Shortly after Florine Stettheimer’s death in 1944, her younger sister excised whole sections of the artist’s diaries for reasons, it seems, of envy and propriety. Around fifteen years later, the Stettheimer family lawyer commissioned a biography of Florine. Its author later admitted that he had used his “overactive imagination to fabricate readings of Stettheimer’s personality, work and intentions.”

Barbara Bloemink has attempted to rectify the ensuing damage to Florine’s reputation in a properly researched biography with contemporary analysis. This noble project is marred by two shortcomings. One is conformity to fashionable art-historical obsessions. The other is copy littered with unstylish repetitions, baffling constructions, faulty word choices, anarchic punctuation, inexplicable emphases, and nattering. Bloemink gets her literary act together somewhat when she describes specific works of art, but the analysis never recovers.

Much of the biography is inferred from Stettheimer’s poems. Alas, this recollection of a romantic dalliance is typical:

You stirred me

You made me giddy

Then you poured oil on my stirred self

I’m mayonnaise.

That is to say, they’re dull, shapeless, stunted of line, and sometimes laughable. Bloemink has clearly overestimated them, and they pervade the book.

Florine Stettheimer was born in 1871 in Rochester, New York, to moneyed German Jews. Her father suffered a series of business humiliations and abandoned the family in 1878. Her mother took the children to Germany. Florine’s childhood in Stuttgart was happy and privileged. It culminated with enrollment