Maurice Sterne
Maurice Sterne
1877 - 1957
American painter, sculptor and printmaker of Russian birth. He fled with his family from anti-Jewish pogroms in Moscow to New York in 1889. From 1894 to 1899 he attended the National Academy of Design, where he studied anatomy under Thomas Eakins and later served as an assistant instructor. In 1904 he won a scholarship that enabled him to spend the rest of the decade in Europe. He was introduced to early French modernism by Leo Stein, and his prints and drawings were exhibited at Paul Cassirer’s gallery in Berlin in 1910.
Sterne travelled through Egypt, India and around the South Pacific; paintings of this period, such as Benares (1912; Washington, DC, Phillips Col.) coupled Expressionist colour and brushwork with Synthetic Cubist spatial patterning, seen in Bali Bazaar (1913–14; New York, Whitney). Through his brief marriage to patron Mabel Dodge (1879–1962) and his association with New York dealer Stephan Bourgeois (1881–1961), he sustained contact with avant-garde developments. After 1920, however, his style moderated and his practice broadened to include monumental sculpture, such as the Rogers-Kennedy Memorial (stone with carved relief and bronze figures, h. c. 10 m, incl. base, 1929; Worcester, MA), and public mural commissions, for example Man’s Struggle for Justice (1935; Washington, DC, US Dept Justice). In 1929 he was elected President of the Society of American Painters, Sculptors and Gravers, and four years later he became the first American artist to be honoured with a one-man exhibition at MOMA, New York. Sterne’s late paintings, mostly New England landscapes and marine paintings (e.g. After the Rain, 1948; New York, MOMA), possess an abstract–impressionistic quality unprecedented in his earlier work. [Jeffrey R. Hayes. "Sterne, Maurice." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T081358.]
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