Esther Pressoir: A Modern Woman’s Painter situates Esther Estelle Pressoir’s body of work within the effervescent art scene of the early 20th century. The first book to present the wide-ranging oeuvre of this American modernist, it covers the span of Pressoir’s long life (1902-86). Coming of age in the 1920s, Stella, as she was known to her friends, cast off societal expectations of a working-class immigrant family in New England and moved through the studios, galleries, and nightclubs of New York. Following a bicycle trip across Europe in 1927, Pressoir developed an expressionistic style that straddled figuration and abstraction. She made provocative renderings of the female nude that challenged historical models, including self-portraits and depictions of her longtime model, muse, and lover, a black dancer from Harlem named Florita. Pressoir’s work is illuminated here in an examination of her private travel journal, letters, and numerous paintings, prints and drawings.