Doppelganger
Magazine >> Issue Six | June 2006
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Florine
Stettheimer, Fraulein
Sophie Von Prieser, 1929.
NOTES ON A
PICTURE
MATTHEW STADLER
The pleasure of a small museum is that there is so little to look at.
The Portland Art Museum (if one ignores its new Jubitz Modern and Contemporary
art wing) still delivers the charms of a modest collection housed inside
its original, jewel-like Pietro Belluschi building. A hodge-podge of unremarkable
works fills out a flat sea, surrounding a few islands of superb art, most
of them paintings. Painting has always been the Portland Art Museum’s
favorite child. They have Albert Bierstadt’s stirring and absurd
fantasy of nearby Mount Hood, painted in his Hudson River studio
in 1869. Bierstadt has turned the mountain 90 degrees, so that its symmetrical
West face can be seen surmounting the great Columbia Gorge and several
attractive cataracts that, in dull life, lie to the mountain’s north.
There is also a lovely Josef Albers, Late Reminder (1953), a
smallish canvas in which a red square with purple geometric penumbra sits
deep in a field of blue. This hangs near a remarkable painting from 1943
by Maude Kerns. Who is Maude Kerns? Google tells me she was born in Portland
in 1876 and died in Eugene, Oregon in 1965. (And I see that Terri Hopkins,
who curates the Art Gym at Marylhurst, in Portland, has included her work
in several shows.) Kerns’s serenely banded rectangle of blue (which
slips from pale to slate to cerulean to aqua in a most beguiling, composition
of blended horizontal bands) is broken by a trio of geometric figures
(including a small black ball and a collision of triangles and spheres
that hovers somewhere between the 1939 World’s Fair emblem and a
prescient icon for Ms. Pac Man), and seems informed equally by Malevich,
Kandinsky, and (I know its impossible) Susan Frecon. This is a beautiful,
unlikely painting, apparently birthed in the WPA program.
But my favorite painting at PAM is Florine Stettheimer’s 1929 portrait
of her childhood governess, Fraulein Sophie Von Prieser. One can easily
spend an hour with it, enjoying the solitude of an otherwise empty gallery
without the distraction of too many great works nearby. The painting centers
on the standing figure of Fraulein Von Prieser, rendered with a Rousseau-like
flatness and hauteur, a pear-shaped action figure stabilized by a great
glob of dress that makes a third leg to balance the two, narrow black
feet protruding from the dress’s front.
The painting is several paintings: There are four portraits (one of them,
the mirror reflection of the girlish acolyte, Florine, gazing in admiration
at her cherished governess—our view appears to be hers); a formal
landscape; a still life of flowers on a side table; a scrim of lace (the
most convincing illusionist surface in the painting); and all of these
are immersed within a kind of overall color-field painting, its quarters
ranging from pale blue to deep umber to sharp green (and echoed in reverse
in a more geometric composition of the same colors in the tile face of
the fireplace). A book on the table is titled “Ansichten Von Stuttgart.”
As with Rousseau, we get a lot of information. The cut of Fraulein Von
Prieser’s dress, its buttons and lace, are exact; a talented seamstress
could easily recreate the dress from the painting. Similarly, the flora
are specific (poppies and forsythia on the side table; morning glory and
a chestnut tree outside) and rendered at a specific time of year (early
summer). The furnishings—the harp-shaped pedestal to the round side
table, its lace doily, a bent wire chair, the wrought iron balcony with
its Gothic-scripted “Sophie V. Prieser”—are as precise
and mimetic as the color fields are abstracted and fanciful. In the beautifully
detailed lace, falling across the upper left half of the open French doors,
this tension between illusion and materiality becomes especially pitched.
The wildly variegated whole is pulled together and unified by the gravity
of the black hole at the center—the elongated figure of Fraulein
Von Prieser in her severe dress—a void that sucks at every corner
of this colorful smorgasbord.
Stettheimer has given her beloved teacher a horsey jaw and Thomas Jefferson’s
brow, and fussed over the details of her face enough to make a hash out
of the skin and coloring. Von Prieser’s right arm descends uncomfortably
far, the pale hand upturned in a gesture that looks obscene, a ball-grabbing
threat such as one might expect from Don Corlione. In her other hand she
holds her pince nez away from her face, her mouth curling downward
in a disapproving scowl. However adoring the girlish Stettheimer in the
mirror is, her black-clad mistress is that much dismissive, perhaps disgusted
by, the white-smocked student.
The largest head in the painting, the dominant portrait, is a grossly
oversized Hellenic bust on the mantle, outsizing the full-body of Stettheimer
in the mirror beside it, and more than doubling the size of Fraulein Von
Prieser’s own foregrounded head. Its marble is as clear and smooth
as the face of Fraulein Von Prieser is hashed and gashed. Whatever
pas de deux of attraction and repulsion is transpiring between mistress
and student, this older, wiser face gazes serenely, eyeless, through that
distraction, at us. Thus, the Portrait of Fraulein Sophie Von Priesser
presents two simultaneous relationships: the temporary, eventful one of
Florine Stettheimer and her commanding mistress; and the eternal, unchanging
one of Hellenic beauty and its viewer.
Out in the landscape (a closely shorn meadow that opens off a formal,
collonaded garden), a dozen schoolgirls stand in a ring holding hands.
Their circuit is complete, closed, as is the charged gap between girl
and governess. Not so the clear gaze of Hellenic beauty. It awaits us.
.
Matthew Stadler is a novelist (Landscape: Memory, Allan Stein) and editor and cofounder of Clear Cut Press. His writing appears in Domus, Frieze, Artforum, Dwell, The Stranger, and many other publications.