“The Stettheimer Dollhouse in a New Light”
Museum of the City of New York | 1220 Fifth Avenue
Ongoing
Yes, I know, the Frick reopened last week. But another Upper East Side mansion with a fabulous art collection is back on public view, too, and this one boasts a tiny Duchamp. After two years off site undergoing extensive conservation, the Stettheimer Dollhouse—a transporting mini monument of the interwar avant-garde, as well as a wryly opulent representation of the domestic lives and social sphere of three legendary Manhattan salonnières (the sisters Carrie, Florine, and Ettie Stettheimer)—returned, having been cleaned, refreshed and repaired, to the Museum of the City of New York in November. It’s the centerpiece and subject of the new exhibition “The Stettheimer Dollhouse in a New Light,” curated by Lilly Tuttle.
Conceived of by Carrie, the eldest of the unmarried sisters, the 28-inch tall, 16-room structure was furnished and decorated by her from 1916 to 1935 in a style reflecting the Stettheimers’ chic Alwyn Court apartment in Manhattan (the façade, meanwhile, resembles their Tarrytown summer home). Born in the United States, the women spent much of their lives in Europe, returning with their mother to New York as adults at the start of the First World War. Though wealthy and well-educated, they were, as Jews, excluded from high society and so became, instead, doyennes of a differently elite, decidedly artistic, scene. While Ettie was a writer and Florine a painter, Carrie both managed their busy household and constructed her exquisite Lilliputian mirror of it—a thing of truly magnetic charm. When I find myself on Museum Mile with a little time to kill, I drop in on the dollhouse.
