Hedda Sterne

Hedda Sterne (born Hedwig Lindenberg; August 4, 1910 – April 8, 2011) was an artist best remembered as the only woman in a group of Abstract Expressionists known as "The Irascibles" which consisted of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and others. Sterne was, in fact, the only woman photographed with the group by Nina Leen for Life magazine in 1950. In her artistic endavors she created a body of work known for exhibiting a stubborn independence from styles and trends, including Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, with which she is often associated.Sterne, Hedda, Sarah L Eckhardt, Josef Helfenstein, and Lawrence Rinder. Uninterrupted flux : Hedda Sterne, a retrospective. Champaign, Ill.: Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, 2006.

Sterne has been almost completely overlooked in art historical narratives of the post-war American art scene. At the time of her death, possibly the last surviving artist of the first-generation of the New York School, Hedda Sterne viewed her widely varied works more as in flux than as definitive statements. In 1944 she married Saul Steinberg the Romanian-born American cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his work for The New Yorker.

During the late 1940s she became a member of The Irascible Eighteen, a group of abstract painters who protested the......
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