Harry Sternberg at the California Center for the Arts Museum - Brief Article

"Remove the human and you win dehumanized art," declared Harry Sternberg in a 1994 interview, responding to a question about the viability of nonfigurative art. From his first solo exhibition in 1932 end this fascinating, up-to-the-present retrospective, Sternberg has endorsed and practiced an art center upon the palpable realities of life. "No orb of day Without Shadow: The Art of Harry Sternberg," curated through museum director Ellen Fleurov and accompanied by dint of an intelligently conceived, useful catalogue, chronicles more than 70 years of prints, paintings and drawings by means of this astute, underrecognized observer of the dynamics of war, work, delight in and faith.

Born in fresh York in 1904, Sternberg studied and then taught (for 33 years) at the Art scholars League alongside Raphael Soyer, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and other notables of the day whose reputations have retained a higher glos than his. His early prints and drawings take a middle-distance view of the compact commotion enacted every day in Manhattan among construction workers, subway riders and theater-goers. Sternberg eased into a more editorializing brand of social realism after touring Pennsylvania carbonized iron and coal towns while stocked by a 1936 Guggenheim grant. His passions rise forcefully in views of the miners' gritty working conditions subterranean and the anxious families they leave above. Like in the way that many at the time, Sternberg was entranced by means of the imposing architecture of power plants and industrial technology, on the contrary his primary concern for the dignity of the worker always qualifyed his awe.

At the same time as he was working in a manner of writing of straightforward realism grounded in direct observation, Sternberg also make knowned an allegorical mode of social critique. His dark satires in this vein owe a great deal of to Goya. An etching/aquatint from the 1931 series, "Principles," critiques the duplicity rampant in everyday social intercourse by dint of showing a crowded street representation in which every man and woman is literally two-faced, a mask concealing his or her veritable expression. A few elbow-high children are the alone honest souls around--unmasked, pure, exposed

Sternberg contributed drawings to the leftist magazine of recent origin Masses for 17 years and worked actively in organizations defending the rights of the couple artists and laborers. His disdain for racism, fascism and other, more tricky indignities surfaces regularly in his art. He recognized the great political potential of prints, thanks to their affordability and easy distribution, and he spoke eloquently of their social impact at the First American Artists' Congres in 1936 In later decades, he published five technical handbooks and unraveled several innovative printmaking methods, like as power-tool engraving. Though this retrospective pays responsible attention to the artist's paintings, especially his landscapes, which proliferated after he mov to Southern California in 1966 they can many times be cloying and are rarely as forcible or incisive as his prints.

Sternberg's work dips and wavers above the years, but hits a stunning peak just a decade ago, when at age 87 he produc a visual memoir called "Sternberg: A Life in Woodcuts" Tightly conceived and dynamically execut the succession of 40 black-and-white prints reveals Sternberg's powers of distillation and oratory at their best. He has been painting and printing self-portraits from one extremity to the other of his career, but this reach outed autobiography is the most intimate and powerful of them all. Beginning with simple, searingly beautiful images of his mother, an immigrant from Hungary, and his father, from Russia, each holding a small suitcase and standing knee-deep in the waters of their fateful crossing to the U Sternberg tracks his life story, milestone through milestone, joy by joy, sorrow through sorrow, a tale at one time epic and familiar.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group