Special Event: Hedda Sterne Rediscovered

Free event!

Followed by a reception in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center!

A visual artist best remembered as the only female in the Abstract Expressionist group The Irascible 18 (and the wife of Saul Steinberg, the Romanian-born American cartoonist and illustrator of New Yorker fame), Hedda Sterne created a body of work known for its stubborn independence from styles and trends. Her works appear in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Born in Romania in 1910, Sterne had achieved international recognition as an avant-garde artist by 1941, when, as a Jew, she fled the country to find refuge in the U.S. (where she died in 2011). The work she left behind in her Bucharest studio, closely guarded for more than 50 years by her close friend and fellow artist Medi Wechsler Dinu (now age 106!), has recently been rediscovered by Cosmin Năsui, director of the PostModernism Museum in Bucharest. Năsui and Radu Stern (former Director of Education at the Musée d'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the author of From Dada to Surrealism: Jewish Avant-Garde Artists from Romania and Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850-1930) will share for the first time Sterne’s early works and Wechsler Dinu's testimonies, recounting a cinematic story of talent and grit, of courage and loyalty, of shattered lives and a bygone world.

Presented in collaboration with the PostModernism Museum (Bucharest).