(gentle piano music)
- [Steven] We're in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
looking at a large vertically oriented canvas
by Hedda Sterne.
This is Number 3 and it was painted in 1957,
but it's spray paint.
- [Sarah] Hedda was using commercial spray paint
on these paintings in 1957.
She's also very experimental with her materials.
Rather than using a brush, although there's some brushwork,
she's using a can of spray paint to sort of have the medium
match the subject that she is portraying, very abstractly.
- [Steven] Using aerosol to apply paint
is an industrial process and it seems perfectly fitted
to the city in which she found herself.
My eye moves so easily across the surface of this canvas.
And I'm very much aware of its two dimensionality,
but at the same time, she's able to achieve
these deep recessive spaces that open this canvas up
and make it a much more complex space.
- [Sarah] We can read this as a completely abstract painting
or we can think about her process
which is that she would often make drawings
underneath highways or bridge structures,
but that wasn't necessarily all that the painting was about.
It was her beginning point.
- [Steven] We're looking at this kaleidoscope
of amorphous forms,
almost like we're looking through girders
that are soft panes of a stained glass window.
- [Sarah] It's almost like a diaphanous light.
There's always this back and forth in her paintings
between structure and light.
And she's often talked
about how if she could paint with light,
she would paint with light.
- [Steven] The surface is really complicated.
You have this atomized paint that has areas
where it's more diaphanous and where it's denser.
And you have this wonderful arc
that moves from the upper right,
down to the lower center of the canvas
scraped along that to create this velocity
that unifies the canvas and draws our eye through.
And so, there is this sense of her body moving
across the surface of this canvas.
- [Sarah] That sense of speed and motion and movement
is really present.
She's communicating this bodily sense of the way
one might experience speed in a pulsating city.
This her arm, her hand that is moving
as an extension of the spray can
to give you that industrial environment.
- [Steven] There's a long history of artists
celebrating American industry.
I think for instance of the kaleidoscopic images
that were produced by Joseph Stella earlier in the century,
but those were much more defined images.
This is a much more abstract painting.
- [Sarah] There is probably a shared sense of wonder
at the city between Joseph Stella and Hedda Sterne.
But Hedda came to this style
by way of a few different movements beforehand.
She in fact grew up in the midst
of the Dada and Constructivism Movement in Bucharest.
She had participated in the Surrealist Movement in the 1930s
before she came to New York.
And then, she was very much a part of the group of artists
of the Abstract Expressionists era.
- [Steven] And that language of abstract expressionism
of Pollock dripping or the notion
that Harold Rosenberg developed of action painting
became synonymous with the work of these artists
and may explain to some extent the neglect of her work
over the last 50 years.
- [Sarah] And also when she felt
that she had explored a style or a process
to the full extent she could,
then she was on another question.
- [Steven] And Hedda Sterne was recognized
for her art early in her career.
The heiress and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim
showed her work quite early.
- [Sarah] Hedda had a collage included in exhibition
in the late 1930s.
And in fact that was the connection that Hedda had
when she came to the US.
Hedda was Jewish.
She had to escape Bucharest, Romania in 1941.
And one of the first people she looked up
when she arrived in New York was Peggy Guggenheim.
And there she was very much a part of both
the Emigres circle of artists that had come from Europe,
as well as the younger generation
of New York American artists.
And then she became a regular central artist
at Betty Parson's Gallery.
She was showing at the same time
as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman.
Just very much a part of that circle of artists.
- [Steven] And thanks to your work,
Hedda Sterne is being reevaluated.
Her work is emerging from the store rooms of museums
around the country and being put back onto the walls.
- [Sarah] I am so delighted to see her work on view
at the Whitney Museum, at the Museum of Modern Art.
The Metropolitan has her work in their collection.
The Art Institute of Chicago
has her work in their collection.
All of these institutions purchased her work in the 1950s,
but I think for a long time curators didn't have a sense
of context for where to put her work
or how to put it in dialogue.
Some of that was overall neglect of women artists.
And I think that we're in a very different moment
where curators and art historians are thinking differently.
So it absolutely makes sense to put her work in galleries
with the artists that she was working alongside
in the 1940s and the 1950s.
- [Steven] I wanna learn a history of art
that is large enough to include Hedda Sterne.
(lively piano music)