CAMPING UNDER GLASS

By ROBERT HUGHES

Florine Stettheimer, whose 124th anniversary has just come and gone, painted a self-portrait in 1923, when she was 51. It is a parody of one of William Blake's illustrations from The Song of Los. It comes out as a yearning apotheosis of the Jewish-American princess, in a semitranslucent nightie from some celestial boutique, languidly holding a bouquet and wafted aloft. Above her is the sun, looking like an expensive Christmas ornament. An insect-winged, bifurcated, slender-is flying toward it, helplessly attracted. It is Florine's eager soul, rising to the em pyrean. Bendel's she loved; and next to Bendel's, art.

The show of Stettheimer's paintings at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art, titled "Manhattan Fantastica," is a fairly irresistible event. You would need to be a bear not to enjoy its charm, its faux-naif artifice, its overwhelming campiness and its evocation of a period in the history of the American art world be tween the wars that now, at the sour close of the 20th century, seems remote and glittering, like something enclosed in a bell jar. This was the moment when New York, pupating into a modernist capital, contained all the other buzz-word News-new woman, new paganism, new verse, the New Negro and the New Republic.

Stettheimer was mesmerized by this sense of breakout, its glitter and fun, its internationalism and Americanness. Her art records, and gently satirizes, that zeitgeist. Nobody could call Stettheimer a major artist, but she didn't deserve the half-century of near oblivion that the new show brings to an end. This was partly her own doing: for all her love of camp flamboyance, Stettheimer wanted to arrange the disappearance of her own work and ordered her executors to destroy the contents of her studio. Fortunately, they disobeyed. Her friend Marcel Duchamp arranged an exhibition for her at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, two years after her death, but it had no impact. Nothing could have been less in synch with the industrial-strength seriousness of postwar American painting than the froufrou, gilt and needling little ironies of Stettheimer's style.

What mainly preserved her work was homosexual taste: in various ways it influenced Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns (who would take over the device of monogram letters around the frame of her portrait of Marcel Duchamp) and a host of others. The ghost of Florine also hovers, one feels, behind the marvelous illustrations of Edward Gorey.

Stettheimer was a rich amateur. One of four daughters, she studied art in Germany, lived for a time in Paris, and after the outbreak of war in 1914 returned to New York. Her home on the Upper West Side became one of an overlapping array of salons devoted to modernism; others were run by Walter and Louise Arensberg and the redoubtable Mabel Dodge.

Unlike them, Florine Stettheimer was not in the least bohemian. The Arensbergs had bizarre figures of the Greenwich Village avant-garde like Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, the first New York punkette, who made public appearances with her hair shaved off and her scalp dyed purple. Such creatures would never have been tolerated at Stettheimer's evenings in town, where decorum prevailed, or her picnics in the country, which she painted as fetes champetres full of wispy, epicene figures.

However, the many Americans who concluded from the 1913 Armory Show that modern art was foreign, perverse and un-American would have found confirmation of that in Stettheimer's guest list: to reach it, you pretty much had to be European or gay, or both. Then you would find your way into her paintings, as did the theater critic Carl Van Vechten, author of the novel Nigger Heaven and prime link between downtown white New York and the Harlem Renaissance, posing in rapturously exaggerated contrapposto in 1922's Portrait of Carl Van Vechten on a red stool on a black rug on a red carpet; while in Portrait of Stieglitz, 1928, the shoe and cane (nothing else) of artist Charles Demuth enter from the left, and the gloved, ermine-cuffed hand of the preposterous New York dandy Baron de Meyer appears on the right

Best of all, apparently, she liked Marcel Duchamp, artist and gigolo to the rich, who appears to have had a role in the sentimental education of her sister Ettie. (Since Ettie cut many pages from Florine's diaries after her death, one cannot be sure.) Florine's portrait of Duchamp in an armchair, turning a slender crank that raises his invented feminine alter ego Rrose Selavy into the air, is one of the most stylish tributes offered by one American artist to another.

Stylish, in fact, hardly begins to describe Florine Stettheimer's work. It is besotted with style as an end in itself, and its delight in quotation naturally endears it to postmodernist taste. Sometimes it's tea-party Ensor, without the bilious satire; sometimes it's Rus sian ballet. There are traces of Elie Nadelman, Odilon Redon, Watteau, Hieronymus Bosch and an over-the-top capriccio of swimmers in some celestial spa titled Natatorium Undine, 1927. Her painting of a spring sale at Henri Bendel's, with ladies squabbling over the merchandise like angry hummingbirds, resembles a Pompeian grotesque translated into the 1920s. She liked caricature too. In the Cathedrals, the series of New York historical-satirical-puzzle pictures that she considered her crowning works, she uses cartoonish labels to sew the message together. In Cathedrals of Wall Street, 1939, Eleanor Roosevelt, the woman Stettheimer most admired, is seen with Fiorello La Guardia and a contingent of drum majorettes, Marine musicians and Salvation Army choristers belting out a hymn: New York, New Deal and capitalism resplendent in gold, all presided over by George Washington. You couldn't get more American than this, unless you were Norman Rockwell. One supposes that when Florine Stettheimer died, the pearly gates must have looked just like that.