Hedda Sterne

B. Hedwig Lindenberg, Bucharest, Romania, 1910
D. New York, NY, 2011

Hedda Sterne was a Romanian-American artist whose prolific career intersected with European Modernism, Surrealism and the New York School. Championed by Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons, Sterne was a self-proclaimed "well working lens” who continuously sought new ways of interpreting the world around her, shifting from urban landscapes, interiors, and machinery to atmospheric space, figurative work, and prismatic abstractions.

Sterne studied ceramics at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts), in Paris at Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and in the ateliers of Fernand Léger and André Lhote. The following year she enrolled in the University of Bucharest, where she studied philosophy and art history.

Sterne’s first solo exhibition was held in Bucharest in 1936. Through her friend and mentor Victor Brauner, as well as Jean Arp, her collages were recommended to Peggy Guggenheim for a group exhibition at her gallery in London. But with the outbreak of World War II, Sterne left Paris for Romania, and eventually New York City in 1941. She established a studio and apartment on East 50th Street and found herself welcomed by her neighbor Peggy Guggenheim and ushered into gatherings of the “surrealists in exile,” such as Max Ernst, who became close friends.

André Breton and Marcel Duchamp included Sterne’s work in the pioneering exhibition “First Papers of Surrealism,” in 1942. She was in multiple group exhibitions at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, including the influential shows “31 Women” and “The Women.” In 1943, she had her first solo exhibition in the US, organized by Betty Parsons at the Wakefield Gallery. The show was favorably reviewed by ArtNews, The New York Times, and Herald Tribune. This began two decades of regular exhibitions, making Sterne among the most frequently exhibited female painters of her generation.

Sterne’s striking presence in the famous photograph known as The Irascibles is a reflection of her active part in the community that would later be known as the New York school. The Betty Parsons Gallery opened in 1946 with Sterne listed as the only female painter represented alongside Mark Rothko, Clifford Still, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock. In 1950, when a group of artists gathered for a symposium, she was one of three women in attendance (also present were Louise Bourgeois and Janice Biala). A letter of protest drafted after the meeting, and signed by many in attendance, led to the press coverage and the photograph. Fifteen of the more than twenty-five artists at the symposium are present in the photograph, published in LIFE magazine in January 1951.

In 1943, Hedda Sterne met Saul Steinberg, another Jewish Romanian refugee newly arrived in New York. He would become her husband and lifelong friend. Both Sterne and Steinberg brought to their art a sense of wonderment inspired by their adopted homeland. In a joint profile in LIFE magazine, published in August 1951, the pair are described as “both fascinated by the US; he by the habits of people; she by machines and towering structures. Both want to create a new picture of America, but not the same pictures.” They traveled often: to Europe after the war to see friends, family, and familiar places; and around North America to experience new environments and landscapes. After spending much of the early 1960s living in Venice and Paris, Sterne returned to the US and purchased a home in East Hampton.

When Sterne passed away at the age of 100 in 2011, she had been leading a mostly private and quiet life for nearly half a century. She had established The Hedda Sterne Foundation and endowed it with her personal collection of art, archives, and library. Hedda Sterne’s artworks are represented in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Tate Modern, London.