September 28, 1980

Florine Stettheimer: Still Lifes, Portraits and Pageants 1910-1942 opened at the Vassar Art Gallery. Organized by the Boston Museum of Contemporary Art, the comprehensive collection of the American artist’s work, was, according to Alan Mintermute ’81, writing in The Miscellany News, “an elegant, witty and sophisticated celebration of curling line and candy colors of her world of wealth, culture and taste in the New York of the 1920s and 30s.” In “Florine Stettheimer: Rococo Subversive” which appeared in Art in America concurrently with the exhibit, art historian Linda Nochlin ’51 called Stettheimer’s “camp” outlook “a kind of permanent revolution of self-mocking sensibiltiy against the strictures of a patriarchal tradition and the solemn, formalist teleology of vanguardism.”

The opening was attended by Joan Mondale, wife of Vice President Walter Mondale, who was seeking, along with President Jimmy Carter, reelection.