institutions were storehouses of historic knowledge, thought, and imagination. To honor the educational legacies of the human mind, their walls had to be decorated in sweeping, allegorical mode. An allegory is a didactic framework populated by figures acting as symbols of conditions like truth, justice, heaven and hell. In short, symbolism replaces narrative as a means of visual communication. One also senses a reluctance—in fact a distinct aversion—to be informative about place or time. Many characters don’t even obey gravity. Employing a worldly Salon artist to tackle these generalized types and schemes was to ask of him quite a lot. The more oracular or legendary the status of certain characters, the allegorical mode permitted them to wear fewer clothes. It is ironic that an artist who catered to a small, entitled social class could arouse criticism if he depicted a bodice hung too low but when he worked for the community at large, he could disrobe his figures at will, as mostly they happened to be gods. Nudity based on Hellenist models was in accord with public taste.

Sargent adjusted to these circumstances with good grace. His figures became vaguely statuesque, though still based on his life drawings, elaborated with academic finish.  For research on the History of Religions panel in Boston, he traveled to the Middle East to study the faces of Bedouins. He drew heavy, unnatural outlines to feature the bodies of those selected for ascent out of their plasma to the beatitude of heaven. Yet he knew how to inject the earthy witness of his materialism into range of the idealism purveyed by his clients. His accent on leisure and theirs on virtue, or at least rectitude, mingled together to form an interesting tension. But it was even then too late to rescue Victorian allegories from their inevitable datedness, as modernity rolled in.

Achievement

London’s Imperial War Museum is filled with belligerent, sinister, and horrific artifacts. Their erstwhile use and subsequent display registered the fact that during the slaughter of 1914—1918, the époque was not belle. As commissioned by the British government to act as an official war artist, sent to the front in the summer of 1918, Sargent conducted himself dutifully.  He chose to focus his powers on one dismal scene that he witnessed: an aftermath of the poisoning of British troops by German mustard gas. In the museum, this work would naturally fit in or even compete with brutal company.  But encountering this great painting, arguably the peak of Sargent’s career, installed in appropriate quarters, I was struck by Gassed’s difference, some element more broadly conceived to stir emotion than national pride in a military context.

Did Sargent misunderstand the treatment proper to his choice of category or genre?  Well, it was unlikely that he would devote an epic work measuring around nine feet by 21 merely to documentary reportage. And this scroll-like grandeur of scale rules out any portrait emphasis, even if the soldiers’ eyes weren’t bandaged.  Furthermore, a propaganda motive, while possible in theory, would have needed more upbeat content to support a creation whose subject is a military disaster. Gassed shows that British dressing stations were overwhelmed by drooping and fallen casualties, the targets of an onslaught of mass destruction. We see nameless victims of that attack, everywhere, promiscuously disabled.

However, a group of Tommies, in single file, crosses laterally from left to right. They, the artist’s protagonists, cannot be said to be merely passing through –a zone of recumbent bodies. Rather, they’re shuffling or slogging by at an uncoordinated pace, barely assisted by medical orderlies. They have all the momentum of a bas-relief, an effect caused by the work’s side view of their progress and their awkward stumble. Their heads are variously bowed, their arms grope for immediate support, and their legs are hesitant and intimidated. Mustard gas menaces the eyes before it ravages internal organs. Sargent thus gives us a spectacle of fresh affliction, still vertical when compared with the suffering troops lying everywhere around.

Slumped at the bottom margin, the bodies of the maimed are in more than ample supply. In fact, their presence continues far behind and beyond the miserable progress of the blinded subjects in the foreground. Sargent elevated these figures so that our vantage is approximately at the level of their feet.  Urged by the artist, I begin to regard them as monuments of calamity, in disordered, vulnerable gait, profiled with their darker khaki uniforms against the radiant light of the setting sun. With its lime greens and roseate tones, nuanced with pale yellows, this light is gorgeous. It floods my sense of what these soldiers have lost—their precious eyesight. No wonder that Sargent exults the world we do see, one he created in homage to the visibility of life. If this intention comes through, as I think it does, it is more an existential than a patriotic statement. How mindful is this grateful recognition and heartbreaking sorrow, which a visual work of art can make evident.

For those curious to learn more about the artist and his  career, I recommend a most informative  book— John Singer Sargent by Carter Ratcliff, Abbeville Press, 1982

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To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano. James McNeill Whistler

Painters often speak fondly of their medium, so why not recall for a moment what we mean by the word “paint?” It should be understood as a chromatic pigment immersed in its vehicle, usually oil, acrylic, or water. An artist handles it by means of a brush, sometimes a knife, rag or sponge and occasionally a finger that smears. On a surface, this pliant material can be loaded or thinned down, as wished. Misapplied paint frequently generates shapes or images that were unforeseen. I have visited an artist’s studio where left over dabs on his palette had jelled up impishly to figurine size. The artist in question is a seasoned painter, Irving Petlin, wise to the fanciful potentials of oil, though his real sweetheart is pastel.

So, what is pastel? A dried paste made of pigment, ground with chalk and compounded with gum water, finished in sticks. One rubs or presses down these sticks upon rough textured paper—an action that visualizes gritty strokes and smudged zones of contact. Or, as the artist says vividly of his own process:

Sometimes there is no form under the hovering hand, no contour, no shape, but a crying out for a color to land and spread like a cloud. …It is here that pastel is unique, softly spreading, bleeding to a nothingness undefined by boundary. The opposite happens when a sharp line of color is called for. The… stick must then draw an insistent, confident color line…one shot only, no second chances!

Pastel was once a convivial sketching tool for the Impressionists. Manet and Degas did well with it. Now, a contemporary artist uses pastel—challenged by what he regards as the medium’s will of its own– to visualize a state in which substance and space are bonded with each other. A wrong stroke and that possibility slips away or is instantly lost.

A number of the pastels he’s recently created are diptychs, presented as if they’re opened pages of ancient manuscripts, upon which some coherent depictions have survived. Their red brown tonality seems to have emerged as a result of the artist’s palm bearing down, while their linearity speaks of intrusive, sharp contours that silhouette a narrative subject. Considering the granulated character and abrasive, unsettled meeting of touch and ground, the work might suggest an arid setting, perhaps a desert. That is why I was taken aback when viewing a Petlin pastel called Towed to Sea (1912).

Beneath the orange haze of twilight, an ocean liner is tugged out from port across a surface that looks—suspiciously—like water. Puffy black lines and dark smudges describe smoke issuing from the ship’s four stacks, while beyond them the heavens are lit by rapturous flares. Abruptly, the date of this pastel implies its subject: 2012, the centenary of the Titanic’s maiden voyage during which it struck an iceberg and sank, at great cost of human life. Here, the white texture of the vessel anticipates the calamity to come.

Since it alludes to an historical event, and is based on a photograph, the image of this ghost ship has a certain credibility. But not if you look at the sky. While its multiple suns (one of them very bloody) are definitely cosmological, they leave us open the idea that the scene itself is extra terrestrial. Judging by the solar positions, over to the rear, the near side of the boat should have been in deep shadow, whereas here it fades into a pale, buoyant void.

In other pastels, the same thing happens to structures as familiar as the Brooklyn Bridge or the vernacular Parisian roof tops seen from Petlin’s left bank studio window. Their outlines are firmly declared without any further acknowledgement that they’re solid structures. Lacking density and volume, they act as contained areas of light itself. If you ask where this light comes from, or what is the source of its energy, the pastels do not answer. One reckons only with the blur they leave, as a kind of bioluminescence, visible even in daylight hours, dimmed though it might be. Petlin’s tableaux are visited by translucent superimpositions, in a manner that brings to mind double exposures or even 19th-century spirit photography.

Over about fifty-five years, he has levered his practice with implications of dialogue—two terms, events, metaphors or states, that either sing together or are answerable to each other.

He teases viewers, for instance, with the sense that some of his latest works on paper date back in time, weathered by millennia of their prior existence. When cemeteries appear elsewhere, they, too, seem to have a long history, of which there remains little but the touching, abstracted evidence of headstones. He infers that the arrivals of people cannot happen unless preceded by their–sometimes urgent—departures, as in pictures of beached lifeboats and refugees on the move, their sad whereabouts undetermined. Yet this art is absorbed by the urban mode as much as it is with pastoral scenography. They complement each other in nearby or distant vantages, though either way they’re poignantly stranded by the retrospective cast of his mood.

As mists drift over an action or in close proximity to it, events seem etherealized by the texture of the pastel grain. The presumptions of first-hand witness give way to an aura of memories, infiltrated by biblical references or hints of more up to date occasions, such as the Holocaust. Time itself is dilated as a restless, substratum of consciousness, tinged with alarms. As if it was harmonized like music on base and treble staffs, his art uses low toned atmospherics to contrast with spritely exposition.

Petlin’s melding of disparate forms and timbres is further enriched by his living interface between two cultures, native and adopted. He made his longstanding, professional name in France; he vacations in Martha’s Vineyard. This artist, resident in Paris, comes originally from Chicago. Born there in 1934, and trained at the school of the city’s Art Institute, he became a younger member of the group later known for monster imagery.

The trauma of the Second World War had left more than a trace in the grotesquerie of their images. Dubuffet’s art brut they received most hospitably. Francis Bacon’s contemporary paintings of a pope with butchered animal carcasses, they regarded as red meat. For Irving Petlin, as well as his friends Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, it was not Cézanne’s formal innovations but James Ensor’s bitter satire that opened the portal to modern art. Edvard Munch’s art also impacted upon the man who was to draw the Titanic. Some residue of Munch’s spirit can be detected in visceral currents that twist through the gauze of Petlin’s later pastels. In the matter of agitated background space, there was something for him to learn from Giacometti’s barbed draftsmanship and Matta’s velvet infinities. Finally, I should mention a much earlier artist who fits into this list of exemplary, model figures, for good reason.

Odilon Redon was an 1890s French Symbolist whose visionary work blossomed in rapport with his feeling for pastel. Like Petlin, he was sensitized by his medium, to the point of imagining it in live reaction to his desire. When dark passages needed to be relieved, Redon rubbed light into them, as if it were a celestial glow. His auto-luminous faces and bodies have an apparitional presence, with an air about them of sacramental meditation. This is true even when the theme was of Greek legends, or a choice of motif like a flowery bouquet. In the end, he limned such subjects with the assurance that they were as enchanting as fairy tales.

Earlier than our 21st Century, fairy tales went out of fashion. Nevertheless, the magic of special effects and the fantasies they engender hold sway in popular imagination. In on example, aliens of reptilian or robotic form enter our world with the unfriendly thought of obliterating us. The success of their apocalyptic genre depends on its entertainment value, manufactured with bravura technique. If they are to be truly entertaining, however, the aliens must look as real and solid, and “there”–as an earthling. For enjoyment’s sake, we have to discount the fact that they were contrived behind the scenes.

Art rarely arouses such disingenuous commitment because it is understood to be symbolic or hypothetical or metaphoric by its very nature. Hand–made images are taken to be “special effects”, fictive in their own right and by common consent. That permission certainly allows a work to act as a door to another world, dreamy in its space, as Petlin’s is.

He stands out as an artist who confides his reveries rather than announces them. To a viewer, this confidentiality can work as seductive, privileged entrance to scenes that advance from, as well as recede into the depth of a poetic region. But there is nothing underhanded about this veiling motion. If you are not allowed to touch any of the represented figures, you can still see how they are palpably constructed, what his facture does to evince them, and what, in fact, the hand does with remarkable craftsmanship to create them. The work tells of invented possibilities and lost histories, but it also shows itself.

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May 5 to September 25, 2017
1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street,
New York City, thejewishmuseum.org

Paul Gauguin once belligerently declared: “Ugliness can sometimes be beautiful; the pretty, never.” As an article of modernist faith, this sentiment was later joined by pronouncements such as the critic Clement Greenberg’s “All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.” Despite being qualified by “sometimes” and “at first,” these categorical statements also work as exclusionary dicta.

An ugly image is generally thought to be displeasing upon visual contact. Here it’s implicitly regarded as a sign of tough mindedness that breaches conventions and disrupts them with art that defines a new, challenging beauty. The ethics of such ‘ugliness’ may also generate an artist’s principled resistance to being understood too easily. If a picture is truly modern, viewers must look for meanings that are unexpected, imperious and hard to take.

A pretty picture, contrarily, is stigmatized as a product made to gratify or seduce viewers, in compliance with cultural norms. Also, it is associated with aesthetic modes favored by the “weaker sex.” An appetite for pretty things is enhanced if it has a sweet tooth. One can therefore easily imagine what a manly modernist might think of a painting titled “Love Flight of a Pink Candy Heart.”

The words themselves carry such a heavy charge of glucose as to suggest an ironic intent. Their author, the New York artist Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) does employ irony, but not so much as to dilute the warm feeling she extends toward her subjects. It emerges in the way the men she depicts are as feminized as the (far fewer) women, both made amiable by the camaraderie of the salon world she presented. Even when seated, these dapper fellows are very light on their feet, as dainty as a ballerina’s. Far from treating it only as a nuance in the proceedings, Stettheimer asserted the prettiness of the men at the soirees she enjoyed and often hosted. You are invited into her relaxed socialite enclaves, fetched there by diminutive characters that resemble dolls or puppets.

What strikes the eye immediately is the rhythm of line and limb that jumps about, especially in ensembles with little narrative pretext. They’re frequently scattered across nebulous white grounds and are endowed with a gem-like aura that resembles the capitals in illuminated manuscripts. Yet, when they’re on the move, they might also recall the snap of a Fred and Ginger routine in Hollywood movies. Had he known them, Busby Berkeley, the dance choreographer, would have found them congenial—if a little loose. Stettheimer herself was beguiled by glamor, whose effects and trappings she applied to decorate private or public festivities. Fashion runways, cocktail parties, and picnics on the grass were evoked as appropriate environments for diarist memories, garnished with vines that twitch and outsized flowers that bloom.

Contemporary American figure painters of her period, roughly 1917 to the early forties, had not visualized anything so outlandish as could be called a fragrant atmosphere. Café life in the “roaring twenties” was at least well toasted by Archibald Motley in Chicago. As for the next decade, regionalists specialized in agrarian sagas, and their urbanist counterparts in carnivalesque satire or citified solitude. Think of Thomas Hart Benton, Reginald Marsh, George Tooker, and the romantic Puritan synthesis achieved by Edward Hopper. One would look in vain for any of their works to feature a cigarette in a holder or a champagne flute about to be sipped. (Also, Prohibition didn’t encourage it.) Rather, the sufferings of thirties hard times induced in painters a need to take themselves seriously, propelled by austerities of style. Stettheimer was an ardent New Dealer. But if politics entered her art, it was apparently to celebrate the patriotism of Wall Street, art museums and the entertainment industry with a bouquet of fire works and flags. Her Cathedral series, which visualizes such themes, easily manages to squirt hints of institutional self-importance up from the pseudo pageant conducted on the ground. Fifth Avenue as the Garden of Eden. This artist worked hard to have fun—at short, metropolitan range.

Certainly her jocular sensibility placed Stettheimer far to the side of contemporary art mainstreams. There is, of course, no law against artists delivering such marginal reports. But when their iconography is concentrated upon a privileged, insular coterie in an era of national suffering, the result may look inhumane to people with a liberal conscience.

But what if the art itself exhibits sympathy to members of a minority group, so disparaged at the time that they could not expect to have civil rights equal to those of their fellow citizens? I refer to the depiction of gay men in Florine Stettheimer’s oeuvre.

In life, no more than a handful of those she knew were actually homosexual—a fact that scarcely mattered. She visualized almost the whole lot of them throughout her career, as essentially fellow women, regardless of their male outfits and histories. They come across as vibrant presences, alive with curvaceous behaviors. And when they swagger, they’re truly elegant. It’s a comedy of manners, whose players are perceived in almost a domestic context. Forget the dynamics of gender conflict or any idea that an ethical issue is involved or that an activist program was required to motivate the stories she tells. Everyone looks at who ever else, presumably through the embracing lens of the female gaze, come what may.

Some notion of this shift in gender inter-action has certainly trickled into the growing scholarship on Florine Stettheimer and lifted her up as an American original. The talk at those gatherings she shows might have been highfalutin and some of the accents, foreign. “This isn’t Kansas anymore”, says Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.” Just as evident is the fairy tale aura that has morphed Florine’s New York into a mythical city—not that it has affected her characters, though it definitely has conditioned her viewers.

This overt figure of pictorial speech permitted the artist certain liberties, above all the camouflage of modernist innovations by outsider, “unschooled” practices. Her interest in garden, lacy, or wood bower ornament was translated into obtrusive yet attractive frames for her paintings. Her drawing style imitated those of young girls, fashioning mash notes in daybooks, yet it seems more knowing and mundane than was within the reach of its genre. As for the space fancied in her art: nominally, it results from a bird’s eye view, suggesting an aloof, buoyant perspective. But it’s really a white, pearlescent background holding vignettes in place without any general grip of logic or locale. This white stuff serves as an invisible scaffold, sometimes melted a little to reveal labels that tell of the personalities illustrated in unrelated scenarios. Such is the funky outcome of strategies that have transposed a collage aesthetic into a personal memoir.

I have so far left out two features that reward our contact with her works, as physical objects. They have surfaces built up through attentive layering by a palette knife, that in the end creates a thickness worthy of frosting on pastry. Or cake. I came away seduced by this flirtation with the human sense of taste. More dramatic, however, is the appeal Stettheimer makes to arouse viewers by color. In her vision, a marriage of color and light can take place in a deliquescent array of hues, as in stained marble, or in opaque, individual fields of heavily saturated yellows, oranges, or blues. Against the pervasive white, with which they are paired, they stand out as fiercely emotive patches of here and now, front stages of perception rather than of those far away. Seeing these pictures only in black and white reproduction would not prepare you for the forcefulness of their chromatics.

So, is Florine Stettheimer’s art a paragon of prettiness, as formulated offhandedly by modernist doctrine? Aware that one of her closer friends was Marcel Duchamp, alias “Rrose Sélavy,” I would say “maybe.” With his readymades, Duchamp played an unlikely role as metaphysical dandy. But when we turn to another of her associates, one she actually collaborated with, the case is not so simple. Gertrude Stein invited Stettheimer to design the costumes and sets for the opera “Four Saints in Three Acts” (music by Virgil Thomson), Their most vivid moment of collaboration came in the chorale (sung by an all black chorus), “Pigeons on the grass, alas!” The theatrical constituents of this scene included cellophane, feathers and lace—materials designed to banish any thought of modernist gravitas, though inescapable as avant-garde tokenism. Given that she anticipated the advent of popular forms into progressive art, Stettheimer insinuated that they were also to be enjoyed as absurdist gamesmanship. She had chops in both areas. Pretty, ugly, beautiful: she misused and mixed their modes at cost to the stodginess of their traditions. No wonder the critics of our day are want to take their hats off at the spectacle she provides.

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