Hedda stars

Hedda Sterne (born August 4, 1910 in Bucharest as Hedwig Lindenberg , † April 8, 2011 in New York City ) was an American artist of Jewish-Romanian descent.

Life

Hedwig's parents were Simon Lindenberg († 1919), a grammar school teacher for languages, and Eugenie geb. Wexler. Her older brother Edouard Lindenberg later became a well-known conductor in Paris. Stars grew up with artistic talent and came into contact with Surrealism through a family friend, Victor Brauner . Sterne was homeschooled until she was 11. In 1927 she got the higher education entrance qualification at the age of 17, whereupon she attended art courses in Vienna before she began studying philosophy and art history at the University of Bucharest. But she broke this off after a year in order to be trained independently as an artist.

Outside Romania, especially in Paris, she developed skills as a painter and sculptor. In 1932 she married her childhood friend Frederick Sterne at the age of 22. In 1941 she fled the National Socialists to New York to be with her husband. Through her acquaintance with Peggy Guggenheim she got to know the New York art scene. After the divorce in 1944, she married Saul Steinberg , a Romanian-born cartoonist and illustrator who became famous for his work The New Yorker , and became a US citizen. Nothing is known about children. In 1960, Sterne separated from Steinberg on a friendly basis.

During the late 1940s, Hedda became a member of The Irascible Eighteen , a group of abstract painters who protested the Metropolitan Museum of Art's attitudes towards painting for that decade. This group was immortalized by the famous 1950 photo: Willem de Kooning , Adolph Gottlieb , Ad Reinhardt , Richard Pousette-Dart , William Baziotes , Jimmy Ernst , Jackson Pollock , James Brooks , Clyfford Still , Robert Motherwell , Bradley Walker Tomlin , Theodoros Stamos , Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko .

From 1992 she worked with the art dealer Philippe Briet, who introduced her to the writer Michel Butor in 1994 . A collaboration began for the book project “La Révolution dans l'Arboretum”, published in September 1995.

She was represented in countless shows and exhibitions in New York and worked as an artist before macular degeneration prevented her from painting. Nevertheless, she continued to draw. At the age of 94, Sterne suffered a stroke that affected her eyesight and walking ability to such an extent that she had to stop working as an artist.

She died on April 8, 2011 at the age of 100.

Her works can be found in collections of various museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC

Publications

• Uninterrupted Flux: Hedda Stars; A retrospective. 2006.

literature

• Annette Reich, Svenja Kriebel: Abstract Expressionism in America. Lee Krasner , Elaine de Kooning , Hedda Sterne, Joan Mitchell , Helen Frankenthaler. Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern , 2001, ISBN 3-89422-114-3 .