“The Stettheimer Dollhouse in a New Light”
Museum of the City of New York | 1220 Fifth Avenue
Ongoing
Yes, I know, the Frick reopened last week. But another Upper East Side mansion with a fabulous art collection is back on public view, too, and this one boasts a tiny Duchamp. After two years off site undergoing extensive conservation, the Stettheimer Dollhouse—a transporting mini monument of the interwar avant-garde, as well as a wryly opulent representation of the domestic lives and social sphere of three legendary Manhattan salonnières (the sisters Carrie, Florine, and Ettie Stettheimer)—returned, having been cleaned, refreshed and repaired, to the Museum of the City of New York in November. It’s the centerpiece and subject of the new exhibition “The Stettheimer Dollhouse in a New Light,” curated by Lilly Tuttle.
Conceived of by Carrie, the eldest of the unmarried sisters, the 28-inch tall, 16-room structure was furnished and decorated by her from 1916 to 1935 in a style reflecting the Stettheimers’ chic Alwyn Court apartment in Manhattan (the façade, meanwhile, resembles their Tarrytown summer home). Born in the United States, the women spent much of their lives in Europe, returning with their mother to New York as adults at the start of the First World War. Though wealthy and well-educated, they were, as Jews, excluded from high society and so became, instead, doyennes of a differently elite, decidedly artistic, scene. While Ettie was a writer and Florine a painter, Carrie both managed their busy household and constructed her exquisite Lilliputian mirror of it—a thing of truly magnetic charm. When I find myself on Museum Mile with a little time to kill, I drop in on the dollhouse.
Its power over me is, in some sense, easy to explain—an assortment of my passions (wallpaper, miniatures, Jazz Age painting, early 20th-century émigré artists) converge in its grid of ornamented spaces—but its appeal goes deeper. The doll-less dollhouse is suffused with expectance and melancholy. Its lack of exterior walls, which suggests total visibility, only heightens the desire to see more: Meticulous detail can’t be appreciated meticulously enough from the other side of its transparent case. So I gasped when I received an invitation, in February, to a private viewing of the dollhouse without its usual barrier, ahead of its transfer to a new custom vitrine. More astonishing was the accompanying opportunity to be present during a further ritual of maintenance, in which each item of furniture, décor, and art—from the mint-and-gilt bedroom set of the coral-pink chamber upstairs, to the poached pears from the kitchen, to the postage-stamp size compositions and statues of Carrie’s art collection—was to be painstakingly removed, dusted, and reinstalled.
In the months since I attended that early spring-cleaning event, I’ve grappled to find a new angle on an old object, one that has been on permanent view since its acquisition in 1945. And—though I could talk about the dollhouse forever—with both the new images provided by the museum (post-conservation) and my own iPhone photos revealing it in a partially disassembled state, there is a sense in which this article is, foremost, a fan’s photo dump. When on public display, Carrie’s magnum opus is kept frustratingly dim, lit only by its sparkling, glass-bead overhead fixtures, to protect its unstable materials from fading. There are ineffable benefits to visiting it in person, of course—you should feel its scale and experience it in real space, as a sculpture in the round—but the way to see the dollhouse is through photography.
Glowing on screen, emptied of its painted furniture and the light turned off, the nursery, with its poignant dereliction—its cracked and discolored geometric confetti-collaged walls and Noah’s Ark frieze—is clearer, as is the painstaking handcrafted quality of its surfaces and the effervescence of its playful design. The salon, minus its needlepoint settee and chairs, becomes a little more haunted, while sounding a new (or newly discernible) note of satire. In contrast to the authentic modern works on view nearby, two faux-Rococo fêtes galantes by artist and magazine illustrator Albert Sterner hang above the room’s doorways, reading now as snickering nods to Gilded Age collectors (like Henry Clay Frick) and their preference for Fragonard and Watteau. And then there is the dollhouse’s famous Ballroom, whose wall above the fireplace is shown to be marked up when its salon-style arrangement of artworks—gifts from the luminaries of Carrie's intimate circle—is temporarily removed. It looks bereft.
Duchamp’s replica of his Nude Descending a Staircase, no.2, 1912, made especially for Carrie, is the most celebrated work on display here, with two drawings and a pint-size outdoor sculpture by Gaston Lachaise a distant second. But there are other enchanting inclusions, such as a canvas by Carl Sprinchorn, depicting a pair of dancers in an Orphist palette, and drawings and watercolors by Cubists Alexander Archipenko and Albert Gleizes. To watch the museum's assistant registrar Riley McBride rehang the works, all around a century old, was like witnessing a magical game of Operation; even to see a person reach into the dollhouse is thrilling.
The “new light” of the exhibition’s title seems to allude to the changing cultural context of the dollhouse, demonstrating just how much attitudes regarding “the remarkable three-dimensional artwork” (as the museum’s web copy calls it) have evolved. In the eight decades since Ettie donated her sister’s dollhouse to MCNY, it has morphed, in the eye of the institutional beholder, from a haute curio to a different kind of treasure (Carrie herself did not regard it as art). Reconsiderations of the 20th-century canon have turned attention not only to overlooked figures, but also to the artistic networks and lineages rooted in queer sociality, fundamental to the Stettheimers’ liberated milieu. And crafts, “hobbies,” and entertaining—that is, the life-as-art activities that Modernist women often embraced or were consigned to—have assumed their rightful place in art history. (The posthumous rising fortunes of Florine’s painting career have no doubt helped to elevate the dollhouse’s reputation as well, contributing to both Stettheimer name-recognition and a richer context for Carrie’s style of understated observation and calculated froufrou.)
The show chronicles a telling episode in the house’s history via the display of a group of dolls. In the 1970s, John Darcy Noble, a former curator at the museum, made figures, based on the proportions and look of Florine’s portrait of Carrie, to populate the house in saucy vignettes. While perhaps embodying the Stettheimer spirit of camp and fun, and successful in drawing attention to the boldface names in the sisters’ circle (there is an Edward Steichen doll with a camera, and Gertrude Stein with a brooch), these latter-day additions, which, for a time, also—wonderfully or perversely—included Christmas decorations, were deemed out-of-step with curatorial best practice in the early 1990s.
The dollhouse’s unpeopled state is key to its transfixing mystery, I think, but Noble’s dolls are delightful to see here—separately, in their own case—where, as handcrafted and sophisticated playthings, their presentation is in keeping with the museum’s something-for-everyone remit. For me, of course, the “new light” of my most recent visit to the Stettheimer Dollhouse was a real light—a ring light—that showed me the aging detail of Carrie’s little rooms like never before. (Though equally revelatory was the chance to look closely into the shadows of her emptied spaces.) And while there’s nothing wrong, necessarily, with full-scale grandeur, I do recommend, as an antidote to spectacles of oligarchic art accumulation, spending time with intimate collections composed of gifts from glamorous genius friends.
