Hedda Sterne Romanian, 1910-2011
Hedda Sterne created visionary, experimental paintings for over seven decades, considered a leading female figure in the post-war American art scene. Stern’s practice gradually evolved throughout her career, spanning from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism, as she often resisted association and alignment with specific stylistic constraints. Although her work differentiates through their distinct themes and visual patterns, they are united through her central fascination with flux, capturing the ever-changing nature of culture, relationships, and ideologies. From industrial, urban representations of 1940s New York to more organic, abstracted landscapes in the 1960s, her paintings are continuously grounded in the essence of dynamism. She interpreted the viewer as a necessary completion of her work, highlighting the intimacy of spectatorship and the inherent relation between audiences and the art they consume. Stern’s expansive, heterogeneous series exhibit her continuous sense of artistic innovation, a drive independent of external cultural or commercial pressures.
Hedda Sterne (b. 1910, Bucharest, Romania; d. 2011) began her academic career by attending classes at the Paris ateliers of André Lhote and Fernand Léger. In 1929, she enrolled at the University of Bucharest, where she studied art history and philosophy. Sturne has exhibited throughout the United States, most recently serving as the subject of a solo exhibition, Uninterrupted Flux: Hedda Sterne; A Retrospective, at Krannert Art Museum. She has additionally been showcased in numerous solo and group exhibits at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA, (2018-2021); the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY, Galleria dell' Obelisco in Rome, Italy, Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, NJ, Queens Museum in Queens, New York, and Vassar College Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie, NY.
Following her passing in 2011, her works are in the permanent collections of numerous private and public institutions, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. In addition, Sturne is the recipient of several awards and grants, including a Fulbright Fellowship (1963), a Childe Hassam Purchase Award (1971), and Hassam and Speicher Purchase Fund Award (1984) from the American Academy of Art & Letters, and Chevalier of Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1999) by the French Ministry of Culture.
