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Frances Simpson Stevens
from: "In Search of Frances Simpson Stevens"
One artist who most poignantly substantiates the Armory Show's influence on modern art in America is Frances Simpson Stevens. She is not included in any account of the show but is the only known American to directly participate in the Futurist movement in Italy. Katharine Rhoades, who produced the Dada magazine 291 with Maurice de Zayas, was part of the Stieglitz circle, and reviews and examples of her work disclose experimentation and engagement with modernist ideals. A third woman artist, who at the time of the Armory Show displayed symbolist paintings and later went on to form the Transcendental Painting Group, is Agnes Pelton. All three of these women have received more critical attention in the last five years but have not been discussed in analyses of the Armory Show.
from Sometimes We Dread the Future
above left: Frances Simpson Stevens Returning to the U.S. due to World War I, Stevens became known to Stieglitz, who asked her for a contribution to Camera Work in 1914 (Stevens 30). During this period, Stevens also published political cartoons in the little magazine Rogue, published by Allan Norton and supported by Walter Arensberg (Naumann, "Lost" 110). Steven's solo exhibition at New York's Braun Gallery in March 1916 (Naumann, "Lost" 110) actively connected her work to the Futurists. The advertisements for the show included her own translations of excerpts from Futurist manifestos and emphasized her relationship to the movement in Italy. She showed a remarkable 21 works at this 1916 solo exhibition.
above: Frances Simpson Stevens
Source: The Part Played by Women
MISS FRANCES STEVENS, ARTIST, MARRIED TO RUSSIAN PRINCE Prince Dimitroff Nicholaievitch Golitizin, whose father, the late General Prince Golitizin, was Prime Minster of Russia when Tsar Nicholas II was deposed, yesterday in the Municipal Building here (New York City) married Miss Frances Simpson Stevens, daughter of Mrs. Arthur Oxley Probst, of No. 157 West Seventy-ninth stree. At the ceremony, which was performed by Mr. Michael Cruise, Deputy County Clerk, were Mrs. Probst, Mr. Ivan Dimitrieff, who was best man, and Count Jean de Strelecki. The Prince and his bride started at once for California and Japan on their way to Vladivostok, where he has a naval command. Prince Golitizin was born on February 27, 1882, and entered the Russian naval service in 1899. He saw service in the Russo-Japanese War and was taken prisoner and was released in January, 1906. In July, 1914, he was placed in charge of naval fortifications on the Gulf of Finland, and in February, 1917, her was assigned to command the cruiser Rurik. Before that order became effective, however, the monarchy was overthrown, the revolution taking place in March. Two months later he was sent to this country on a naval mission. Prince Golitizin wears several decorations, including the orders of St.Anna and St. Stanislus, and the silver medal with bands commemorating the Russo-Japanese war. The forture of his family before the revolution was estimated to be about $20,000,000. He has one brother alive "somewhere" in Russia, but his two other borthers were victims of the Bolsheviki. He will return to the service of Ceneral Kolchak in Siberia. The Prince's birde, who was born in 1893, is a descendant of Thomas Welles, first Governor of Connecticut. She is a graduate of D H, Wellesely, Mass. She studied art in this city [New York], in Spain, France and Italy, and some of her work was shown in the famous futurist exhibition held in the Twelfth Regiment Armory several years ago. She organized and directed at the Hotel des Artistes, where she had a studio, the Red Cross Auxiliary No. 435, and she has a complimentary diploma from the Italian Red Cross for her work for it. from original newpaper clipping in the D H School Archives.
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"As an adult, 
Very little is known about the early training of the artist Frances Simpson Stevens, and until recently (1994) she was known primarily through her single painting in the Arensberg collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Naumann, "Lost" 110). According to Francis Naumann, Stevens was alone among American artists in exhibiting with the Futurists in Italy. Her involvement with modernism in some ways begins with her participation in the Armory Show, which undoubtedly provided Stevens with one of her first exposures to modern art. She studied briefly with Robert Henri, who was known to use examples of Cézanne in his classes. Henri, an early teacher of many artists who would go on to become modernists (Morgan Russell, Samuel Halpert, Andrew Dasburg, and Man Ray) was insistent on discouraging imitation in his students' work. Stevens painted Roof Tops of Madrid, her contribution to the Armory Show, during the summer of 1912 while she was studying with Henri in Spain. This painting probably reflects the swiftly executed brushstrokes of Henri more than any modernist technique. During the 1912 trip to Europe, Henri also took students to visit Gertrude Stein in Paris, where they would have seen work by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and other fauvists. Stevens most likely gained an introduction to "futurism" not through the Italian painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlos CarrLá, or Gino Severini but through Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase at the Armory. Futurism, a loosely tossed term in American criticism at the time and often unidentified with the movement in Italy, represented more than any other term the new, the now, the most outrageous art of the time. By 1913, however, Stevens undoubtedly had some knowledge of the specific artists who called themselves Futurists for, according to Carolyn Burke, one reason Stevens traveled to Italy was to meet the Futurists there (Burke 51).
photo at right: Frances Stevens (center) standing next to her painting Battle of Gorizia, ca. 1916. In the newspaper article above Stevens is surrounded by (clockwise, from top right) Marcel Duchamp, Gene Criotti, Hugo Robus, Stanton Macdonald-Wight, and Albert Gleizes. "Fresh from a discreet New England boarding-school [DH, Class of 1911], fate plunged Frances Stevens into Italy just as the Futurists there published their fiery manifesto. Instantly Miss Stevens learned how to say 'No more slavery to Nature - a running horse has not four legs but twenty' in Italian, allied herself with the revolutionists, and earned the distinction of having Brussels sprouts and other things thrown at her work by the enraged Academicians. . ."
In addition to the passionate fervor of the Armory Show that certainly encouraged any interest Stevens had in modern art, Naumann refers to an equally important introduction to Mabel Dodge that likely took place some time during the Armory exhibition (Naumann, "Lost" 112). Dodge arranged for Stevens to live with Mina Loy, the modern British poet and painter who was living in Florence at the time of the show and had asked Dodge to find her a boarder. If Stevens did go to Italy in search of the Futurists, the desire for artistic collaboration was mutual: "When Frances made the acquaintance of the Florentine painters Carlo Carrá and Ardengo Soffici, who . . . had joined the futurists earlier in the year, they began turning up at the Costa San Giorgio in the hope of enlisting her in the movement" (Burke 151). Early in 1913, Marinetti met Stevens, then Loy, and began encouraging them to become his pupils. He also introduced the two women to other Futurist painters, bringing them to Loy and Stevens' home (Naumann, "Lost" 107). Before the fall of 1913, Stevens had translated parts of the Futurist manifestos into English, and she provided the local English paper in Rome with commentary for the 1913 Futurist show (Naumann, "Lost" 107). In 1914, Stevens and Loy exhibited with the Futurists at the International Exhibition of Futurism in the Galleria Futurista in Rome where Stevens showed eight machine-image works like Dynamism of a Printing Press (above). She remained in Italy during 1914, until sometime in the late fall. Her works that survive through photographic reproductions owe less to Futurism's depiction of dynamic movement on canvas than to its glorification of the machineÑin this case, the printing press.
By 1916, when Loy arrived in New York, Stevens was described as "a regular at Stieglitz's gallery . . . she continued to paint in the Futurist manner" (Burke 213). Stevens introduced Loy to Walter Arensberg within a few days (Burke 213). Other artists Stevens would have known, if only through Arensburg, were Morton Schamberg and Charles Sheeler, whose machine-image works parallel her Futurist-inspired painting of 1916, Dynamic Velocity of Interborough Rapid Trasit Power Station (right). The painting, purchased by Arensberg, is the only known surviving work by Stevens. During this time, she also began creating objets d'art, hand-painted paper-maché heads (which she called pupae, "dolls") that could be used as wig or hat stands. The striking contrast between her presentation as an avant-garde painter (above) and as an artisan (below) reflects the distinction between the two fields of art production at the time.
In 1917, Stevens exhibited with other American and European moderns at the People's Art Guild and the Penguin Club as well as the 1917 Society of Independent Artists Exhibition (Petteys). Her participation in avant-garde circles seemed to come to an end with her 1917 publication in The Blind Man, a magazine edited by Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood. The Blind Man's first issue (out of a total of two) was devoted to Duchamp's entry to the Society of Independent Artists' Exhibition, Fountain. After Stevens' marriage to a Russian count in 1918, she disappeared from the art world. Evidence of her prodigious work in the second decade of the last century exists in exhibition catalog listings and the few photographs of her work. While Stevens did not sustain a long career as an artist, her participation in the Futurist movement and her painting and cartooning in New York reflect the Armory Show's inclusion of women artists that experimented within vanguard circles not as patrons but as producers of modern art.