Untitled #1

"If form is expression, so is the interruption of space...where outline becomes inline." – Hedda Sterne, 2004

Hedda Sterne’s Untitled is immediately alluring, drawing the viewer’s gaze into its labyrinthine, crystalline constructions. Executed with deft grace, wherein Sterne appears to have merely breathed the soft oils and pastels onto the canvas, Untitled consists of pale ochers and grays resting weightlessly upon the tableau, rigidly constrained by an architectonic construction of smokey black pastel lines. Meticulously bifurcated into two hemispheres of perfectly reflective symmetry, the work paradoxically insists upon an illusion of dimensional space whilst containing only internal referents upon the canvas, resulting in a captivating and almost eerie effect.

This breathily architectural work is consistent with Sterne’s stylistic development in the 1980s. She constantly sought to reinvent her works, moving from different periods. Here, her iconic style from the 1950s evidenced in her New York series seen at both the Whitney Biannual and the Venice Biennale remains latent, seen with its speed and gestural energy, as well as its lack of any macho cult of personality which pervades the Abstract Expressionists—a group whom she spent many years avowedly dissociating herself from. In the New York series, Sterne’s gaze was firmly affixed upon the city’s metropolitan landscape, depicting legible parts of the urban fabric. In the present lot, the artist’s subject becomes more abstracted and the sense of linear perspective heightened. Sterne’s graphic depth recalls the architectural drawings of Renaissance masters Filippo Brunelleschi and Jacopo Bellini, manifested onto a resolutely innovative tableau.

Sterne’s insistence on depth, however, is not in service towards depicting reality, but for revealing the structures of the thinking mind. She said an in 1981 interview that “now I have a feeling that my painting is about thinking” (H. Sterne, December 17^th 1981 interview with Phyllis Tuchman, Smithsonian Archives of American Art). She remained preoccupied with this period for the remainder of the decade, producing these untitled works which work as epistemological meditations.

Born in Romania to a Jewish family, her father a polyglot language instructor, her mother a poet, and her only brother a composer, she became fluent in German, French, and English along with Romanian in childhood. She took piano lessons despite her hatred of music at the insistence of her mother, drawing in the margins of sheet music. The day her parents permitted her to study art “was, and is to this day, the happiest moment of my life” (op. cit.). She studied first in Bucharest with the German sculptor Frederic Storck, then at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and finally in Paris, where she attended lectures at the ateliers of Fernand Léger and André Lhote. In Paris she was introduced to Surrealist circles and began exhibiting automatist works, which drew the attention of Hans Arp.

Narrowly escaping Nazi capture, she arrived in New York in 1941, and soon after befriended Peggy Guggenheim. She was first represented by Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, where she was reacquainted with Surrealist colleagues including André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and max Ernst. After Guggenheim’s move to London, she began her almost 40-year collaboration with the important gallerist Betty Parsons, who nurtured the New York School of Abstract Expressionists with whom became Sterne associated. She was infamously the only woman among the “Irascible 18” artists who appeared in a Life magazine photograph after writing an open letter of to the Metropolitan Museum of Art protesting conservative curatorial practices, standing over artists including Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Ad Reinhardt.

Throughout her life, Sterne practiced daily meditation and read existentialist philosophy deeply, influenced most strongly by Jacques Maritain’s metaphysical epistemology and Nikolai Berdyaev’s Christian mysticism. Sterne conveys on the present lot these intellectual strands into an eternal aesthetic language, depicting visually the thinking mind among reverberations of religious symbols, including the Star of David and the Cross, which transcend from their religious significance into geometric figures. She wrote that during her meditations, her mind became “a sphere with endlessly faceted surface[s], each facet a point of departure just discovered” (H. Sterne, quoted by Barry Schwabsky in “Hedda Sterne,” Artforum 60, no. 7, March 2022). Here we see these points of departure resolve into an endlessly captivating integrated composition.