Abstract Expressionism at MoMA

Three of the works featured in the Museum of Modern Art's Abstract Expressionist New York, October 2, 2010--April 23, 2011.

Hedda Sterne, New York VIII, 1954, 72 1/8" x 42"

Philip Guston, The Clock, 1956-57, oil on canvas, 76"x64 1/8"

Philip Guston, Painting, 1954, 63 1/4"x60 1/8"

Happy 100th Birthday, Hedda Sterne!

Today, August 4th, is the 100th birthday of Hedda Sterne, a pioneering artist who happened to be a woman. Congratulations, Hedda, on reaching this milestone and thank you for paving the way for those of us who are women and want to be taken seriously as artists.

Hedda Sterne in the 1950s as photographed by Margaret Bourke-White. (Image from "Uninterrupted Flux: Hedda Sterne," a catalog of a retrospective of Sterne's work, published in 2006 by the Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, edited by Karen Hewitt, exhibition curated by Sarah L. Eckhardt. Most of the images in this post are from this catalog.)

I have written about Hedda's work and career earlier in this blog, as follows:
Who Was That Woman, April 1, 2009
A Virtual Connection Made Real, March 8, 2010
Hedda Sterne: Part Two, March 11, 2010

I hope you will take a look at these earlier posts because they try to summarize Hedda's very interesting life and career.

My interest in Hedda began when I was writing my long series of posts on Rothko back in March and April 2009. I came across the famous Life Magazine photo of "The Irascibles" and became curious about the only woman in the picture. That photo has haunted Hedda throughout her life and become her most enduring public image. Through my posts, I tried to publicize other images of Hedda that portrayed her as the serious and independent-minded artist she was.

Photo by Nina Leen published in Life Magazine in 1951. 

L to R: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Rotert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlied, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne. The protesting artists were termed "The Irascibles."

Last February, during the unusually heavy snowstorm that New York received, I met Hedda's niece Veronique Lindenberg, a resident of Paris who was in New York visiting Hedda. During that meeting where Veronique, my friend Binnie Birstein and I had lunch, Veronique very kindly presented me with a copy of the now out-of-print catalog of Uninterrupted Flux, Hedda's 2006 retrospective exhibition at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois. Having the catalog meant a great deal to me because I could see the range of Hedda's work and get an idea of her accomplishments unrelated to the Irascibles photo.

The catalog from Uninterrupted Flux

While Hedda's body has been subject to the infirmities of her great age, her mind and spirit remain strong. I hope that you will join me in congratulating her on her birthday and thanking her for pursuing a unique artistic path during her long life. Veronique is with her in New York and has told me that she will read birthday wishes to Hedda, so if you would like to pass those along, please add your comment to this post.

Hedda Sterne, about 1963-65, photograph by Theodore Brauner, from the Uninterrupted Flux catalog.

Hedda Sterne - Part Two

This is a continuation of my post about Hedda Sterne, an artist born in 1910, who will celebrate her 100th birthday in August. (Note: Click on any image to enlarge it.)

Hedda, ca. 1963-65, Photographer: Theodore Brauner. (Image from "Uninterrupted Flux: Hedda Sterne," a catalog of a retrospective of Sterne's work, published in 2006 by the Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, edited by Karen Hewitt, exhibition curated by Sarah L. Eckhardt. The images and quotes in this post are from this catalog.)




Hedda's second husband was Saul Steinberg, the artist probably best known today for his New Yorker magazine covers. Below is a page spread published August 27, 1951 (titled "Self Portrait With Wife") from Life magazine with Steinberg's work on the left and Hedda's on the right. (Note that the famous Irascibles photo was published in Life earlier that same year in January 1951.)

In the Uninterrupted Flux catalog, the exhibition curator, Sarah Eckhardt, divides Hedda's work into 11 categories in order to bring some order to the "consistent inconsistency" that Hedda practiced. Two of Hedda's continuing interests were machines and motion, and she visualized machines as having human characteristics that made them become "anthropographs." She thought that machines were designed as self portraits of their creators and displayed "their needs and insatiable desire for consumption."

Two notable results of Hedda's interest in machines and motion were, first, an exhibition at Betty Parsons' gallery in 1954 where tondo (round) paintings were mounted on central axes and viewers were invited to rotate the canvases as they wished. Secondly, also in 1954, Hedda was included in "Seven Painters and a Machine," where the seven were commissioned by Fortune magazine to produce their responses to a machine called the "Continuous Miner." Hedda's painting was chosen a year later for the cover of World At Work: 25 Years of Art for Fortune. In the early 1960s, Fortune arranged for Hedda to tour several John Deere factories, which provided the impetus for a series of paintings that portrayed tractors. The CEO of John Deere purchased the entire series for the company.

Tractor Seat, 1961, mixed media on heavy paper, 20 x 25 inches framed. Owned by John Deere, Moline, IL


In the 1980s Hedda painted large, architectural paintings such as the two in the page spread below from about 1982. She referred to these works as "Patterns of Thought" and "Architecture of the Mind."

Both untitled. The one on the left is 44 1/2 x 64 inches; the right one is 51 x 78 inches. They are oil and pastel on canvas.


Art as Diary/Diary as Art
It seems to me that the most appropriate way to view Hedda's work is in the context of her long life. "Maybe I am saying something which is a truism," she said, "but I feel that my work all along was like a diary." Her interests were wide ranging, she read continuously and quoted or paraphrased from her reading or conversations with "poets, novelists, philosophers and theologians." In 1976 she made her art a literal diary by      placing sections of unstretched canvas on the floor of her living space. She drew a grid on the canvas and then filled in one square each day with either a quote, her activities or her thoughts and the date. She alternated between all caps and cursive script so that the grid had a checkerboard look.

Diary, June-October 1976. Acrylic and ink markers on unstretched canvas, 103 x 54 inches.

Closeup of Diary, showing variance in handwritiing that made a checkerboard effect.


Last Drawings
In later years, Hedda suffered declines in her health that included macular degeneration. She had to stop painting in 1998 but was able to continue drawing aided by a magnifying glass and motivated by her unswerving determination and devotion to creating art. She drew hundreds of small-scale drawings in pencil, pastel and sometimes thinned Wite-Out. The drawings are untitled but dated with the date of completion.

Left: June 25, 1999, pencil and pastel on paper, 12 1/4 x 9 1/8 inches. Right: August 24, 2000, pencil and pastel on paper, 12 1/4 x 9 1/8 inches.

Untitled, May 30, 2004, pencil and pastel on paper, 12 1/4 x 9 1/8 inches.

"Sometimes I react to immediate visible reality and sometimes I am prompted by ideas, but at all times I have been moved, to paraphrase Seamus Heaney, by the music of the way things are. (One can find secret significance at the depth of the ordinary.) I believe that simplicity is an invention of man. Nature is never simple. And, the habit of careful study of the visual immediate opens our eyes to the presence of mystery in the seemingly obvious. In art the retinal, intellectual, and spiritual necessarily collaborate, alternating in importance. Art is essentially revelatory. The desire for clarity drives us....

"And through all this pervades my feeling that I am only one small speck (hardly an atom) in the uninterrupted flux of the world around me."     Based on a conversation with Sarah Eckhardt, May 30, 2004.

Hedda Sterne, ca. 1977. Photographer probably Lillian Bristol.

A Virtual Connection Made Real

One recent night/morning about 1:30 a.m. or so, I was writing a blog post when I received an email telling me that a comment had just been posted to my blog. It was from a woman named Veronique Lindenberg. She had idly googled 'Hedda Sterne' and turned up my blog post from April 2009 headed "Who Was That Woman?," a post I had written about Hedda Sterne. Veronique told me that Hedda Sterne was very much alive at the age of  99 1/2 years and was strong, still struggling with life and eating with appetite.

Hedda Sterne in the 1950s as photographed by Margaret Bourke-White. (Image from "Uninterrupted Flux: Hedda Sterne," a catalog of a retrospective of Sterne's work, published in 2006 by the Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, edited by Karen Hewitt, exhibition curated by Sarah L. Eckhardt. Most of the images in this post are from this catalog.)

I recognized the name Lindenberg as being Hedda's birth name and surmised that Veronique was a relative. In fact, Veronique is Hedda's niece who lives in Paris and was visiting Hedda in New York.

Background
In the midst of my six-part post about Mark Rothko, I had become intrigued with Hedda Sterne, an artist who was working in New York at the same time that the Abstract Expressionists were flourishing in the '40's and '50s. Hedda did not identify her work as belonging to that movement but was tagged with it because of her inclusion in a famous photo that had been published in Life magazine in 1951. That photo, taken by Nina Leen, showed 14 male artists and Hedda Sterne. They (along with several other artists - male and female - from the club at Studio 35) had written a letter to the director of the Metropolitan Museum protesting the conservatism of the museum's jurors for group shows, and the letter made the front page of the New York Times.

L to R: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Rotert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlied, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne. The protesting artists were termed "The Irascibles."

Foreground
Veronique and I emailed back and forth a few times, and when she found that I was visiting New York, suggested that we meet to chat and visit some galleries together. She also wanted to see the exhibition of Betty Parsons' work at Spanierman Gallery since Betty Parsons had been Hedda's longtime art dealer and personal friend.

Unfortunately, the snowstorm that New York experienced last weekend curtailed our plans, but Binnie and I did meet Veronique in Chelsea at the El Anatsui show and had lunch together.

Here are Binnie Birstein (left) and Veronique (right) across from me at lunch.

Veronique is the daughter of Hedda's brother Edouard, who was a conductor in Paris. (Edouard and his mother emigrated from Romania to Paris in the late 1940s while Hedda moved to New York in 1941.)

Hedda and her brother "Edi" about 1915. Veronique told me she was always surprised by how old the faces of these children looked.

Not only did Veronique meet and talk to us about Hedda, but she graciously presented me with a copy of the now out of print catalog of Hedda's 2006 retrospective. The title of the catalog refers to Hedda's view of her work and of life itself. She feels that she is "only one small speck (hardly an atom) in the uninterrupted flux of the world around me." (quoted in the U.F. catalog, p. 2)

The cover of the catalog shows Hedda's "Machine 5" of 1950.


Hedda's Story
Veronique told us that she had met Hedda for the first time at about age 16 after the death of her father. She visited New York and stayed with Hedda, but her aunt had little time for her teenaged niece since her life was devoted to making art. Veronique described a somewhat stern aesthete who viewed making art as her life's work and let few things interfere with that mission. Over time the relationship between Hedda and Veronique has developed strong bonds. They are now each other's only living relative. As Hedda nears the century mark of her life in August, Veronique treasures her three or four visits a year to New York. She says that although Hedda is no longer able to make art, she remains a philosopher of life and retains her wisdom and humor. She speaks four or five languages and converses with Veronique in both French and English.

Hedda in the 1930s in Paris before she emigrated to the U.S.

What motivated Veronique to contact me was my understanding of how annoyed Hedda must have been that she was known to posterity mainly because of her inclusion in the "Irascibles" photo. Hedda was very much her own woman. She had a long career of making and showing art that defied categorization because of her insistence that she be free to pursue whatever interested her in a style she thought appropriate.

A story that Veronique told me demonstrated that Hedda became aware of independent thinking early on. At age three, Hedda was in a group of relatives mourning the death of Hedda's uncle. She was crying, as were the rest of those gathered. Hedda suddenly had a thought that she did not feel sad and so she stopped crying. She recognized this as a personal choice and evidence that she could think unique thoughts and determine her behavior regardless of those what those around her thought or did.

Hedda was involved in the Romanian art scene from an early age and studied the work of avant-garde European artists as well as classical plaster casts and old master paintings. After high school, she initially enrolled at the University of Bucharest where she intended to study philosophy and art history, but instead decided to pursue her artistic training independently. Her first solo trip to Paris in 1930 allowed her to work in the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere and the atelier of Fernand Leger. She became intrigued by (but not fully committed to) surrealism and traveled between Paris and Bucharest with study trips to Greece, Egypt and Spain.

An early untitled Surrealist-influenced collage by Hedda , about 1941.

Hedda's first public exhibit in 1938 showed work that was influenced by surrealism and dadaism. However, Hedda differed in her approach to creating work; she believed not in the surrealists' automatism, but instead saw herself as an instrument of the ideas being expressed and the translator of abstract ideas into visual language. This allowed her a much more active role in the creation of art that depended less on chance than on her freeing herself from superfluous influences so that she could become a "more perceptive and better performing instrument." (U.F. catalog, p. 5)

Hedda's Work
Here are a few examples of Hedda's work showing the range of the styles and subject matter that she chose.
.

"Monument", ca. 1949-51, oil on canvas, 52 x 30 inches.

Monotype, Untitled 1949, 18 x 13 inches, Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of llinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002-3-3, Gift of the artist.

"Totem Pole I [N.Y., N.Y. #17]", 1949, Oil on canvas, 38 x 16 inches.

"Annalee Newman", 1952, Oil on canvas, 78 x 34 inches, collection of Priscilla Morgan. (Annalee was Barnett Newman's wife. The Newmans were friends of Hedda and then-husband Saul Steinberg.)

"Tractor Seat", 1961, mixed media on heavy paper, 20 x 25 inches (framed), John Deere, Moline, IL.


To be continued... (see Part II here - http://artinthestudio.blogspot.com/2010/03/hedda-sterne-part-two.html

Unearthing Interesting Things

I'm still organizing things in the studio. Progress is actually being made. I bought 10 or 12 new storage containers (some transparent) and have been repacking the many old books I've collected for use in my work (not as reading material but as objects to deconstruct and reuse in various ways).  I've also sorted through the materials I use for texture, and the pieces of fabric, and all the papers, the tools, the various equipment and who knows what all. The good news is that I'm getting there and I can imagine a time when I'll finish and be able to rehang some work, set up the tables and be ready to roll.

Meanwhile, in one of the innumerable pre-existing storage containers, I came across a cache of notebooks that I used when I was a student at MassArt. Of particular interest to me was one for the color class that Rob Moore taught. Here is the initial direction and first homework assignment:

1) Collect found color from magazines (enough for 4-5 weeks worth of assignments)
2) It must be continuous color 
3) Collect as many greys as possible
4) Sort by color
5) Use railroad board or chip board to mount the colors for exercises.


First Assignment:
1) Create an illusion of red:
   (A) as black
   (B) as grey
   (C) as white
in 3 separate studies, using, to define the objective, 8 other hues beyond a constant red.
2) Place all 3 studies (24 colors plus red) into a single arrangement of color and shape.
Note: choose most saturated red.
This is a perceptual problem to challenge preconceived ideas of color. Intensity of a color does not increase by lightening or darkening which only affects hue. Perception depends where the color falls in the value scale, i.e. red as opposed to yellow. You will use a red that has a constant position in the value scale but change its function relative to the colors around it. This will be affected by the size of the color shapes and saturation levels.

Wow! No wonder I didn't understand what was going on.

Hedda Sterne, Machine No. 5

Who Was That Woman?

As you may recall, I've been reading that interminable book on Rothko, and after several years (slight exaggeration), I'm about half way through. You'll be glad to know that he's finally breaking through to his signature style, and he's nearly the Rothko that we who live in the future know.

Anyway, I came to the part where the AbEx group that Rothko belonged to sent a letter of protest about the overly-conservative jury appointed to select work for the Metropolitan Museum in 1950. They protested that the jury was biased against the "advanced art" (namely Abstract Expressionism) then being made in New York that should be made part of the Museum's collection.

That letter actually prompted a front-page story in the NY Times (can you imagine that happening today?) and inspired a story in Life Magazine in January 1951 that termed the group "The Irascibles." Life included what became an iconic photo of 15 of the AbExers.

L to R: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Rotert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlied, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne. Photo by Nina Leen in Life Magazine, January 15, 1951.

So I was thinking that I would do a post about two women gallerists who promoted Rothko - Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons. As far as I can tell from reading the Rothko book and several others, Peggy and Betty were responsible for establishing Abstract Expressionism and launching the careers of many important artists. While Peggy Guggenheim's New York gallery, Art of This Century, originally specialized in Surrealism and was oriented mainly toward European artists, it also introduced and continued to show work by Rothko, Pollock, Cornell, Newman, Gotlieb and many others beginning in 1942. Peggy had first had a gallery in London (Guggenheim Jeune), but was forced by the war to close it and move back to the U.S. After the war, Peggy closed her New York gallery and returned to Europe in 1947, finally settling in Venice.

Betty Parsons was an artist herself and not trained as a gallerist. She took over most of the American artists who had been with Peggy and established a gallery that eventually became very sucessful, operating until her death in 1982. Helen Frankenthaler said of her, "Betty and her gallery helped construct the center of the art world. She was one of the last of her breed."

I may still write more about Peggy and Betty, who so vitally served this 99.9% male group of Abstract Expressionist painters, but meanwhile, I became interested in Hedda Sterne, the lone woman in the Irascibles portrait, who stands so prominently above the men seated below her.

Hedda Sterne was born Hedwig Lindenberg in 1910 in Bucharest, Romania to a non-religious Jewish family. She escaped the Nazi onrush by way of Portugal and arrived in the U.S. in 1941, where her first husband, childhood friend and fellow Romanian, Frederick Sterne, had already established himself.

Saul Steinberg and Hedda Sterne, photo by George Platt Lynes, c. 1944-45.

Her second husband, whom she married in 1944, was Saul Steinberg, artist and illustrator, made famous by his New Yorker magazine covers.

Iconic New Yorker cover from March 1976 by Saul Steinberg, "View of the World from 9th Avenue"

Hedda's appearance in the Irascibles photo had nothing to do with Saul Steinberg or anyone else but herself. She was an artist who had shown with the Abstract Expressionists and signed the letter of protest, but she refused to categorize her work as Abstract Expressionism. She "grew up with Surrealism" thanks to an artist friend and studied art in Vienna, Bucharest and Paris. She exhibited collages in the "Surindependents" exhibition of 1938 in Paris, where Jean Arp saw her work and arranged to have one of her collages sent to the Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London.

Throughout her life she experimented with various subjects, mediums and techniques, sometimes prompted by observation and other times by ideas, but "at all times I have been moved...by the music of the way things are...And through all this pervades my feeling that I am only one small speck (hardly an atom) in the uninterrupted flux of the world around me." (This quote is from a wonderful article and interview by Joan Simon in Art in America from February 2007 when Sterne was age 96 .) "Uninterrupted Flux" provided the title of a traveling show and catalogue that organized her varied career and work into thematic and chronological groupings.

"Further I", 1984, acrylic and crayon on canvas, 72" x 52." (This image is from a 2007 article in The Brooklyn Rail.)

Sterne said that she had originally been interested in architecture but that she was bad at math so she studied art instead.

"Machine 5" from 1950. "I had a feeling that machines are unconscious self-portraits of people's psyches: the grasping, the wanting, the aggression that's in a machine. That's why I was interested to paint them. And I called them "anthropographs"--maybe it was pretentious thinking [laughs]." (from the Joan Simon interview in Art in America)

Sterne went her own way throughout her career: "I took it for granted that art is essentially an act of freedom. You react to the world totally freely. I met many artists in New York who believed progress is linear, from figure to abstract. In my work I never followed that idea." (from the Joan Simon interview)

Untitled, 1968

Photos of work by Sterne are difficult to find on the internet. Although she drew and painted portraits throughout her life, I could not find any to show here, but just from these three images, you can see how varied her work is. And yet, she is known not for her work but for her appearance in that Irascibles photo, which must have been very annoying.

From everything that I could find, Hedda Sterne is still alive. She would now be aged 99. During the interview that Joan Simon did with her in 2006 when Sterne was 96, she referred to her macular degeneration that began in 1997 causing her to stop painting and the stroke she suffered in 2004 that ended her drawing. She was then mostly blind and able to read for only 15 or 20 minutes at a time with a machine.

Joan Simon asked Sterne how she spent her days, and her reply was so evocative and especially meaningful to me because of my mother's age and infirmity. It gave me greater insight into the feelings of someone who is so old but still has her mental capacity and ability to express herself:

"Now that I am so old and incapacitated, I don't do anything with great enthusiasm. You know, thinking, dreaming, musing become essential occupations. I am watching my life. As if I'm not quite in it, I watch it from the outside. Because after so many years of working unceasingly, and enthusiastically, being idle is a tremendous effort of concentration and adjustment.

The luck is that there is less energy. That's a compensation. It makes it easier. Just sitting. I saw peasants in Romania, you know, on Sunday, when they get up all summer at 4 and work incessantly until noon, let's say. And Sunday they just sit, and their resting is so active - like an activity, resting. It's a beauty to behold, you know. It's not just doing nothing. It's being and existing in a certain way. In a way old age is a little bit like that. It has its beauties."