Florine Stettheimer at the Guggenheim
The Florine Stettheimer show Painting Poetry at the Guggenheim Museum is charming, delightful and goes down easy. Stehttheimer's sinuous, colorful drawings and paintings which take as their subject matter the very elite world of her sisters, shopping, picnicking, dancing, opera and famous friends give insight into an upper class woman who straddled the line between fine art and illustration. At a panel about the artist last night, this artist was recognized as culturally undervalued as someone who created meaning through social process. Artist Cecily Brown who said at first Stettheimer was something of a guilty pleasure then studied the work and understood the work to be more like the Breugel jigsaw puzzles she favors for their crowds and sub texts. "She leads your eye on in a joyous dance...in the electricity and intense passages between things."