Dandies by Susan Fillin-Yeh

Author:Susan Fillin-Yeh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 0303-04-11T05:00:00+00:00

Fig. 4.5. Georgia O’Keeffe, Summer Days, 1936, oil on canvas, 36 × 30 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of Calvin Klein. Photograph © 1999 Whitney Museum of American Art. © 2000 Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation/Artists Rights Society, New York.

These objects with their novel locations also have undergone disconcerting scale changes. Literally ungrounded, enormous, they are observed as spectacle, as panoply. And with this vision, artificed, ambiguous, and shifting, we are returned to the elegant and strolling flaneur/dandy, who takes on an artist’s body. Stettheimer’s self-image spells it out for us. If, in Family Portrait, II (as in other paintings), Stettheimer identifies herself as a painter, here where her mannish painting pyjamas separate her from her jeweled and begowned family, she also assumes the flaneur’s aloof location at the side of her own painting—at its margin—the margin that offers her the most complete view of the panorama she has constructed for us.

Such dandyism in the work of both artists is a dandyism of locations, both psychic and physical, and a resultant dandyism of vision. In each case, objects have been drawn very close: the giant flowers and other floating things have been pushed to the foreground, nearly into our space. At the same time, the imagery, which looms against glowing skies, crowds the canvas. Stettheimer and O’Keeffe both suggest that certain things cannot be contained within boundaries, and so, psychologically, their images seem to push viewers back, displacing them. Thus, the viewers of Stettheimer’s and O’Keeffe’s paintings are brought to share the vision of the modernist artist, the flaneur/dandy “out of place,” who privileges the view from the sidelines in images of distancing and dislocation while investing them with insight—and, perhaps, with the glamour of the unattainable.

And it is this dandy’s consciousness of self and position that made that persona so useful an appropriation for all sorts of modernist dandies and cross-dressers, and especially for women artists, a persona that is inscribed in Stettheimer’s dense narrations, in O’Keeffe’s resonant severities, and the destabilizing spatial disjunctions seen in both. Each in her own way gives us images of modernism’s mobile spaces in a vision of a world no longer grounded in certainty, no longer marked out in traditional perspective or rules of painting—or in clichéd sexual roles. If, as one might argue, modernism and the dandy constructed each other, women artists of New York’s avant-garde shaped that construction to their own purposes as specially suited to their own paintings.66 The visual imagery of dislocation that these early modernist dandies mapped out has come down to us now in a shifting, sometimes recalcitrant, subversive, and provocative masquerade.

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