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Last week, I took my daughter to the Museum of the City of New York to see the Stettheimer Dollhouse and the bread box-sized art display installed inside. Both the dollhouse and art display have been in the museum since 1945, but only last year were they given a room of their own. And while my daughter was a little distracted to see Oscar the Grouch, down the hall at The New York Dolls, I was totally intrigued.<\/p>\n
Commissioned in 1916 by Carrie Stetheimer – a wealthy New Yorker who ran modern salons with her mother, Rosetta, and two sisters Etty, the writer, and Florine, a well-known painter – the house is a 28-inch-high, two-story, 12-room mansion, with bathrooms and elevator. , modeled on Andr\u00e9 Brook, the Tarrytown estate where the family used to spend the summer. Curry spent 19 years decorating her interiors with Empire wallpaper, Louis XV furniture, and other fine furnishings, and at one point even rented a separate apartment to work in on the project.<\/p>\n
It also persuaded the leading artists of the time, such as the sculptors Alexander Archipenko and Gaston Lachaise, to contribute an appropriate volume of art. Most famously, Marcel Duchamp recreated his Naked Going Down a Ladder, the Cubist-effect image of a moving object that scandalized New York at the 1913 Armory Show. A 1918 ink-and-wash copy that’s rougher and more explosive than the original, his length is just over three inches and a half.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
After her mother’s death in 1935, Carrie stopped working at home, and when she herself died nine years later, the pieces she collected were loose. Before donating everything to the museum, her sister Etty chose 13 postage-stamp-sized drawings and paintings to hang as an exhibit in the home’s grand ballroom, where she thought her sister would, and three sculptures nearby. (A few more are hanging elsewhere in the house.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The first rooms you will meet are the living quarters, which are exposed to view by removing the facade. They look like their residents have just moved out. There’s bacon on the stove and cake on the ice chest. Last night’s mahjong tiles, handcrafted by Carrie, are still scattered on the library table. At first it may be interesting to look at all the rooms with the view of God, or it may feel comfortable and comfortable to imagine yourself inside. But when you start counting the details\u2014the dumbbells and wringer in the master bathroom, the crafty little cupboards in the linen room, the Dreiser and Van Vechten titles on the red-painted bookshelf in the library\u2014you’ll quickly discover that they’re more than you could possibly take in. At the back, meanwhile, the art gallery is only partially visible through three French windows.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The new installation addresses these difficulties by surrounding the house with enlarged interior landscape photos, along with relevant historical materials. It’s presentation wise, which makes the attractive and secret home more accessible without removing the ambiguity, although I would have preferred the taller wall decals over QR codes. Ettie’s 1945 donation receipt indicates that she sent to the side of the house a doll, with Saratoga’s chest and torso; And Carrie, in a photo clone of Florine, appears as flashy fins at a garden party.<\/p>\n
The art exhibition begins in the courtyard of the house, where Ettie has installed the stately alabaster of Gaston Lachaise “Venus” and the bronze “Mother and Child” by William Zorach. The diverted Zorash mother sensitively looks toward her counterpart with an expression of concern, while the goddess, draping a robe behind her bare body, adjusts to not looking at anyone. If you are young enough to enter this Stettheimer mini salon, you will have to pass between eros and local living to do so.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
But at least looking inside, you’ll find a picture of two dancers by Swedish painter Carl Springshorn hanging above the fireplace. She wears a pink puffy skirt and wears a jacket, while he waits beside her in navy robe. Around them hover clumps of the primary color so bright that the pair are almost obscured. Eleven drawings and a framed painting gather around the Sprinkhorn: a mixture of sensual graphite nudes by Lachaise; zigzag bathers, against a red sky, Marguerite Zurach; a sailboat facing a great wave; Cubist pastoral scene. “Naked” by Duchamp; And in the movie “Mama’s Boy” by Louis Boucher, a child stares between heavy green curtains.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
In retrospect, it is curious to note that Etty Stetheimer, one of three gorgeous, energetic women putting the finishing touches on another major art project, chose to hang such a large percentage of nude women with only one female painter’s work. But it’s also a brilliant trick, a time capsule within a time capsule that captures both the limitations and possibilities of life as a bohemian woman in pre-war New York.<\/p>\n
The arrangement and shapes of the other pieces\u2014smaller and narrower\u2014dominate the arrangement and shapes of the other pieces\u2014the smaller and narrower\u2014and their less floral colors emphasize this fact. It feels like the dancers are the lead characters and all the other visuals are their dreams. And what exactly in their dreams? Both are preoccupied with female beauty, both as a symbol and as a tangible reality. But among the images on the right-hand side, beside the ballerina, there is also the sturdy sailing ship, a Lachaise nude posing in abundance and Duchamp’s image of the woman as pure electric power, all appropriate enough for a person to gracefully jump on stage.<\/p>\n
On the left, beside the male dancer, there is only a sullen little boy watching from his bedroom – and another Lachaise drawing of a character turning away. The male dancer is really standing there. The ballerina is the workplace.<\/p>\n
Stettheimer dolls’ house<\/strong><\/p>\n Until May 20 at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. 212-534-1672; mcny.org.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week, I took my daughter to the Museum of the City of New York to see the Stettheimer Dollhouse…<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6794,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interior-design","no-post-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6793\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}