The Importance of Catalogues Raisonnés
With Barbara Bloemink
Recorded Webinar Available Here

(Left) Florine Stettheimer, The Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue, 1931, Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 in. (152.4 x 127 cm.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Ettie Stettheimer (Right) Florine Stettheimer, Spring Sale at Bendel’s, 1921, Oil on canvas, 50 × 40 inches (127 × 101.6 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Miss Ettie Stettheimer
Florine Stettheimer was a highly important, innovative artist, whose work was highly sought after during the 1920-40s. Her work was then widely forgotten for seventy-five years. Though Stettheimer’s art is finally receiving the recognition it’s due, the decades of disestablishment result in many museums and cultural institutions still misrepresenting her work in their collections. The lack of authority on her œuvre has also given rise to the Stettheimer fakes entering the market.
Barbara Bloemink is one of the very few experts on Florine Stettheimer who has studied her work sufficiently to identify fakes or flag incorrect assessments leaving the artist’s legacy in a vulnerable position. For Florine Stettheimer, and other significant woman artists, a catalogue raisonné is a critical publication that situates their work within the art historical canon and institutes a scholarly approach to safeguarding their legacies for present and future generations.

Dr. Barbara Bloemink is the international expert on the work of the modernist artist Florine Stettheimer. In 1995, she published her Ph.D. dissertation on the artist and co-organized a retrospective of Stettheimer’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her 2021 Florine Stettheimer: A Biography was chosen by the New Yorker as “One of the best books of 2021.” As an art historian, Bloemink is the author of over 20 books on international modern and contemporary art and design.
Dr. Bloemink has served as Director and Chief Curator of five art museums — the Smithsonian National Design Museum, Cooper-Hewitt, the Guggenheim & Guggenheim Hermitage Museums in Las Vegas, the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, the Kemper Museum of Art and Design, and the Hudson River Museum in New York — and has organized over 70 international exhibitions of modern and 20th-century contemporary art and design. She has lectured all over the world on contemporary art and design, creativity, and the art market.