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.
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.