Hedda Sterne (1910–2011)

Hedda Sterne was born Hedwig Lindenberg to a Jewish family in Bucharest, Romania. Her father was a language teacher, and as a young child she learned German, French, and English. She attended a private girl's school that specialized in training foreign language teachers, but also began studying art at age eight. In the late 1920s, she traveled regularly to Vienna to take classes in ceramics at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. In 1929, she enrolled at the University of Bucharest, where she studied art history and philosophy. In 1932, she married Friederich Stern, later known as Frederick Stafford. She became active in Bucharest's thriving avant-garde communities of artists and writers. She traveled frequently between Bucharest and Paris, where she studied briefly in the ateliers of Fernand Léger and André Lhote, and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Some of her works were included in the 11th Exposition du Salon des Surindépendants at the Porte de Versailles, where they drew the attention of Hans Arp. The following year, her work was shown in the 50th annual Salon des Indépendants. With the outbreak of World War II, she and her husband began to prepare to flee Europe for the USA. However, she did not accompany her husband in the spring of 1940 when he left for New York. Instead, she remained in Bucharest with her family, where in January 1941 she witnessed the Bucharest Iron Guard pogrom. She finally departed for New York via Lisbon in October 1941. By 1942, she was exhibiting her work there under the name "Hedda Sterne." Hedda established a studio on East 50th Street, near Peggy Guggenheim's home on Beekman Place, and the two became close friends. Through Peggy, Hedda met and became re-acquainted with many of the Surrealist artists she had known in Paris, including André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst. Around this time, she also met and became close friends with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whom she advised to use his own drawings to illustrate his book The Little Prince. In 1944, after a divorce from her first husband, Hedda married fellow artist and Romanian refugee Saul Steinberg. Hedda was an active member of the New York School of painters and a prolific artist for more than 50 years.