Abstract
The interwar period (1914-1941) in American culture was full of vociferous debates about how to effectively conceptualize an American art. In “Queering the Stettheimer Circles,” I discuss the capacities of art devised by the Jewish artist Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944), and the Manhattan salons that she and her two unmarried sisters created between 1915 and 1943. I argue that Florine developed an aesthetic language that was highly inflected by the hybridized identities of her gay male cohort who drew upon periodized Camp idioms. These idioms drew upon seventeenth-century baroque art and ephemeral American material culture, contemporarily identified as kitsch, on which she drew in her paintings and in the creation of her studio-salon in Manhattan’s Beaux-Arts Building. In the Stettheimer circles, Camp was used interchangeably with the terms “baroque” and “rococo,” which were coded queerly. Baroque art and architecture resurfaced continuously in motifs within Stettheimer’s artworks and her archival correspondence with the queer authors Carl Van Vechten, Max Ewing, and others. The circle that revolved around Florine offers an alternative expression of cultural identity through metonymic markers of queer and queer-adjacent modernities.
Committee Chair
Angela Miller
Committee Members
Anne Collins Goodyear; Bradley Bailey; Ila Sheren; John Klein
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Author's Department
Art History & Archaeology
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
4-21-2026
Language
English (en)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/9tbh-8z58
Recommended Citation
Rus, Lauren Ann Johnson, "Queering the Stettheimer Circles" (2026). Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations. 3743.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/9tbh-8z58