[1] In the mid-1930s, Stettheimer created the stage designs and costumes for Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's avant-garde opera, Four Saints in Three Acts.

She saw the work of the Cubists, Cézanne, Manet, van Gogh, Morisot, and Matisse years before the Armory Show, the first large exhibition of modern art in America.

With varying success, she tried her hand at a variety of media and styles, from Symbolism and Fauvism to Pointillism, resulting in a series of works that are reminiscent of Matisse's Luxe, Calme et Volupté.

[15] Captivated with the staging and choreography of the Ballets Russes, she created the libretto, costumes, and sets for an opera of her own: Orphée des Quat'z Arts.

The resulting maquettes, with their costumed characters made from intricately sewn and beaded materials, display theatrical, active, dance-like movements and individualized personalities that prefigure her mature paintings that emerged in 1917.

[20] The four Stettheimer women moved into an apartment on West 76th Street in Manhattan, where they began holding salons, inviting recent expatriate artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, and Francis Picabia, as well as members of Alfred Stieglitz's circle, such as Marsden Hartley and Georgia O'Keeffe, and other musicians, writers, poets, dancers, and members of New York's avant-garde.

Stettheimer painted a number of these gatherings of her family members and friends enjoying outdoor festivities, including Sunday Afternoon in the Country (1917).

[27] The show consisted of a number of the artist's early Matisse-derivative works, painted with bright, pure colors, thick impasto, and heavy contours.

[30] Stettheimer transformed her painting style by returning to the miniaturized, theatrical, colorful influence of her designs for Orphee des Quat'z Arts.

In Stettheimer's mature work, each canvas is arranged like a stage, filled with easily identifiable family members, friends, and acquaintances.

Her use of what Duchamp called multiplication virtuelle (continuous narrative) was highly sophisticated, with roots in the Ballets Russes and the ideas of Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust about time and memory.

Stettheimer also filled her compositions with visual performances of individually recognizable figures, arranged around actual prominent locations and detailed, accurately rendered, well-known architecture.

Barbara Bloemink has proposed that Duchamp based his persona as Rrose Sélavy in the well-known 1920-21 photography by Man Ray on Stettheimer.

[33] Stettheimer also painted several monumental works dealing with controversial subjects, such as Asbury Park South, which shows African-Americans enjoying a well-known, segregated New Jersey beach.

She continued to paint a floral still-life each year on her birthday that she referred to as an "eyegay," a play on the word "nosegay" (small bouquet) and her dislike of any "symbolism" in art.

[40][41] During her twenties and thirties, Stettheimer engaged in flirtations and romantic relationships, and her paintings, diaries, and poems reveal her admiration for the male anatomy.

On the right, in a sexual reversal from traditional subject matter, a group of women dances around a handsome male exercise instructor whom they admire for his physical appearance.

Some of her poems are written in nursery style, some offer witty social critiques, and others present satiric portraits of fellow modernists, such as Gertrude Stein ("Gertie") and Marcel Duchamp ("Duche").

[49] Following its run in New York, the Stettheimer retrospective traveled to the San Francisco Legion of Honor Museum and the Arts Club of Chicago.

Although she did exhibit at a number of retail galleries and was often asked to sell her work, she priced each painting at the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars, so no one could afford them.

"[29] Stettheimer's reluctance to sell her paintings and her decision to price them beyond what the market could bear reflected her desire for artistic independence in a male-dominated art world.

Her unique style, combining whimsy and social commentary, has since been recognized as ahead of its time and a precursor to later feminist and queer art movements.

[54][55] From this point on, her work influenced a number of contemporary women and gay artists, drawn to her female gaze and decorative, theatrical style.

Andrew Russeth, the executive editor of ARTnews, stated that Stettheimer's paintings "elegantly make the case that she is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century and could serve as a useful model for those of the 21st.

"[51] During her lifetime, Stettheimer's work was specifically mentioned and cited favorably by critics reviewing the many exhibitions in which it was shown, as well as by the writer/photographer Carl Van Vechten and the painter Marsden Hartley.

They write: Unapologetically domestic and über-feminine, Stettheimer's work has been variously described as 'faux naïf', reveling in simplified shapes and Fauve-like colors (Tatham); as 'rococo subversive', embracing a camp sensibility (Nochlin); and as 'temporal modernism' influenced by Bergsonian concepts of time as heterogeneous durée, aligning Stettheimer with Marcel Proust and other literary modernists (Bloemink).

[47]Representing an international style of modernism that integrates various art forms, Stettheimer's paintings, like her poems, are sensorily as well as sensually charged.

Because she refused to affiliate herself with a single, well-known art gallery, such as the Stieglitz "Group", or with a specific style such as Dada or abstraction, Stettheimer's work was always received and reviewed as uniquely her own.

[58] Her unique, feminine style and consciously female gaze set her work directly against the critical tastes of the male-dominated Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s.