Sterne and Steinberg
I
J
c,/J
- _ _j__
\ I
I
\ ,I
\
\
Saul Ste inberg, The Spiral, 1966. Ink on paper, 19 x 25 \4 inches , The Menil Coll ection, llouston. © 2008 The Saul Ste inberg Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Displayed together in a museum exhibition, the works of Saul Steinberg (1914-99) and Hedda Sterne (b. 1910) may look like an odd pairing at first glance. The two Romanian-born artists met in New York in 1943 after the Nazi occupation forced U1em 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, U1e artists held little aesthetic common ground; art historians or critics would be hard pressed to trace overlapping stylistic influences. They distinguished themselves in different media-he primarily with pen on paper, she with paint on canvas. She preferred the private process of painting to exposing her work to the public, while his most famous drawings were printed in and on the covers of magazines such as The New Yorker. Furthermore, with only a few exceptions, the artists kept their public personae separate, each preferring to be understood on his or her own terms. Yet Sterne and Steinberg shared an important artistic perspective: each questioned U1e ability of an artist's personal aesthetic style to communicate a stable identity. In the New York art world of the 1940s and 1950s, such an attempt to divorce style from subjective identity constituted a radical divergence from the artistic philosophy of their contemporaries. Both Sterne and Steinberg frequently exhibited alongside Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and
Barnett Newman. In fact, their home often functioned as a social and intellectual meeting place for some of these figures. Neither artist, however, has been included in dominant art historical narratives of the period. This exclusion is due in part to each artist's own resistance to artistic labels such as Abstract Expressionism. Yet many of tl1eir colleagues likewise disavowed the idea of a unified movement, but have nevertheless been consistently grouped together in museums and by art historians. Instead, Sterne and Steinberg's skepticism regarding a central tenet of their artistic generation-the relationship between identity and aesthetic expression-seems to have played a significant role in their eventual marginalization. This exhibition places a small number of works by Sterne and Steinberg in dialogue with one another in order to amplifY U1e artists' unique positions as critics engaged with their artistic milieu. Among the artists we now consider "canonical" Abstract Expressionists, the majority placed an undeniable emphasis on developing a personal style that expressed one's identity. Many of these artists described the process of painting in existentialist terms as a struggle to understand U1emselves. As Jackson Pollock famously stated, "Painting is self-discovery. Every good painter paints what he is." 1 Clyfford Still defined "self-discovery" as his main theme in a conversation with Katherine Kuh, an influential mid-century curator. Kuh explained that "he made clear that for him self-discovery was less concerned with finding out about himself than witl1 creating himself." 2 Barnett Newman declared, "The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject matter of painting." 5 Speaking on behalf of his contemporaries, Newman clarified, "Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or 'life,' we are making (them] out of ourselves, out of our own feelings."4 Understood within the artists' own terms, each monumental abstract canvas offers a tangible glimpse into the painter's psyche. The degree to which each of these artists developed a signature "look" (one cannot easily confuse a painting by Jackson Pollock, for example, with a painting by Barnett Newman) would therefore suggest a somewhat stable, if not imposing, sense of self. In reference to the instantly recognizable paintings of many of her peers, Sterne has often stated that she refused to paint "logos." Indeed, when surveying tl1e diversity of her oeuvre, the viewer may find it difficult to imagine one artist at the center. Although sometimes disorienting, her continual shifts in style reflect her artistic philosophy. Like her fellow artists, Sterne felt that a brush stroke or a gesture was capable of revealing a certain "truth"; yet, for Sterne this "truth" does not originate with her.
Rather, she has consistently described herself as an "instrument" or a "lens." More recently she has quoted the poet Czeslaw Milosz in order to convey her process as "taking dictation," not from within herself, but from her relationship with her environment, or as she aptly explained in a 1954 artist statement, "the stream connecting past and future." 5 In the same statement, she depicted the role of the "revolutionary artist" as that of "a constant re-evaluator." For Sterne, as thoughts changed, so did her modes of expression. She found the idea of a "consistent" artistic style impossible because it would suffocate the inspiration that drove her to paint-her fascination with the continual flux of life around her. Thus, Sterne eschewed both the concept of a stable identity and a single aesthetic style, preferring the freedom to change along with her environment. Presented here as an illustration of her self-proclaimed freedom, Sterne's three large-scale paintings resonate with a body of Steinberg's drawings from the same period. In the time frame
Hedda Sterne
New York VIII, 1954 Synthetic polymer paint
on canvas 721/s x 42 inches The Musewn of Modern Art, New York. Mr. and Mrs. Roy R. Neuberger Fund. © 2008 Hedda Sterne/ Artists Rights Society (ARS) , New York
Steinberg and Sterne HO~IA~IAN-UOHN A~llll'SII
C.\ltTOOl\IST A,'\U AltTlST-\\'IH:
TilE WOitl ,l) \\ '1'111 PEN
A~ll I'AL\'TUIUJSII
"Steinberg and Sterne" pictorial spread, Life magazine (August '27, 1951)
reflected in this exhibition, Sterne developed at least three distinct styles: anthropomorphic machines; large-scale, heavily abstracted images of New York City that utilized commercial spray paint; and sedate, expansive paintings consisting of horizontal bands confined within a vertical canvas format. All the while she simultaneously drew and painted figurative portraits of friends and family. (A fuller examination of her career reveals works as varied as Surrealist collage, conceptual diary canvases, and crystalline geometric abstractions.) Whereas Sterne communicated her philosophy indirectly through a lifetime of successive aesthetic shifts, Steinberg often treated the idea of style as his main subject. His pen lines constantly interchange techniques, even within the same drawing. Such sustained focus on style itself exposes both its power and its mutability, while also undermining any connection between Steinberg's drawings and a "true" artistic identity. Steinberg's penchant for wearing self-drawn masks or presenting entire drawings of himself in order to avoid posing for press photographs (see the Life magazine spread) underlines his playful yet incisive attitude
towards representation and identity. On one hand, the artist's line is as authentic a marker as a photograph; on the other hand, it is a fiction, as artificial as any form of self-representation. In Steinberg's Parade series of drawings, which features little men ceremoniously hoisting over their heads accepted signifiers of authenticitysignatures, seals, and thumbprints-the men carrying lines and brush strokes provide a particularly humorous commentary on the era. In Steinberg's world an abstract brush stroke stood on par with an elaborate signature. Isolated and given a tangible weight (some take more than one man to hold aloft, while others are visibly unwieldy to balance), each of these marks reveals its contingent status. Minus their officiating documents or painted compositions, the signatures and brush strokes reveal themselves as mere representations of authority and authenticity, making the serious parade of self-importance even more ridiculous. Yet, since Steinberg often included himself in the critique (he titled a drawing of a man literally signing himself into existence Se(fPortrait), his investigations of style and identity are rarely cold or condescending. Rather, Steinberg seemed to agree with his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries on a basic point: man is selfmade (or more literally, self-drawn). But he took things at least one step further by insisting on exploiting all of the materialsand styles-at hand. For Steinberg, the self-made man was just that: if he can represent himself in one style, he can just as easily be redrawn in another. Accordingly, Sterne and Steinberg drew each other in a range of styles. These portraits reveal, on an intimate scale, the artists' experimentations with various techniques in their efforts to captm·e each other's elusive essence. Never intended for the public, these often casual sketchbook drawings illustrate a thoroughly consistent attitude, even on the most personal of levels, about their explorations of identity and aesthetic expression. Sterne and Steinberg never set out to play formal roles as critics of their own generation. Rather, their participation was simultaneous with their resistance. Sterne's presence in the 1951 photograph of the lrascibles-surrounded by some of the men we now deem the most "important" artists of the twentieth century-
lnge YloraU1
Untilled {Hedda Wearing Saul Steinberg Mask/, 1959 Gelatin silver prinl
14 x 11 inches Collection of lledda SLerne © lnge Moralh/ Magnum Pholo NYC
speaks to her engagement and prominence in the art world at the time. However, the fact that current art history books rarely feature her work alongside that of her male counterparts suggests that we have less tolerance for diverse perspectives now than her fellow artists did then.6 In a similar vein, Steinberg blurred the boundaries between "fine art" and "print culture": the upscale gallery world and commercial arl. He showed at Belly Parsons and Sidney Janis, garnering immense respect from his fellow artists as well as art critics like Harold Rosenberg, while becoming one of the most beloved cartoonists of The New Yorker.1 Yet again, stripped down narratives of the period have left little room for this sort of flexibility and, until recently, his work has remained segregated from that of his contemporaries.8 Sterne and Steinberg separated in 1960, but never legally divorced. They remained close friends, communicating on an almost daily basis until Steinberg's death in 1999. Their work, however, should not be examined side by side simply on the grounds of their personal relationship. Rather, their conversation as artists highlights a more complex and nuanced discussion about artistic identity and style in general, and the Abstract Expressionists more specifically. Considering Sterne and Steinberg's work together broadens our conceptions of the period and makes space for a more diverse dialogue in the future. -Sarah Eckhardt Guest Curator
J
c,/J
- _ _j__
\ I
I
\ ,I
\
\
Saul Ste inberg, The Spiral, 1966. Ink on paper, 19 x 25 \4 inches , The Menil Coll ection, llouston. © 2008 The Saul Ste inberg Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Displayed together in a museum exhibition, the works of Saul Steinberg (1914-99) and Hedda Sterne (b. 1910) may look like an odd pairing at first glance. The two Romanian-born artists met in New York in 1943 after the Nazi occupation forced U1em 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, U1e artists held little aesthetic common ground; art historians or critics would be hard pressed to trace overlapping stylistic influences. They distinguished themselves in different media-he primarily with pen on paper, she with paint on canvas. She preferred the private process of painting to exposing her work to the public, while his most famous drawings were printed in and on the covers of magazines such as The New Yorker. Furthermore, with only a few exceptions, the artists kept their public personae separate, each preferring to be understood on his or her own terms. Yet Sterne and Steinberg shared an important artistic perspective: each questioned U1e ability of an artist's personal aesthetic style to communicate a stable identity. In the New York art world of the 1940s and 1950s, such an attempt to divorce style from subjective identity constituted a radical divergence from the artistic philosophy of their contemporaries. Both Sterne and Steinberg frequently exhibited alongside Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and
Barnett Newman. In fact, their home often functioned as a social and intellectual meeting place for some of these figures. Neither artist, however, has been included in dominant art historical narratives of the period. This exclusion is due in part to each artist's own resistance to artistic labels such as Abstract Expressionism. Yet many of tl1eir colleagues likewise disavowed the idea of a unified movement, but have nevertheless been consistently grouped together in museums and by art historians. Instead, Sterne and Steinberg's skepticism regarding a central tenet of their artistic generation-the relationship between identity and aesthetic expression-seems to have played a significant role in their eventual marginalization. This exhibition places a small number of works by Sterne and Steinberg in dialogue with one another in order to amplifY U1e artists' unique positions as critics engaged with their artistic milieu. Among the artists we now consider "canonical" Abstract Expressionists, the majority placed an undeniable emphasis on developing a personal style that expressed one's identity. Many of these artists described the process of painting in existentialist terms as a struggle to understand U1emselves. As Jackson Pollock famously stated, "Painting is self-discovery. Every good painter paints what he is." 1 Clyfford Still defined "self-discovery" as his main theme in a conversation with Katherine Kuh, an influential mid-century curator. Kuh explained that "he made clear that for him self-discovery was less concerned with finding out about himself than witl1 creating himself." 2 Barnett Newman declared, "The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject matter of painting." 5 Speaking on behalf of his contemporaries, Newman clarified, "Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or 'life,' we are making (them] out of ourselves, out of our own feelings."4 Understood within the artists' own terms, each monumental abstract canvas offers a tangible glimpse into the painter's psyche. The degree to which each of these artists developed a signature "look" (one cannot easily confuse a painting by Jackson Pollock, for example, with a painting by Barnett Newman) would therefore suggest a somewhat stable, if not imposing, sense of self. In reference to the instantly recognizable paintings of many of her peers, Sterne has often stated that she refused to paint "logos." Indeed, when surveying tl1e diversity of her oeuvre, the viewer may find it difficult to imagine one artist at the center. Although sometimes disorienting, her continual shifts in style reflect her artistic philosophy. Like her fellow artists, Sterne felt that a brush stroke or a gesture was capable of revealing a certain "truth"; yet, for Sterne this "truth" does not originate with her.
Rather, she has consistently described herself as an "instrument" or a "lens." More recently she has quoted the poet Czeslaw Milosz in order to convey her process as "taking dictation," not from within herself, but from her relationship with her environment, or as she aptly explained in a 1954 artist statement, "the stream connecting past and future." 5 In the same statement, she depicted the role of the "revolutionary artist" as that of "a constant re-evaluator." For Sterne, as thoughts changed, so did her modes of expression. She found the idea of a "consistent" artistic style impossible because it would suffocate the inspiration that drove her to paint-her fascination with the continual flux of life around her. Thus, Sterne eschewed both the concept of a stable identity and a single aesthetic style, preferring the freedom to change along with her environment. Presented here as an illustration of her self-proclaimed freedom, Sterne's three large-scale paintings resonate with a body of Steinberg's drawings from the same period. In the time frame
Hedda Sterne
New York VIII, 1954 Synthetic polymer paint
on canvas 721/s x 42 inches The Musewn of Modern Art, New York. Mr. and Mrs. Roy R. Neuberger Fund. © 2008 Hedda Sterne/ Artists Rights Society (ARS) , New York
Steinberg and Sterne HO~IA~IAN-UOHN A~llll'SII
C.\ltTOOl\IST A,'\U AltTlST-\\'IH:
TilE WOitl ,l) \\ '1'111 PEN
A~ll I'AL\'TUIUJSII
"Steinberg and Sterne" pictorial spread, Life magazine (August '27, 1951)
reflected in this exhibition, Sterne developed at least three distinct styles: anthropomorphic machines; large-scale, heavily abstracted images of New York City that utilized commercial spray paint; and sedate, expansive paintings consisting of horizontal bands confined within a vertical canvas format. All the while she simultaneously drew and painted figurative portraits of friends and family. (A fuller examination of her career reveals works as varied as Surrealist collage, conceptual diary canvases, and crystalline geometric abstractions.) Whereas Sterne communicated her philosophy indirectly through a lifetime of successive aesthetic shifts, Steinberg often treated the idea of style as his main subject. His pen lines constantly interchange techniques, even within the same drawing. Such sustained focus on style itself exposes both its power and its mutability, while also undermining any connection between Steinberg's drawings and a "true" artistic identity. Steinberg's penchant for wearing self-drawn masks or presenting entire drawings of himself in order to avoid posing for press photographs (see the Life magazine spread) underlines his playful yet incisive attitude
towards representation and identity. On one hand, the artist's line is as authentic a marker as a photograph; on the other hand, it is a fiction, as artificial as any form of self-representation. In Steinberg's Parade series of drawings, which features little men ceremoniously hoisting over their heads accepted signifiers of authenticitysignatures, seals, and thumbprints-the men carrying lines and brush strokes provide a particularly humorous commentary on the era. In Steinberg's world an abstract brush stroke stood on par with an elaborate signature. Isolated and given a tangible weight (some take more than one man to hold aloft, while others are visibly unwieldy to balance), each of these marks reveals its contingent status. Minus their officiating documents or painted compositions, the signatures and brush strokes reveal themselves as mere representations of authority and authenticity, making the serious parade of self-importance even more ridiculous. Yet, since Steinberg often included himself in the critique (he titled a drawing of a man literally signing himself into existence Se(fPortrait), his investigations of style and identity are rarely cold or condescending. Rather, Steinberg seemed to agree with his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries on a basic point: man is selfmade (or more literally, self-drawn). But he took things at least one step further by insisting on exploiting all of the materialsand styles-at hand. For Steinberg, the self-made man was just that: if he can represent himself in one style, he can just as easily be redrawn in another. Accordingly, Sterne and Steinberg drew each other in a range of styles. These portraits reveal, on an intimate scale, the artists' experimentations with various techniques in their efforts to captm·e each other's elusive essence. Never intended for the public, these often casual sketchbook drawings illustrate a thoroughly consistent attitude, even on the most personal of levels, about their explorations of identity and aesthetic expression. Sterne and Steinberg never set out to play formal roles as critics of their own generation. Rather, their participation was simultaneous with their resistance. Sterne's presence in the 1951 photograph of the lrascibles-surrounded by some of the men we now deem the most "important" artists of the twentieth century-
lnge YloraU1
Untilled {Hedda Wearing Saul Steinberg Mask/, 1959 Gelatin silver prinl
14 x 11 inches Collection of lledda SLerne © lnge Moralh/ Magnum Pholo NYC
speaks to her engagement and prominence in the art world at the time. However, the fact that current art history books rarely feature her work alongside that of her male counterparts suggests that we have less tolerance for diverse perspectives now than her fellow artists did then.6 In a similar vein, Steinberg blurred the boundaries between "fine art" and "print culture": the upscale gallery world and commercial arl. He showed at Belly Parsons and Sidney Janis, garnering immense respect from his fellow artists as well as art critics like Harold Rosenberg, while becoming one of the most beloved cartoonists of The New Yorker.1 Yet again, stripped down narratives of the period have left little room for this sort of flexibility and, until recently, his work has remained segregated from that of his contemporaries.8 Sterne and Steinberg separated in 1960, but never legally divorced. They remained close friends, communicating on an almost daily basis until Steinberg's death in 1999. Their work, however, should not be examined side by side simply on the grounds of their personal relationship. Rather, their conversation as artists highlights a more complex and nuanced discussion about artistic identity and style in general, and the Abstract Expressionists more specifically. Considering Sterne and Steinberg's work together broadens our conceptions of the period and makes space for a more diverse dialogue in the future. -Sarah Eckhardt Guest Curator
