STERNE, MAURICE

STERNE, MAURICE (1877–1957), U.S. painter, educator, printmaker, and sculptor. Born in Libau, Latvia, his family moved to Moscow; at the age of 10, the artist immigrated to the United States. In America, he first studied map engraving, then painting and drawing at the National Academy of Design (1894–99) under the tutelage of Thomas Eakins. He also studied at Cooper Union in New York City. After receiving a Mooney Traveling Scholarship from the National Academy, he traveled widely in Europe and Asia from 1904 to 1915, although maintaining a base in New York City. In fact, Sterne became an American citizen in 1904. He first traveled to Paris, absorbing the lessons of Degas, Renoir, and Cezanne, then to Italy, where he studied Mantegna and Piero della Francesca. Sterne next lived in Greece, studying 4^th- and 5^th-century statuary. In 1916, he traveled to Taos, New Mexico, where he and his wife Mabel Dodge devoted themselves to the study and preservation of American Indian culture. Sterne's images from this time include sensitive portraits of Indians, with great attention to details of dress. Two years later, he returned to Italy. By 1910, he was in Germany, where he executed many commissioned paintings. From 1910 to 1914, he visited Bali, Java, Burma, and India. Work from this time, characterized by a movement away from the lessons of academic painting to a more decorative and spontaneous use of line and form, and brighter palette, reflected Sterne's enchantment with the people and places he encountered here. He was elected president of the Society of American Painters in 1929. In this same year, Sterne won a competition to create a public sculpture in Worcester, Massachusetts. Made of limestone, the Rogers-Kennedy memorial depicts a couple pulling a plow atop a base featuring an array of bas-reliefs which illustrate events in the life of an agricultural community. In 1933 he had a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art, the first for an American artist. The critic Lewis Mumford praised Sterne's Balinese paintings as the highlight of the exhibition. Sterne worked in a variety of media: paint, charcoal, etching, and marble, among others. Sterne's subjects included portraits, still-lifes, genre-scenes, seascapes, as well as themes borrowed from the Impressionists. The latter include dancehall scenes such as Entrance of the Ballet, which appropriates the subject matter, and the economy of light and form characteristic of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. Sterne's talents as an artist emerge most forcefully in his depictions of women, whether the quietly luminous marble Sitting Figure (1932) or the water, crayon, and charcoal Study of My Wife, which captures a figure in a few emotive and economical strokes. Sterne's style underwent a radical change after an illness suffered in 1945, becoming looser, freer, and more colorful. Sterne taught at the California School of Fine Arts (1935–36) and the Art Students League in New York. He divided his time between New York and Provincetown. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum.

bibliography:

C.L. Mayerson (ed.), Shadow and Light: The Life, Friends and Opinions of Maurice Sterne (1965); C. Roth, Jewish Art. An Illustrated History, revised ed., Bezalel Narkiss (1971).

[Nancy Buchwald (2^nd ed.)]