The Cathedral of Art (1942–1944, unfinished). Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
When Florine Stettheimer died in 1944, at the age of 72, the New York artist, poet, and salonnière, was still putting the final touches on
The Cathedrals of Art, the last in a series of four monumental paintings devoted to New York’s cultural, social, and economic temples. Identical in scale, each painting measures five feet tall by just over four feet wide.
The series, which includes
The Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue (1931)
, and
The Cathedrals of Wall Street (1939), was a winkingly aware homage to places of worship in the city she’d called home for all her adult life. For the deeply private artist,
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“S is for Susan who perished of fits”: Mark Dery offers the first major biography of Edward Gorey.
Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey
, by Mark Dery, Little, Brown, 503 pages, $35
• • •
By his mid-twenties, the artist and illustrator Edward Gorey had already settled on his signature look: long fur coat, jeans, canvas high-tops, rings on all his fingers, and the full beard of a Victorian intellectual. His enigmatic illustrations of equally fur-coated and Firbankian men in parlors, long-skirted women, and hollow-eyed, doomed children (in
The Gashlycrumb Tinies, among other works) share his own gothic camp aesthetic. Among the obvious questions for a reader of Gorey’s biography are: Where in his psyche, or in the culture, did all those fey fainting ladies and ironic dead tots come from? And, not unrelatedly: Was Gorey gay?
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