Bucharest and the Avant-Garde

Sterne's long career has traversed both Europe and America and has intersected with several important movements. Born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1910, Sterne was only 6 when Romanians Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco took part in the Dada movement in Zurich, Switzerland, and 14 when Janco returned and with M. H. Maxy and Ion Vinea organized Contimporanul, an exhibition of avant-garde Romanian art, in Bucharest. The exhibition was an extension of Janco and Vinea's publication, Contimporanul (Present Time), which they had begun in 1922 and which functioned as the central organ of the avant-garde movement (as well as the longest published avant-garde periodical) in Romania.' Although dominated by Romanians-whose numbers included organizers Maxy and Janco as well as Victor Brauner and Constantin Brancusi-the exhibition also attracted many other artists, including Germans Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp, Arthur Segal, Hans Richter, and Erich Buchholz. The opening night events had the ambience of Cabaret Voltaire, with a jazz performance, poetry readings, and general sense of chaos.• Scholars of the eastern European avant-garde movement in general, and the Romanian scene specifically, return to the  Contimporanul exhibition as a key moment in which these young Bucharest artists successfully defined their own local movement as one of international import and established a dialogue with artists in both Paris and Munich.

 At age 14, Sterne was too young to contribute to this exchange, but she was already sufficiently involved in the Romanian art scene to know many of the main players in Bucharest. While Sterne does not remember the Contimporanul exhibition specifically, several connections link her to its organizers and their Bucharest milieu. First, Sterne very clearly remembers attending an exhibition of shaped canvases at a young age and suspects that the works were Victor Brauner's. Although no record remains of the exact works that Brauner showed in Contimporanul or his first solo exhibition in 1924, we know that he made "constructions" and that he, like Janco and Maxy, favored constructivism at the time. Brauner became an enthusiastic and critical young voice for avant-garde art in Bucharest and later traveled to Paris, where he joined the surrealists and became close friends with Andre Breton. The Brauners were family friends, and Victor acted as an artistic mentor for both Sterne and Victor's younger brother, Theodore. In the same year as the Contimporanul exhibition, Brauner reproduced an abstracted linocut portrait of Sterne at age 13 or 14 titled Hedei ("to Heda") in 75HP, the single-issue journal that he and poet llya Voronca edited (fig.3), and he used the image on the invitation to his solo exhibition in Bucharest that November.' Full of "picto-poesies" (word-image collages), 75HP referenced dadaism, futurism, and cubism. The most radical examples of modernism available at the time literally surrounded the portrait of Sterne.

 Brauner was not Sterne's only connection to the art scene in Bucharest. Another important participant in Contimporanul, M. H. Maxy, had taken language lessons from Sterne's father's several years earlier, and after seeing some of Sterne's early sketches, convinced her father to let her study art. By age 16, Sterne occasionally studied art in Marcel Janco's studio. From the time that Janco began publishing Contimporanul in 1922 until he fled Bucharest in 1941, he played a central role as both a promoter of international modernism in Romania and a premiere architect; his presence saturated the very idea of modernism in Bucharest.' Such a prominent set of avant-garde artists as Brauner, Maxy and Janco likely colored Sterne's initial understanding of modernism both in Bucharest and abroad. Yet, at the same time, Sterne appreciated a variety of other artistic experiences and sources. Her first art teacher in Bucharest, Frederick "Fritz" Storck (a friend of Brancusi and a respected, but traditional, artist), encouraged her to draw from classical plaster casts.' At an even earlier age, she poured over art books her family provided for her and copied the drawings of artists she especially admired, for example Leonardo da Vinci. She also remembers receiving compliments as a child for her ability to capture likenesses in portraits. Sterne absorbed and wove together these seemingly disparate threads in her early artistic environment-traditional, academic training; portraiture; constructivist canvases; picture poems; and modern architecture-and used such diverse artistic elements to develop her own fluid sense of artistic expression. Rather than consider art history a linear progression, she engaged da Vinci, Cezanne, and the futurists simultaneously, as various possibilities.

 Although rather isolated in a city that she describes as "a century behind" (she now likens her trips between Bucharest and Paris as time travel), Sterne tapped into a local art community that maintained connections with the art world in France and Germany, while also developing its own radical visual and literary theories. She read the latest essays and manifestos in the Bucharest avant-garde periodicals, such as Contimporanul, Integral, and Punct. '° Yet Sterne's varied student work suggests she maintained a willingness to absorb a variety of artistic influences without adhering to the principles of any one group. Although Sterne may have been unaware of the youthful proclamation that Brauner and Voronca made in 75HP, their words crystallize the life-long artistic philosophy that Sterne began developing in Bucharest: "whenever what we do becomes a formula, we shall relinquish it."

—Sarah Eckhardt

Extract from “Consistent Inconsistency: Hedda Sterne’s Philosophy of Flux,” published in Uninterrupted Flux: Hedda Sterne, a retrospective (2006)

Hedda Sterne's Presence in the "Irascibles" Photograph

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Nina Leen, The Irascibles (1950) | Left to right, from back row: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne; Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell; Bradley Walker Tomlin; Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, and Mark Rothko

By Sarah Eckhardt

Extract from “Consistent Inconsistency: Hedda Sterne’s Philosophy of Flux,” published in Uninterrupted flux: Hedda Sterne, A Retrospective, Exhibition catalogue (Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, 2006)

Hedda Sterne is perhaps most recognizable as the only woman in the famous 1951 photo of the so-called lrascibles. Taken by Nina Leen and published first in Life (fig. 1), this photograph has become a standard illustration in books and articles on abstract expressionism or the New York school. Yet in the majority of these texts Sterne's name appears only once or twice, and her body of work does not figure at all. Sterne's marginalization in art historical narratives contrasts starkly with her prominent position at the top of the group in this photograph—and all the more with her prevalence in the primary sources of the 1940s and 1950s.

Sterne actively engaged in the artistic dialogue in New York, beginning almost immediately upon her arrival late in 1941. By the time of the 1951 photograph, Sterne's work had been featured in four solo exhibitions (each organized by Betty Parsons) and numerous important group shows, including five at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century, one at Sidney Janis Gallery, two Whitney Annuals, and three Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art Annuals. In the subsequent decade, Sterne had nine more solo shows and participated in more than forty group exhibitions. During the 1950s and 1960s the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and several other major art institutions acquired her work. At the Betty Parsons Gallery and elsewhere, Sterne's art hung alongside that of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Theodore Stamos. Any account of the photograph of the lrascibles that has attributed Sterne's presence to "chance" has grossly underestimated her involvement and visibility in the New York art scene of the 1940s and 1950s. 

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Roundtable discussion at Artists' Sessions at Studio 35, New York, 1950

Upper frame, from left to right: Seymour Lipton, Norman Lewis, Jimmy Ernst, Peter Grippe, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Alfred H. Barr Jr., Motherwell, Richard Lippold, Willem de Kooning, Ibram Lassaw, James Brooks, Ad Reinhardt, and Richard Poussette-Dart

Bottom frame, left to right: James Brooks, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, Louise Bourgeois, Herbert Ferber, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Janice Biala, Robert Goodnough, Hedda Sterne, David Hare, Barnet Newman, Seymour Lipton, Norman Lewis, Jimmy Ernst

Most reproductions of the photograph disconnect the image from the events that led to it: the April 21-23, 1950, roundtable discussion entitled "Artists' Sessions at Studio 35" (fig. 2), and the May 20, 1950, publication in the New York Times of an open letter to the director the Metropolitan Museum of Art protesting the selection of aesthetically conservative juries for group exhibitions. What was, for Sterne and the other artists involved, a loose affiliation of individualists united merely for practical purposes quickly became, for the media and the larger public, a movement under the title the "lrascibles" (later termed the abstract expressionists and the New York school). Never a joiner, Sterne consistently refused each of these labels, as did several of her fellow participants at the "Artists' Sessions": the transcript of the event famously ends with de Kooning's statement, "It is disastrous to name ourselves."' Unlike de Kooning and most of the men in the photograph, Sterne has become more famous for her presence in the photograph than for her work.