The Cathedrals of Broadway by Florine Stettheimer, 1929. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo via Wikimedia Commons [Public domain].I saw Florine Stettheimer’s Cathedrals series when I was at the Met last month, and I’ve been eager to learn more about it ever since. Stettheimer (1871-1944) was a New York state-born modernist artist and theatrical set designer; you can certainly see evidence of both her theatrical experience and her modernist leanings in these paintings. There are four works in the Cathedrals series – The Cathedrals of Broadway (1929), The Cathedrals of Art (1942), The Cathedrals of Wall Street (1939), and The Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue (1931). Each painting concerns a different cultural center of New York City, presenting the sights, events, institutions, and characters in massive, stage-like displays. The Metropolitan’s collection database calls the works “extraordinary composite visions of New York’s economic, social, and cultural institutions”. Of this work in particular, the museum notes the “magical atmosphere of neon-lit theatres” and “little hint of the harsh conditions that confronted many New Yorkers in the 1930s”. However, it’s difficult not to read some degree of satire and social critique into the bright, chaotic compositions and slight tone of surrealism. After all, Stettheimer would be neither the first nor the last artist to draw attention to Wall Street and Fifth Avenue’s foibles.
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Alexandra Kiely, aka A Scholarly Skater, is an art historian based in the northeastern United States. She loves wandering down the dark and dusty corners of art history and wholeheartedly believes in visual art's ability to enrich every person's life.
Her favorite periods of art history are 19th-century American painting and medieval European art and architecture. When she not looking at, reading about, writing about, or teaching art, she's probably ice dancing or reading.
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