About this work
The scene is at once intimate and electric. *Studio Party (Soirée)* is an oil on canvas measuring approximately 28¼ × 30 inches — nearly square, like a window thrown open onto a very particular world. The figures crowd a gathering at Stettheimer's studio: at the top left, Ettie Stettheimer, Isabell Lachaise, and Maurice Stern cluster beneath a copy of *Family Portrait No. 1*; on the lower left, sculptors Gaston Lachaise and Albert Gleizes face a canvas shown only from its back; and at center, playwright Avery Hopwood and art critic Leo Stein share the room while the Hindu poet Sankar sits directly before Stettheimer's nude self-portrait.
Stettheimer depicts Stein having removed his hearing aids — likely her joke, at Stein's or Hopwood's expense, about the critic's interest in genuine conversation.
Meanwhile, Juliette Gleizes, sharing a sofa with the artist, gapes in apparent realization that the provocative painting on the wall is, in fact, her hostess's self-portrait. The palette is bright and declarative — figures rendered in Stettheimer's characteristic elongated style against a flattened interior space, the whole composition crackling with wit and social observation.
*Studio Party (Soirée)* was painted between 1917 and 1919 and is now held in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut.
It depicts a salon like those Stettheimer commonly held in her Bryant Park studio, which doubled as the Jazz Age's most idiosyncratic — and by many accounts most fruitful — salon.
She had daringly painted herself nude and installed the self-portrait in the middle of that studio, making it the primary focus of the soirées she held there. Embedding her own nude as the painting-within-the-painting, and capturing her guests' charged reactions to it, was unprecedented for a woman at the time — and Stettheimer was boldly proud of it, making it the centerpiece not only of the room but of this canvas as well. The work belongs to a suite of salon paintings from this period that function as living social documents of the modernist avant-garde.
*Soirée* is a painting of famous artist friends looking at paintings in Stettheimer's studio — and unlike anything else being made at the time: figurative, bright, colorful, and outright funny. It rewards slow looking; the longer you sit with it, the more its layers of joke and drama come forward. It suits a reader's library, a collector's study, or any room where conversation is the point — spaces where a painting can hold its own as
