Maurice Stars

Maurice Stars (1933)
Photo Carl Van Vechten

Maurice Sterne (born August 18, 1878 in Liepāja , † July 23, 1957 in Mount Kisco , New York ) was an American graphic artist , painter and sculptor of the classical modern age .

Life

Maurice Sterne was born as one of nine children of Gregor and Naomi Sterne in the then German-speaking city of Libau on the Baltic Sea, which until 1920 was Germany's northernmost city.

In 1884, after the death of his father, the Sterne family moved to Moscow , where Maurice attended a Jewish vocational school with the aim of becoming a locksmith . He soon left and went to a polytechnic, presumably today's Moscow State Technical University . In 1889 he emigrated to the USA with his mother and younger sister Lena , where the older brother Max was already staying.

In his early years in his new home in New York, he worked part-time in a flag factory, a cigar shop, a bronze factory, a mirror factory, and a pub. One of his jobs was in a map engraving shop. Here his focus fell on handicrafts. He first attended a technical drawing class at Cooper Union . He then went on to study at the National Academy of Design until 1899 while continuing to work in the evenings. He received anatomical drawing lessons from Thomas Eakins and made the acquaintance of Alfred Henry Maurer .

He exhibited his first work in 1902 in the "Country Sketch Club" 835 Broadway, New York. In 1903 he became an assistant to James David Smillie (1833-1909) at the National Academy of Design .

In 1904, Sterne won a travel grant from the academy and went to Europe. Until 1907, Sterne lived the life of a bohemian in Paris and frequented the artistic circles around the Café du Dôme , where he met Leo and Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso , among others . He had refused to study at one of the academies in Paris. It was at the Paris Autumn Salon that he first saw works by Paul Cézanne and other French modernists such as the impressionists Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir . He was also fascinated by the classical style of Andrea Mantegna , Piero del Pollaiuolo and Piero della Francesca .

He later went to Germany, then to Italy, to paint in Rome and Anticoli Corrado , with shorter stays in Florence and Greece . The trip through Greece in 1908 brought Sterne to sculpture. The encounter with marble sculptures of antiquity had inspired him to work in stone. In Rome he met artists from the Villa Strohl-Fern , including Karli Sohn-Rethel , whom he had previously met in Berlin.

Village scene (1910s)

Star may have come into contact with gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim through a group show at Paul Cassirer's in Berlin in 1911. Graphic works by the artist Sterne were published by Flechtheims Verlag and in the journal Der Cross-Section . In Germany he enjoyed the patronage of Alard Dubois-Reymond, who commissioned several paintings in 1910. With this money he was able to finance his big trip to Asia in 1911. Accompanied by his friend Karli Sohn-Rethel, this led via India , with a longer stay in Benares , to Mandalay in Burma , on to Java , to Bali , where the two lived and painted from 1913 to 1914. These travel impressions strongly influenced his pictorial subjects and his later style. Sternes painting combined expressionist coloring with cubist design.

Back from Asia, he lived and worked in the following years mainly in the artists' village of Anticoli Corrado, near Rome. Here he met Leo Stein and the collector and gallery owner Martin Birnbaum again, in the house of Edward Bruce (1879-1943), who would later become his pupil. Occasionally he stayed in the USA and lectured at the Art Students League of New York . When Jules Pascin emigrated to the USA in 1914 , he became an American citizen with the support of Maurice Sterne and Alfred Stieglitz . The stay in Italy was interrupted by a short marriage. In 1915, Sterne met the art patron and writer Mabel Dodge and became her third husband in late 1916. Mabel set up a studio for him in Provincetown , Massachusetts, and invited him to join her artistic circle of friends.

In 1919 he moved to Taos (New Mexico) with his wife and the anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons . Mabel and Elsie wanted to found an artists' colony there. Mabel bought, on the recommendation of Antonio "Tony" Luhan, a Native American , a 49,000 m ² plot. After their falling out, until the divorce four years later (1923), Mabel (Mabel Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan) supported Maurice Sterne with monthly donations.

In 1920 Sterne returned to Europe and renewed a relationship with the young Vera Segal, whom he knew from New York as a student at the Duncan School of Dance. In Anticoli Corrado , Maurice Sterne had a studio that he shared with the American painter Edward Bruce, where he had friends such as the American art dealer and publisher Israel Ber Neumann and his students.

Since the 1920s, Sternes representations have become closer to nature. The impressions of the ancient Greek marble art still had an effect. Monuments and wall paintings were created as part of public contracts. The late style took on an impressionistic character. An exhibition at "Scott & Fowles" in New York in 1926 brought her artistic breakthrough.

In 1923, he married Vera Diana Segal (1899–1963) in Vienna . Between 1923 and 1932 the Sternes commuted between Europe and the USA. In 1925 he became the first American artist to represent the United States with a solo exhibition at the International Exhibition in Rome. In 1926 he was selected to make a sculpture for the Rogers-Kennedy Memorial in Worcester, Massachusetts . Henry Francis Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum, described this task, which he completed in 1929 with the help of the artist Arturo Martini , as "the most beautiful piece of outdoor sculpture in America". At this time, in Rome, Sterne was again living in the Villa Strohl-Fern, while his wife Vera had a performance at the Teatro Quirinale in Rome in 1929 . In 1928 Sterne was commissioned to paint a self-portrait for the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and in the same year he was awarded the Logan Medal of the Arts for his exhibited work at the Art Institute of Chicago .

In 1929 he was elected President of the American Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers. Together with George Grosz , Sterne ran the Sterne-Grosz-Studio in New York from 1932 to 1935. An art professorship moved Sterne to San Francisco for six years in the mid-1930s . From 1934 to 1936 he taught at the California School of Fine Arts . In 1939 he went to Hawaii to carry out his first and only commercial art project, a series of paintings for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company .

Welcoming to Freedom (1938)

In 1933, Maurice Sterne was the first American to receive a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art . In this context, both Alfred Flechtheim and Alex Vömel acted as lenders. He was elected a full member ( NA ) of the National Academy in 1944 . Since 1938 he was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Star contracted cancer in the early 1940s and moved to Mount Kisco, Westchester County , New York on the east coast in 1945 . By the end of the decade he was barely able to paint, so he gave up and started writing his memoirs. From 1945 to 1950 he was a member of the National Commission of Fine Arts . The artist died on July 23, 1957 in Mount Kisko, New York, after a long battle with cancer again.

The Phillips Collection has eight works by the artist, two from his early journeys to the Far East, five Italian paintings from the 1920s and one late work from New England.

In Anticoli Corrado a street is named in his honor; the Via Maurice Stars .

Solo exhibitions (selection)

• 1912, 1915 and 1917: Berlin Photographic Co., New York City, 305 Madison Avenue
• 1917 and 1922: Bourgeoise Galleries, New York, NY
• 1925: Scott & Fowles Gallery, New York, NY
• 1930: Reinhardt Galleries, New York, NY
• 1930: Corcoran Gallery of Art , Washington
• 1933: Art Institute of Chicago
• 1933: Museum of Modern Art , New York
• 1939: Honolulu Museum of Art , Hawaii

literature

• Christine Stansell: American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt, 2000, ISBN 0-8050-4847-2 .
• Three American Modernist Painters: Max Weber, Maurice Sterne, Stuart Davis. 1970, reprinted by Arno Press Inc., New York, ISBN 0-405-01528-3 .
• Angelo Bucarelli: Corrado Anticoli. Nomi & Cognomi. Gangemi, 2010, ISBN 978-8-84921906-7 .

Web links

Commons : Maurice Sterne  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Biography Maurice Sterne , on the Phillips Collection, accessed May 15, 2015
• Maurice Sterne, Yale University , accessed May 15, 2015

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Guide to Jewish Genealogy in Latvia and Estonia (English) ( Memento of the original from April 6, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ^ The Art Institute of Chicago: Exhibition of the Country Sketch Club of New York, March 1-24, 1902 (MDCCCCI), 7
3. ↑ Martin Birnbaum with friends in Italy, 1915-1916 / unidentified photographer. Martin Birnbaum papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. ( Memento of the original from May 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Edward Bruce (Biography English): studied painting from his friend and artist Maurice Sterne, from 1923
5. ^ Christine Stansell: American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co, 2000, ISBN 0-8050-4847-2 .
6. ↑ Maurice Sterne and his students in Anticoli Corrado, approx. 1920 ( Memento of the original from December 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ Vera Sterne, the American dancer (...) at the Teatro Quirinale (...). Vera Sterne is the wife of an American painter, at present living in Villa Strohl-Fern. In The Chicago tribune and the Daily news, New York (European edition), 8 May 1929 ( gallica.bnf.fr )
8. ↑ The Pittsburgh Press - July 27, 1930
9. ^ Horace Meyer Kallen: Maurice Sterne retrospective exhibition, 1903-1932; paintings, sculpture, drawings. February 15th - March 25th, 1933. Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY)
10. ↑ nationalacademy.org: Past Academicians "S" / Sterne, Maurice NA 1944 ( Memento of the original from March 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on July 17, 2015) 
11. ↑ Members: Maurice Stars. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 27, 2019 . 
12. ↑ Anticoli Corrado, where the painters found their models , with illustration of the street sign Via Maurice Sterne , accessed May 16, 2015
13. ↑ Brooklyn Life, Brooklyn, New York, Saturday March 13, 1915 , on newspapers.com, accessed May 24, 2015
14. ^ Martin Birnbaum, Art dealer, New York, NY Manager of the Berlin Photographic Co., New York City, 1910-1916
15. ↑ Exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculptures by Maurice Sterne: from April 1 to April 22, 1922. (online) (English)