About this work
Painted in Stettheimer's quintessentially feminine palette of whites, pinks, and reds, *The Cathedrals of Art* is a fantastical portrait of three of the city's major museums — the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
A red-carpeted staircase is lined with well-known art critics, dealers, and gallery owners gaping at the spectacle above.
Art critic Henry McBride holds two flags reading "Go" and "Stop," while Alfred Stieglitz strikes a dramatic pose on the staircase, and photographer George Platt Lynes takes pictures of a naked baby Stettheimer called "Baby Art."
The painting even announces itself — Stettheimer wrote its title directly on the canvas, in bold gold letters gracing the floor.
Stettheimer herself appears in the lower right, holding an armload of flowers — depicted, by her own choice, as being in her mid-thirties, though she was over 70 at the time.
When Stettheimer died in 1944, she was still putting the final touches on *The Cathedrals of Art*, the last in her series of four monumental paintings devoted to New York's cultural, social, and economic temples.
Executed between 1929 and 1942, the series created extraordinary composite visions of New York's economic, social, and cultural institutions.
For the deeply private artist, *The Cathedrals of Art* is arguably the most personal of the works.
She was an insider in the art world — and yet this painting reveals how much its political machinery relegated her to outsider status.
The whimsical, even fey atmosphere is a veneer for the artist's incisive social commentary and informed contemporary perspectives.
Renaissance altarpieces were among the artist's key inspirations — and the painting's triptych-like structure, with its three museum vignettes presiding like saints in niches, makes that devotional lineage unmistakable.
This is a painting that rewards long looking — the kind that suits a study, a library, or any room built for thought and conversation. Its dense, jewel-bright surface pulls viewers in close, and there is always another figure to identify, another joke to catch, another small absurdity tucked into the margin. It is a visual representation of what many have imagined the New York art world to be: a frothy fever dream of theater, glamour, and intellect. It speaks directly to anyone who has ever felt simultaneously dazzled and skeptical of the institutions that shape culture
