Thread by @dean_frey

Remembering Hedda Sterne on her birthday 🎂
📷 Gjon Mili for Life Magazine, 1950
"Covering a canvas is a very complicated and deadly serious game. There are strict rules and one can't possibly cheat."

Saul Steinberg & Hedda Sterne by Arnold Newman, 1951
"We looked at everything, everything. Every Sunday when there was no traffic, we went motoring through New York."

Remembering Hedda Sterne on her birthday 🎂
Saul Steinberg drew a picture of her as a cat.
@Smithsonian
@ArchivesAmerArt

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry sent Hedda Sterne this letter, ca. 1943
@smithsonian
@ArchivesAmerArt

Hedda Sterne with her cat, Poussin
📷 Evelyn Hofer, c.1952
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@ArchivesAmerArt

Saul Steinberg sent Hedda Sterne this letter when he was in North Africa in 1944. The two married when he returned to the States.
@smithsonian
@ArchivesAmerArt

Here's the second page of Saul Steinberg's letter to Hedda Sterne

Hedda Sterne, when she heard of Mark Rothko's suicide, said "Who was this man, Rothko, who killed my friend?"
📷 Nina Leen, "The Irascibles", 1951. Rothko is sitting on the right, the only artist with glasses; guess which one is Sterne

Here's the caption for "The Irascibles". Cool that Nina Leen had Hedda Sterne overseeing this bunch of AE bros. An alternative group portrait might have included Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Jay DeFeo, Helen Frankenthaler, & more.
museumstore.sfmoma.org/women-of-abstr…

Hedda Sterne by Margaret Bourke-White, 1947
"Hedda was always searching, never satisfied. She had many ways; most artists just have one way to go."
- Betty Parsons

Hedda Sterne
Untitled from Metaphores and Metamorphoses Metaphores and Metamorphoses VIII
1967
@MuseumModernArt

Hedda Sterne
Untitled
1967
@MuseumModernArt

Another shot of Hedda Sterne by Evelyn Hofer, c. 1952. She's in her garden at 171 West 71st Street.
"One of the hallmarks of Miss Sterne's paintings and drawings is her ambiguity. Never can we look at her work and pinpoint it with one word, one idea."
- David L. Shirey

Hedda Sterne by Inge Morath, 1959
"I see myself as a well-working lens, a perceiver of something that exists independently of me: don’t look at me, look at what I’ve found."

Hedda Sterne
Portrait of Barnett Newman, 1952
Oil on canvas
Collection of The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College

Hedda Sterne
Self-Portrait, c. 1940
"Sometimes I react to immediate visible reality and sometimes I am prompted by ideas, but at all times I have been moved by the music of the way things are."