piccolagalleriaportatile

2.8.26

Florine Stettheimer

wikipedia.org

Portrait of My Sister, Ettie Stettheimer, 1923

: artforum.com

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Portrait of Virgil Thomson, 1930

A model (nude - self-portrait), 1915-16

Heat, 1919

Christmas, 1930-1940

Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, 1928

Moolinex

artpute.over-blog.com

instagram.com/moolinex

artsfactory.net/index.php/moolinex

Deep Purple

Depp Purple

Hearth of darkness (d'après J. Conrad)

Tête de mort clé brisée, 2000

Tous morts tous égaux

Morris Hirshfield

Born in 1872 in a small town of about 1000 inhabitants in Russia-Poland near German border. Mother was German Born; father a native of Russia-Poland.

It seems that even in my young days I exhibited artistic rendencies — not in painting — but in wood-carving, for at the tender age of 12 I aroused our little town by producing for myself a unique noise-maker to be used in the Jewish Purim festivals at the synagogue. On this noise-maker I managed to depict the main event of the Purim day by modeling in wood actual miniature figures of the well-known Jewish biblical sharacters Mordecai, his adopted cousin Esther, Haman and King Xerxes . .. I painted the features to make the appearance more lifelike and actually clothed them in garments I felt fitted their day.

The furor it created was so great that the Rabbi of that congregation was compelled to go to my father pleading that he hide my work-of-art in order that prayers could be rendered.

Seeing my work so well received and admired, I took courage to go on to even greater efforts. At the age of fourreen I undertook the sculpturing in wood of a piece of work almost six feet high for our local synagogue. It formed the prayer stand in front of the scroll on which the Cantor’s prayer-books rested. It consisted of two huge lions holding between them the ten commandments. Below the animals were two prayer books lying flat, and on top of the holy volumes were two birds, one holding in his beak a pear, the other a leaf. Everything was carved in full life-like figures and embossed with a good many more ornamental designs which I do not remember in detail and the whole gilded with gold and other colors of paint... .

Unless destroyed by the ravages of recent warfare, it still hold its place of honor in the synagogue for I have been told by kinsfolk recently arrived from my home town that when they left it was still standing.

At the age of eighteen I left Europe and came to America where I found a position as worker in a woman’s coat factory. After being in the line several years I became engaged and thus stimulated, went into business with my brother in the manufacturing of woman’s coats and suits, the firm being known as Hirshfield Brothers. During this period I married.

I stayed in this line for twelve years. While we were making a very nice line of merchandise we could not call it a financial success, so we sold the business and shortly thereafter entered a new field — the manufacturing of boudoir slippers, where I made a huge success, employing over three hundred people. The E. Z. Walk Mfg. Co., as I called it, soon, became the biggest manufacturing plant of its kind in N.Y.C.

During all these years, although busy manufacturing, I never quite stifled my strong urge to produce artistically, to saint or carve — although I never quite actually managed to settle down to work on anything. I did turn out several inventions, however, patented in Washington.

After being at the head of the E. Z. Walk Mfg. Co. for fifteen years and enjoying an enviable rating and a well-known name and doing a business of about a million a year, I was suddenly stricken ill and during my long absence the place was so badly managed that on my return I found it impossible to go on. I retired then from active business.

My first paintings, on which I worked so laboriously and which took me so long to produce, were started in 1937 and were called The Beach Girl and Angora Cat.

It seems that my mind knew well what I wanted to portray but my hands were unable to produce what my mind demanded. After working five months on one and then the other in 1937 I could not carry them out to my satisfaction and so put them to one side, coming back again to them in 1938, when once again, I worked on them for about five or six months. While they were muchly improved, they still did not satisfy me and so again I put them to one side. It was when I took them up again in 1939 for the third time that I brought them out to my entire satisfaction.

(in View Magazine, october 1945: archive.org from THEY TAUGHT THEMSELVES by Sidney Janis, Dial Press, 1942)

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