#salons

Florine Stettheimer, Family Portrait, II, 1933. Oil on canvas.

Dressed in a black pantsuit and with palette and paintbrush in hand, the artist appears at the far left side of this family portrait. She is joined by her mother, who sits upright in the golden armchair at right, and her sisters, Ettie and Carrie; the former reclines in the chair beside the artist, and the latter flanks the scene at the opposite end, a cigarette between her fingers. An artist, set designer, and poet, Stettheimer led a New York salon where she entertained her family and a close circle of artists, critics, and curators, exhibiting her work and sharing her poems.

Signs of her 1930s Manhattan milieu abound in this painting’s backdrop—an imagined skyline that features the Art Deco skyscraper at the heart of Rockefeller Center, known today as the Comcast Building, as well as Radio City Music Hall, the Chrysler Building, the Statue of Liberty, and a dragon-adorned decorative fragment from Alwyn Court, the midtown apartment building where the artist lived and worked. Overtaking these monumental and modern structures, Stettheimer depicted a trio of fantastically enormous blooming flowers at the painting’s center. She was unabashedly proud of this unconventional and personal portrait, frequently referring to the painting as “my masterpiece.”

Rien n'est plus "monroviesque", plus farce en fait, en pratique, que cette drôle de prétention des salons au "bon goût" ... au "raffinement" ... Dans n'importe quel salon, en dix minutes d'assemblage, il se commet plus d'impairs, d'horreurs de goût et de tact, que dans tous les Corps de garde de France en dix ans... Le seul fait d'aller dans le monde dénote déjà chez le bonhomme une impudeur de cochon... une sensibilité de bûche. Le Monde, c'est un vrai paradis pour les sapajous exhibitionnistes.

A lesbian royal, Winnaretta Singer (1864-1943) became a princess by entering a lavender marriage with a gay man. She spent her life supporting the arts and public health.

[Though primarily interested in music, Singer also painted, including this self-portrait c. 1885]

Singer was born in Yonkers, New York to the wealthy Singer family (of Singer sewing machines). As was true of many women from newly rich American families, she was married to an old and respectable but financially unstable European family. This was her first marriage, to Prince Louis de Scey-Montbéliard. On her wedding night, she reportedly threatened to kill him if he touched her, and their marriage lasted 5 years before it was annulled, on the grounds that the marriage was never consummated.

The next year, Singer married Prince Edmond de Polignac. Though she was 28 and he was 59, it was a happy marriage, because they were both gay. Singer and her husband were great friends and fellow artists, and Signer was free to pursue women without fear (except, occasionally, of those women's husbands). Singer had a long list of confirmed partners, including American painter Virginia Woolf.

Singer funded a music salon that housed the first performances of such musicians as Chabrier, d'Indy, Debussy, Fauré, and Ravel. Her salon, indeed, was one of the best-observed salons and many of our ideas about salon culture were drawn from the Singer-Poignac salon. She also funded Stravinsky, Milhaud, and multiple ballets.