Hedda Sterne (1910-2011)
Untitled, 1966
Signed and dated lower right: "Hedda Sterne 1966" Graphite on paperboard 133/4x103/4in.(34.9x27.3cm)
Provenance
The artist
Elaine de Kooning
Estate of Elaine de Kooning
[Trinity International Auctions, Avon, CT, May 30, 2009, lot 201] Private collection, New Jersey
Description
As the sole woman in Nina Leen’s 1951 Life magazine photograph of the “Irascibles,” Hedda Sterne is most recognizable for her place in the thick of the Abstract Expressionist milieu. In the decade prior to Leen’s photograph, Sterne had exhibited widely in New York, including four solo exhibitions organized by Betty Parsons, four group shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, a group exhibition at Sidney Janus Gallery, and two Whitney Annuals. Her key involvement and high visibility in the 1940s art world is “grossly underserved by the art historical
narrative” that has grown around the formative years of the New York School. (1)
Sterne’s long career included a broad range of approaches to her work and her environment, but she remained faithful throughout to her own artistic philosophy, “which strives for a certain invisibility and abandonment of self in exchange for receptivity to her environment.” (2) This sensitivity placed her in direct opposition to the bravado and psychological weight of the Abstract Expressionist autographic mark. Perhaps for this reason, Sterne has been largely left out of the broader written histories of the period.
Sterne worked in several distinct series over the course of her career, seemingly moving on as soon as one series became popular or gained wide acceptance. This stylistic slipperiness made it hard to characterize her work overall, but highlights the innovative spirit that runs through these different works. "Untitled," created in 1966, was part of a larger series undertaken in the mid- 1960s by Sterne to explore organic forms. Populated by wispy, almost ghostly drawings of flowers, "Untitled" leaves a large swath of negative space around the edges. This work was originally in the collection of Elaine de Kooning.
Sterne’s drawings are studies in movement and mark-making. Regarding Sterne’s drawing “Untitled” (c. 1954) in their collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art states that Sterne’s drawn marks “seem to dance. . . across, unmoored from gravity and perspectival space. As a whole, the composition suggests a transient moment captured on the page.” This description seems to apply to this present “Untitled” drawing as well. Other institutions that hold Sterne drawings in their collection include the Whitney Museum of American Art; Worcester Art Museum; Davis Museum at Wellesley College; the Menil Collection, among others.
Born Hedwig Lindberg in 1910 in Bucharest, Sterne was aware of the avant-garde art scene in her hometown from a very young age. Interwar Bucharest had close ties to both Paris and Munich, and fostered a tight-knit community of Dadaists, Futurists, and Constructivists to whom the young Sterne would look for artistic role models. She knew avant-garde artists Victor Brauner and Marcel Janco in Romania, and went on to take art classes at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum and to study art history and philosophy at the University of Bucharest. In 1930, she moved to Paris and worked both in the Atelier Fernand Léger and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She traveled throughout Europe during this period, painting and sculpting, and first showed her work in 1938. These early compositions were torn Surrealist- inspired paper pieces she called papiers arrachés et interprétés. Through Jean Arp, Peggy Guggenheim became aware of Sterne’s work and exhibited one of these pieces at her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London that same year.
Surrealism as a style continued to be important to Sterne after she left Paris and moved to New York at the outbreak of war in 1941; she circulated with the expatriate community that included Guggenheim and Max Ernst. She quickly began exhibiting at Guggenheim’s new Art of this Century Gallery, as well as with Betty Parsons, and was included in Marcel Duchamp and André Breton’s seminal First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in 1942.
After her machine paintings of the late 1940s and early 1950s, her work included a series of impressions of New York rendered with a spray gun, her large-scale “Vertical-Horizontals” that suggest horizons, the drawings called “Baldanders,” portraits, and geometric paintings.

Sterne’s work is held in most major public collections, including the Whitney Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Menil Collection, among many others.
1. Sarah Eckhardt, Uninterrupted Flux: Hedda Sterne (Urbana-Champaign: Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, 2006), 1.
2. Ibid., 1.