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Charles Demuth at 23 Fifth Avenue and Alwyn Court (cont) Moreover, Mabel Dodge regularly served dinner for selected guests: “a soup, roast beef, and browned potatoes, peas, a salad of broccoli, a loaf of Italian bread, pats of sweet butter, and cheese and coffee. Bottles of whisky, red and white wine, and beer stood at intervals along the unclothed refectory table.” Afterwards, a more informal repast — “sandwiches, salads, cold meats, glasses, and bottles, including kummel bottles in the form of Russian bears — was offered to feed the throng. “When dulness, beating its tiresome wings, seemed about to hover over the group, she had a habit of introducing new elements into the discussion, or new figures into the group itself,...all mixed up with green glass vases, filled with fragrant white lilies, salmon snapdragons, and blue larkspurs, pinchbottles, cigarette stubs, Lincoln Steffens, and the paintings of Marsden Hartley and Arthur B. Davies. Over the whole floated the anomalous odours of Eau de Lavande Ambrée and Bull Durham...“The groups separated, came together, separated, came together, separated, came together: syndicalists, capitalists, revolutionists, anarchists, artists, writers, actresses ‘perfumed’ with botanical creams,’ feminists, and malthusians were all mixed up in this strange salad.” After Mabel Dodge deserted New York for Taos, New Mexico, Charles Demuth became a regular visitor at another salon, when his friend Robert Locher took him to meet the Stettheimer sisters and their formidable mother: Florine painted highly sophisticated faux-naif canvases, Ettie wrote novels in suffocating prose, and Carrie presided as the social hostess in the New York apartments at the Alwyn Court on West 58th Street, as well as in summer homes when their salon travelled from one to the other. Locher and Florine Stettheimer had exhibited their work together at the Knoedler Gallery in 1916, and both had failed to sell anything. As a result, Locher went into commercial art and Stettheimer simply withdrew to paint largely for her own and her friends’ amusement. Some years later, social historian Parker Tyler reconstructed the setting and atmosphereof the Stettheimer salon in his book about the sister who painted: A Life in Art, making abundantly clear that theirs was a considerably more exclusive salon than what had amounted to a kind of open house at Mabel Dodge’s. “The matrilinear emphasis, beyond doubt,” Taylor suggested, “is largely responsible for the ladylike quintessence that pervaded the Stettheimer drawing-room.” Locher and his wife, Van Vechten and his wife Fania Marinoff, Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, art critic Henry McBride, designer Elsie de Wolfe, playwright Avery Hopwood, composer Virgil Thomson, artist Louis Bouché and his wife Marion, popular novelist Joseph Hergesheimer, photographer Alfred Steiglitz, artist Georgia O’Keeffe, sculptor Gaston Lachaise, a few theater people, and art patrons, and several old-monied bankers usually constituted the guest list in various combinations but rarely all at the same time. “Fugitives from Greenwich Village,” Tyler continued, managed to get in now and then, but they were not invited to return. If one of the regulars wished to bring along a stranger, he always telephoned first. “The tone of party conversations followed the rule of beyond-which-not. At the same time, assuming that one of the hostesses initiated or invited an opening, polite ribaldry of a [Ronald] Firbankian complexion might prevail . . . ." “Florine – less, it may be supposed, out of prudery than distaste – would abruptly change the conversation if an inadmissible topic came up, or, quiet as a mouse, would disappear from the room. . . . Ettie . . . defined the sisters’ basic moral position on an occasion when she felt the masculine consideration being shown them excessive. ‘We may be virgins,’ she succinctly gave forth, ‘but we know the facts of life.’. . .
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