Maurice Sterne

(1878–1957). Painter, printmaker, and sculptor. Remembered particularly for semi-abstract paintings of exotic and “primitive” subjects, he found potent inspiration in a two-year residence on Bali. The best of these works combine a seductive and sensual vision of life on that distinctive island with cubist-derived forms arranged in shallow space, as in Bali Bazaar (Whitney Museum, 1913–14). Like Gauguin and many subsequent modern artists, Sterne deeply admired the arts and lifestyles of cultures untouched by Western rationalism and capitalism. Born in Liepāja, Russia (now Latvia), he lived for a time in Moscow before arriving in New York. At a young age, he worked for an engraving firm and studied drawing at Cooper Union. After training from 1894until1899 at the National Academy of Design, in 1904 he embarked on a decade of global travel. Following several years in Europe, where he absorbed Cézanne's work, early Renaissance painting, and classical sculpture, he traveled on to Egypt, India, Burma, and, finally, to Bali. Following his return to New York in 1915, his Balinese paintings made his reputation and attracted the attention of Mabel Dodge (later Luhan), to whom he found himself uneasily married in 1917. Soon Sterne moved (alone) to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to paint indigenous Indians. After Dodge arrived at the end of that year to colonize New Mexico with her bohemian friends, she and Sterne quickly parted ways. (They divorced a few years later.) Later Sterne worked for long periods in Anticoli Corrado, not far from Rome, attempting to capture ideal beauty in depictions of peasants rendered in a purified, linear style, as in Breadmakers (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1923). His still lifes of this time retain closer ties to Cézanne. In 1933 the highly regarded Sterne numbered among the first American artists to be accorded a one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art. Subsequently, he secured one of the most prestigious mural commissions of the federal art projects, a series of twenty scenes on the subject of Man's Struggle for Justice (installed in 1941), for the Justice Department building in Washington, D.C. From the mid-1940s Sterne summered in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, where he painted fresh seascapes that are less intellectually restrained than much of his previous work. He died at his primary residence in Mount Kisco, north of New York City. Sterne's autobiographical writings appear in Shadow and Light: The Life, Friends, and Opinions of Maurice Sterne (1965), edited by Charlotte L. Mayerson.