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Hedda Sterne American (born 1910) Born in Bucharest, Sterne was exposed to the work of the Romanian avant-garde arists as a teenager and studied briefly with Marcel Janco. During the 1930s she traveled widely in Europe and, through a friendship with Victor Brauner, met many of the surrealist artists living and working in Paris, where she exhibited in 1938. In 1941 she emigrated to America and settled in New York (she became a citizen in 1944). Sterne became very involved in the expatriate art circle there, which included Max Ernst, Piet Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp, and exhibited with them in "First Papers of Surrealism" in 1942; the first exhibition of surrealism in the United States. The following year she met fellow Romanian Saul Steinberg, who she was to marry in 1944, and also Betty Parsons, whose gallery she was to exhibit at from the late-1940s to the 1970s. In 1950 Sterne was one the fifteen artists (and the only woman) who sent a much-publicized open letter to the Metropolitan Museum of Art complaining about the museum's conservative juries for group exhibitions. Later termed "The Irascibles", the group included Jackosn Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt and Robert Motherwell amongst others. The same year she was named one of the country's best artists under the age of 36 by "Life" magazine, and her work and Steinberg's appeared as a feature article in the magazine in 1951. Stene exhibited widely in the 1950s and '60s, and her work at this time is a type of linear abstraction, often with a softer, almost spray-painted appearance to it. Often there are shapes, at some times more apparent than others, that depict small parts of unknown machines. Although grids appear sometimes, partially, in paintings from the 1950s, it is not until the 1980s that Sterne paints more rigid works such as this one. Aside from the many solo shows she had at Betty Parsons Gallery in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, Sterne also exhibited in numerous biennials and group shows, including those at the Art Institute of Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Retrospecitive exhibitions have been held at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey (1967), the Queens Museums, New York City (1985), and, most recently, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois (2006). Sterne's work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Menil Collection, Houston; Baltimore Museum of Art; Albright -Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; and many others.

 

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