Paired in a single museum exhibition, Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) and Hedda Sterne (b. 1910) may at first look like an odd couple. The two Romanian-born artists met in New York City in 1943 after the Nazi occupation forced them to flee Europe. They became U.S. citizens and married in 1944. Despite occupying the same domestic space, as well as exhibiting at the same gallery, the artists had little aesthetic ground in common: most art historians and critics would be hard pressed to trace stylistic influences between the two. Yet Sterne and Steinberg did share an important artistic perspective: each questioned the ability of an artist’s personal aesthetic style to communicate a stable identity.
In the New York art world of the 1940s and 1950s, divorcing style from artistic identity constituted a radical divergence from the philosophy of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Barnet Newman. While Sterne and Steinberg maintained close friendships with many of the so-called Abstract Expressionists, their work’s play with subjectivity registers important differences with that movement. By placing a small number of works by Sterne and Steinberg in dialogue with one another, this exhibition amplifies the artists’ joint (and unique) position as critics within their artistic milieu.
Appropriately, the artists’ portraits of one another reveal, on a more intimate scale, their experimentation with a myriad of styles, a fluidity that emphasizes the illusive and dynamic presence of the other.
The exhibition is generously supported by The Brown Foundation, Inc., and the City of Houston.
Hedda Sterne and Saul Steinberg, c. 1944-45
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Hedda Sterne
© Estate of George Platt Lynes
A drawing by Steinberg is visible in the background of the photo.
