STERNE, HEDDA

STERNE, HEDDA (1916– ), U.S. painter, printmaker, educator. Born Hedda Lindenberg in Bucharest, Romania. Between 1932 and 1934 she studied art history and philosophy at Bucharest University, and then in Vienna and Paris. She affiliated herself with the Surrealists, especially Victor Brauner,   and exhibited in the Paris Salon of Surrealist Independents in 1938. Sterne arrived in the U.S. in 1941. She exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery that same year. The artist had her first solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1943, a show consisting of assemblages recalling totems. Also in 1943, Sterne married cartoonist Saul Steinberg. She is probably most familiar to students of art history as the only woman featured in the famous photograph of the Abstract Expressionists, "The Irascibles" by Nina Leen, published in the January 15, 1951, issue of Life magazine. She often signed her work "H. Sterne" to mask her identity as a woman, a strategy necessary when the work of female artists in 1950s New York encountered the risk of being dismissed as "delicate." Sterne adopted many different styles throughout her career, often at the same time: While a painting like Birds (1944–45) recalled the simple, evocative shapes of Adolph Gottlieb, a composition titled Fixtures of the same year depicts a stylized, but definitively representational interior, complete with radiator. As late as 1997, Sterne returned to a motif she had established in the 1940s, that of a cruciform in U.S.A. Sterne also painted portraits throughout her career. She received a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Venice in 1973. Her work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum. A retrospective at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois is scheduled for 2006. Her art is in the collections of the Art Institute, the Carnegie Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Art, and the Whitney Museum, among other institutions. She lives in New York. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: A.E. Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (1997); C. Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of Hedda Sterne and Adolph Gottlieb," in: Arrogant Purpose, 1945 – 49, vol. 2. Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. ed. by John O'Brian (1986). (Nancy Buchwald (2nd ed.)