Artnet profiles Hedda Sterne

By Karen Chernick

If you’ve heard of Hedda Sterne, it might be because of a notorious photo of her published in LIFE magazine in 1951. There she was, a lone woman towering over a jumble of painters that included Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, and Motherwell, standing on a chair in the back row. Sterne lived for a full century, long enough to outlast everyone in that iconic frame, but sadly also long enough to see herself written out of histories of this New York School in which she was clearly a key player.

“I’ve been working, you see how old I am, since I was seven,” said an octogenarian Sterne in a 1992 interview with BOMB magazine. “And the one thing people remember is that photograph.”

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Image: Hedda Sterne, Metamorphoses XIII, 1967

© The Hedda Sterne Foundation Inc, ARS, NY and DACS, London
Courtesy The Hedda Sterne Foundation Inc, Van Doren Waxter, New York, and Victoria Miro