“I was thrilled”, was Andy Warhol’s enthusiastic reaction to the pictures of Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944). Many of the elements of her work inspired his Pop Art. During Stettheimer’s life her sensuous and ironic paintings with their numerous figures were valued highly by artists and curators, although the general public remained largely unaware of their merits. Only after her death did her close friend Marcel Duchamp organise a retrospective in the Museum of Modern Art. The art and literature scene of Roaring Twenties New York gathered at Florine Stettheimer’s extravagant parties. Surrounded by the cultivated and yet unconventional “Dada flair”, the artist staged her pictures as a performance – and was thereby well ahead of her time. As an outstanding painter she was not only at the heart of the American art business, but also attracted attention with her eccentric, subversive and often humorous poems, as well as demonstrating her talent as a stage and costume designer in the theatre. This bibliophile monograph about the multitalented artist is lavishly illustrated and tells a new, exciting history of the modern age through her artworks.
