Romanian artist Hedda Sterne was a prominent figure of 20th-century modernism and an active member of the New York School. Her paintings, drawings and collages are recognised as pivotal bridges between European Surrealism and American Abstract Expressionism.
Read MoreHedda Sterne (born Hedwig Lindenberg) was born in Bucharest, Romania to Jewish parents. Her father was a language teacher, and Sterne and her older brother Edouard Lindenberg grew up with education in languages and music. In the 1920s, Sterne began to travel frequently to Vienna, where she took ceramics classes at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
From 1929 to 1932, Sterne studied art history and philosophy at the University of Bucharest. She married Friederich (Fritz) Stern in 1932, and travelled often between Bucharest and Paris, where she briefly attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, studying under André Lhote and Fernand Léger.
Through the 1920s and 1930s, Sterne was involved with avant-garde art and literary communities in both Romania and France, in particular the Surrealists and Constructivists. Her collages were exhibited in the 11th annual Salon des Surindépendants in Paris in 1938, where they were praised by Jean Arp, who recommended Sterne to Peggy Guggenheim, leading to her inclusion in numerous exhibitions at the Art of This Century gallery in New York.
The outbreak of the Second World War led Sterne to flee Bucharest for the U.S. in 1941, a year after her husband had left for New York. The pair, who had separated, changed their surname from Stern to Stafford, but Sterne began exhibiting under 'Hedda Sterne', with the added 'e', by 1942 – the name under which she had exhibited in Europe.
Sterne was welcomed by Surrealist exiles upon her arrival in New York and became close with her neighbours Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst. She participated in her first U.S. group exhibition, First Papers of Surrealism in 1942, organised by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp.
In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim began exhibiting Sterne's works at the Art of This Century Gallery. Sterne held her first U.S. solo exhibition in 1943, organised by Betty Parsons at Wakefield Gallery. The same year, she met Romanian emigrant and artist Saul Steinberg in 1943. The two married in late 1944, eventually separating in 1960.
Though Sterne's early 1940s works continued to embody the principles of Surrealism, the architecture and urban dynamism of New York quickly influenced both the subject and style of her artworks. This can be seen in the abstracted cityscape Untitled (1945), where skyscrapers are depicted close-up as illuminated windows at night, or NY, NY No. X (1948), which shows an increasingly constructivist approach, with intersecting geometric planes encapsulating the architectural maze of New York City.
Sterne became more closely associated with the Abstract Expressionists from the 1950s, with her paintings deploying bold, gestural forms and bright colours, in unconventional mediums such as enamel, tar and spray paint as well as oil paint. She also experimented with printmaking. The representation of light and motion became key areas of enquiry for Sterne, giving a sense of the entwining natural and manmade during a period of economic and cultural prosperity in New York.
The oil painting Machine Motor Light Blue (1951) marks the early stages of Sterne's increasingly abstract approach while retaining the novelty of depicting industrial machinery. In later works such as New York VIII (1954), composed in synthetic polymer paint; Road No. 11 (1957), or Manhattan #3 (1958) – both in oil and spray paint – forms are no longer distinguishable, appearing only as loose, blurred marks, densely layered with swathes of cool tones.
Life magazine named Sterne as one of the country's best artists under 36 in 1950. She gained widespread attention for her inclusion as the only woman in a photograph published by Life in 1951 with the 'Irascibles', a group of artists which also included Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko. The group had protested against the Metropolitan Museum of Art's conservative exhibition juries and lack of representation of abstraction, signing an open letter to the museum's president in 1950.
Sterne's practice became increasingly minimal and abstracted over the 1960s, reflecting a developing interest in nature, light and landscape. She was an artist in residence at Yaddo in 1961.
In 1963, Sterne was granted a Fulbright Fellowship in painting and subsequently went to study in Venice for over a year, where she developed her 'Vertical Horizontal' series. The large-scale oil painting Vertical Horizonal #7 1/2 (1963) is divided approximately into thirds horizontally, with stripes in various muted tones each steeping into the adjacent sections.
In a 1992 interview with BOMB, Sterne stated, '...I never think of colour as pigment. Colour serves in my paintings to indicate distance, nearness or roundness. I use colour only as a means to define things, just like the line.'
After returning to the U.S. from Venice, Sterne moved into East Hampton Springs, where she lived and worked during the summers for the following decades.
Sterne became increasingly private in her later life, though retrospectives of her practice were held widely following her first in 1977 at the Montclair Art Museum. She continued to produce new work through to her 90s, despite suffering macular degeneration and having multiple strokes. Sterne died in New York in 2011 at the age of 100.
Sterne received numerous accolades in her lifetime, including the Fulbright Fellowship (1963); First Prize at the Art Institute of Newport Annual (1967); the Childe Hassam Purchase Award (1971) and the Hassam and Speicher Purchase Fund Award (1984) at the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and Ordre des Artes et des Lettres, Paris (1999).
Selected solo exhibitions include: Metamorphoses, Victoria Miro, Venice (2022); Architecture of the Mind, Van Doren Waxter, New York (2021); Imagination and Machine, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa (2020); Hedda Sterne, Victoria Miro, London (2020); Printed Variations, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas (2018); Hedda Sterne Rediscovered, Nasui Collection & Gallery, Voluntari, Bucharest (2015); and Uninterrupted Flux: Hedda Sterne, a Retrospective, University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville (2007).
Selected Art of This Century gallery group exhibitions include: Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction, 1930–1950, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2021); Women in Abstraction, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2021); Centennial of the Women in Romanian Art, Brasov Art Museum, Romania (2018); Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2018); and Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017).
Sterne's works are held in significant international collections including The Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée National d'Art Moderne and Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Tate, London.
The Hedda Sterne Foundation's website can be found here.
Misong Kim | Ocula | 2023
![Contemporary art exhibition, Hedda Sterne, Hedda Sterne at Mayfair, London, [closed] Mayfair, London, United Kingdom](https://files.ocula.com/anzax/62/62338035-f5b7-4f96-9d51-fcd0a0a3b537_720_400.jpg)