The Hill News

The New York Times obit today reported the death, at 100, of Hedda Sterne, a member of the group of abstract expressionist, avant-garde artists of the early 20th century. Sterne escaped Bucharest and fled to the U.S. when the Nazis rounded up and massacred Jews in her home city. She worked prodigiously “at the margins of art history,” the Times noted, less famous than her movement contemporaries such as Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning. She stands out as the only woman in a famous 1951 Life magazine photo of the movement’s leaders.

Why write about her in a political-oriented blog, readers may wonder? It is because her observation about her art struck this author as especially revealing. “Every drawing teaches me something,” Sterne wrote. “Leonardo drew things to explain them to himself.” For writers, that observation is central. Forget writer’s block. We often do not know precisely what we think about a subject until we try t! o express our thoughts about the subject with pen on paper (or, today, electronically on computer).

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