Maurice Sterne was an American sculptor, painter, draftsman, sculptor, and muralist remembered today for his association with philanthropist Mabel Dodge Luhan.
Background
Maurice was born on July 13, 1878 in Libau, Latvia, the son of Hirsch Zwi Sterne and Naomi Schlossberg. His father was trained as a rabbi but became a grain merchant.
Latvia, then under Russian rule, suffered from the oppressive authority of Czar Alexander III and the tyrannical police brutality of the Cossacks. Sterne's brother Michael was forced to flee to Germany because he was threatened by Cossack persecution for his liberalism.
Sterne's father died when Sterne was seven, and his older brothers, Joel and Carl, and his sister Rosa had gone to Moscow. Soon after, Sterne and his mother joined them. Sterne was not to avail himself of this opportunity, because in 1889 he, his mother, and sister Lena left for America to escape the increasing persecution of Jews. Michael Sterne was already there. The Sterne family moved into a house in New York's Lower East Side.
Education
As a boy, Sterne was encouraged to read German literature, notably Goethe and Heine.
It was in Moscow that he was to have his first art experience, a visit to the Tretyakov Museum. He was so enchanted that he was determined to become an artist. He was enrolled in a trade school for locksmiths briefly but then was transferred to a more advanced polytechnical school. He was drawing on his own. Examples were submitted to the director of the Kommisarsky Art Academy, who was so impressed that he offered a scholarship to the young artist. At one point, he was working in a saloon and taking night classes at the National Academy of Design. He was to graduate from that institution in 1899, winning a number of awards.
In 1904 he received a grant to study abroad, in Paris, where he saw the art of the impressionists and postimpressionists.
Career
Before the outbreak of World War I, Sterne traveled throughout Europe, particularly in France, Germany, Italy, and Greece. He haunted the museums. An exhibition of his etchings and drawings was held in Berlin in 1910.
From 1912 to 1914 Sterne was in Bali, where he was fascinated by native rituals and folkways. He made several thousand paintings and drawings, many on rice paper with oil paint.
Before returning to America in 1915, he visited Italy and took up residence in Anticoli, where he was to establish a studio and art school in 1918.
In the mid-1920's, Sterne's reputation grew as he began to exhibit in Europe and America.
His 1926 show at the Scott and Fowles Galleries in New York was a sellout. He had invested in the stock market and suffered losses in the crash of 1929.
When Sterne was in Egypt and Greece during the first decade of this century, he developed an enthusiasm for sculpture and made his first attempts.
He said that he wanted to emphasize contour and line rather than bulk and mass. Most critics consider his sculpture as minor in relation to his paintings and drawings. His major work in sculpture is the Rogers-Kennedy War Memorial in Worcester, Massachussets. He worked on this monumental piece for three years in Italy.
In 1934-1936 the Sternes lived in San Francisco, where he taught painting at the California School of Fine Arts. Sterne worked for five years on murals for the library of the Department of Justice Building. They were unveiled in 1941 to a generally unfavorable reception; however, his show at the Wildenstein Gallery in New York in 1947 was a critical success.
Toward the end of his life he was ill and aware of impending death. He spent much of his time working on his memoirs. Paintings of his went into the collections of the major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The town fathers of Anticoli, where Sterne had maintained his studio for nearly thirty years, honored him by naming a street after him. Sterne's reputation declined in the 1940's and 1950's.
According to his first wife, Sterne sympathized with the Germans during World War I.
Views
Sterne, generally conservative in art, rejected Matisse as a poor draftsman and Picasso as a charlatan. He believed that it was necessary to return to the nineteenth century in France, from Manet and Cezanne onward, and to develop a style of his own by avoiding what he considered the sensational and merely experimental.
Membership
He was a member of American Painters, Sculptors, and Gravers.
Interests
Artists
He was particularly impressed by that of Cezanne. Also the influence of Gauguin was seen in these works, which brought Sterne great acclaim in the United States and Europe.
Connections
On August 18, 1917, he married the heiress and author Mabel Dodge Luhan in Peekskill, New York. After a stormy four years of marriage, they divorced, and he married a dancer, Vera Segal, on June 3, 1923. There were no children.