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hedda sterne a painting life "Covering a canvas is a very complicated and deadly serious game." Hedda Sterne Skill of the highest kind is a premise that must be taken for granted in playing any "deadly serious game" but it is no guarantee for winning. The element that decides the contest, though certainly closely knit up with the artist's technical dexterity, reveals the most intimate and therefore the loneliest essence of his talent. Some artists triumph by cunning in the deadly game that Sterne speaks of. Others rely on headlong force, on hard-bitten discipline or on abandoning themselves to one of the many forms of ecstasy. In Sterne's case one feels that the deadly game is won primarily by wit . . . taking the word in its most archaic meaning of spirited acumen, alertness to her adversary's (but also to her own) strengths and weaknesses. There's courage born of such wit, sustained by indomitably oblique, knowing humor. Just as the Bremen Musicians decided that they could surely find something better than death, Hedda Sterne wins the rounds of her deadly serious game by never standing still, by recognizing the deadliness of the game and outwitting it. This sense of wit accounts for her ability to deal with tragic themes without overt pathos. There's something picaresque about her art that can discover the very fragrance of life and death in a head of lettuce just as she perceives the inevitable tragedy of modern man in her portraits. In her picaresque way she is always aware of the vulnerability that life . . . and art . . . bring with them. So firmly familiar is she with that that she can afford to shrug off gallantry in the face of ultimate defeat as a commonplace and go on to celebrate survival in canvases that are sparse but also comforting. Her wit is an ingenuity of the heart. She is, God help her, an artist's artist. Which does not mean that she is inaccessible to a lay public. But there are aspects of her art that only an artist can seize on the wing. The rest of us must make a sacrifice of time in order to tune in. For Hedda Sterne has a certain mischievous quality and she modulates quickly to another key just when we think we have caught on to one particular melodic line or harmonic theme. Her Roumanian background (Roumania being a country where borders are more important than the capital, where regional character and the surrounding cultures of Slavic, Oriental, Magyar and Latin origin are forever in need of reintegration) guarantees an ability to come to terms with the vast variety of experience not by chameleonlike adaptation but by an enduring allegiance to individuals rather than to groups. This is partly (very much partly) an explanation of her quick understanding of the New York scene in many of her earliest works. The welter of New York and also the city's unexpected coherence where chaos and strictest order stand cheek by jowl, gives poignancy to these moments of balance between the forces of composition and disintegration. Her allegiance to the sovereignty of the individual also predestined her to do some of her most memorable and valid work in the field of portraiture. That she should have painted these portraits at a time when critics, artists and public were unanimous in proclaiming the death of portraiture is as surprising as it is typical of Hedda Sterne. These haunting images depend on the perfect perception and rendition of nuance in attitude, on the subtlest distinctions of expanding or contracting personality. The artist has managed in each case to suggest the interplay of pressure produced by the impact of highly individualized sitters on a measured space that describes precisely the extent of energies emanating from a face or from a stance. In the case of some portraitists it is fitting to say that they "betray character". Goya, for instance is such an artist whose conception of portraiture imposes ruthlessness. Sterne belongs to another category of portraitists who insist on respecting a measure of reserve for their sitters. Slightly more in keeping with the mood of the sixties are her large canvases that pertain to landscape perceptions. Ambiguous horizon-lines sometimes draw us into tremulous space and sometimes exclude us so that we find ourselves simultaneously looking at and sometimes looking into paintings. Coordinates are suspended and yet the vision is so sure, so authentic that we trust our guide as she invites us to participate in the sometimes mystifying images that are like sounding boards of a mood that cannot be defined in any other way. Some of the canvases were painted in Venice where whispers have a resonance that carries over vast distances. But that may be only a coarse metaphor for the brooding quality of some of these paintings. Having hazarded one personal and probable incorrect interpretation, I might as well slide a bit further down the inclined plane of speculation. Some of the great white paintings of the seventies remind me of the chapter "Snow" in the "Magic Mountain". It is the moment after existential panic. Tranquility conquers the fear of being lost. Though the pervasive whiteness eliminates all hope of physical orientation, it sheds a steadfast light on signs (are they shadow? are they substance?) that do point a way. In this stage of disembodied serenity it scarcely matters whether we are given the grace of reading the signs. It suffices to know that there is a language, that there is a means of communion with the radiance from which life stems and to which life returns. Like every true artist, Hedda Sterne is surprised by the unexpected obligations that are imposed by her art. It is a great perplexity and we may be glad that all we need be surprised at is her ability to fulfill these obligations with such scrupulous honesty. This is indeed a deadly serious game. And just as serious is the wit and generosity with which she lets us participate in each risky move while we can enjoy it all at a safe distance. Fred Licht February 1982
