Hedda Sterne (August 4, 1910 – April 8, 2011)[1] was a Romanian-born American artist who was an active member of the New York School of painters.

In 1929 she enrolled at the University of Bucharest where she studied art history and philosophy with various notable intellectuals, including Tudor Vianu, Mircea Florian, and Nae Ionescu.

In late 1941, Sterne established a studio and apartment on East 50th Street, nearby Peggy Guggenheim's home on Beekman Place.

The two became close friends, and through Guggenheim, Sterne met and became reacquainted with many of the Surrealist artists she had known in Paris, including André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst.

[10] In 1942, Sterne was included in the seminal exhibition The First Papers of Surrealism, which opened on October 14 at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in midtown Manhattan.

[11] In February 1943, Sterne met fellow artist and Romanian refugee Saul Steinberg, whom she would marry on October 11, 1944, after her divorce from Stafford was finalized.

During the 1950s, Sterne's notable contribution to Abstract Expressionism came in the form of her use of commercial spray paint to depict motion and light in her abstract renderings of roads, highways, and cityscapes.In 1950, Sterne was a key participant in the "Artists' Sessions at Studio 35," a discussion about the modern art scene in New York and the aims of the artists.

Following the two-day session, on May 20, 1950, Sterne was among 18 painters and ten sculptors who signed an open letter to the president of The Metropolitan Museum of Art to protest aesthetically conservative group-exhibition juries.

After the publication of the letter in the New York Times on May 22, 1950, an editorial in The Herald Tribune of May 23, 1950, dubbed the group the "Irascible 18" and attacked the artists for "distortion of fact" in claiming the Metropolitan had "contempt" for modern painting.

[14] 15 of the letter's 28 signees arrived for the photo shoot: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, and Hedda Sterne.

Her work of the 1960s and forward is often regarded as a progression of "series," following Sterne's ongoing and developing interests in visual perception, semiotics, existentialism, and meditation.

In November 1992, she met the art dealer Philippe Briet, and began a sustainable friendship which led to several projects until his death in February 1997.

In October 1994, Briet introduced writer Michel Butor to Hedda Sterne, which began their collaboration on a book published in September 1995, La Révolution dans l'Arboretum.

He spent the remainder of 1943 and much of 1944 stationed in China, India, North Africa and Italy, providing pictorial propaganda, primarily for the OSS's division of Morale Operations.

Life Magazine featured a profile of the couple in their August 27, 1951 issue, titled "Steinberg and Sterne: Romanian-Born Cartoonist and Artist-Wife Ambush the World with Pen and Paintbrush".

In Eleanor Munro's book Originals: American Women Artists, Sterne remarked: I believe ... that isms and other classifications are misleading and diminishing.

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.

[2] In 2006, the art historian Josef Helfenstein wrote: From the very beginning of her outstanding but unknown career, Sterne maintained an individual profile in the face of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, all of whom she knew personally.

The astonishing variety of Sterne's work, spanning from her initial appropriation of surrealist techniques, to her investigation of conceptual painting, and her unprecedented installations in the 1960s, exemplify her adventurous spirit.

When the heroic male narratives of modernism begin to fade, we may, eventually, be ready to recognize this amazingly idiosyncratic body of work.

These muted, mostly tan and blue canvases depict machines inspired by farm equipment in Vermont, and reveal her sometime alliance with the Surrealists (especially a fellow Romanian artist, Victor Brauner).