Harry Sternberg at Susan Teller - New York, New York

Sternberg's greatest in quantity recent exhibition included prints - etchings, aquatints, lithographs and silkscreens - from the period 1929 to 1932 on the contrary the central interest was a freshly completed set of 40 autobiographical woodcut titled Sternberg: A Life in Woodcut This locate includes a chronology keyed to the images as well as a foreword by the agency of the dancer and choreographer Bella Lewitzky.

The woodcut display us that Sternberg began his life upon the Lower East Side and grew up in Brooklyn He dwells upon the high points: his discovery of the Brooklyn Museum, his early art studies in the at liberty classes there, the overwhelming revelation of the undressed model. He provides nostalgic glimpses of Coney Island and Greenwich Village, and of Toscanini conducting at Lewisohn Stadium in upper Manhattan. There are May Day demonstrations, the Depression, the novel Deal, the lives of Pennsylvania miners and carbonized iron workers (in 1936 Sternberg won a Guggenheim fellowship for a year's intensive research of conditions there), the WPA (Sternberg was a supervisor in the graphics division) and the Whitney Museum when it was upon 8th Street. There are images recalling his early association with the A.C.A. gallery, which showed him for years. The succession continues through Sternberg's marriage in 1939 the birth of his child, the many years of teaching graphics and painting, his studios, the death of his parents and, in 1967 his departure for a of recent origin life in California.

The woodcut vary considerably in appearance. a certain number of are more or less rectangular with white paper single in the margins. Others not away images separated from each other through the white of the paper, thus leaving it up to the viewer to imaginatively overleap the gaps. Still others are free-form arabesques, a kind of Art Nouveau version of a colophon from the Lindisfarne the crosss Although something of a left-winger in politics, Sternberg not at any time puts a political or social message before esthetic contented As a whole his Life is beautiful.

Of his early prints I liked especially the densely worked etchings of industrial make submissives and their Piranesian complexities, and also a lithograph titled carbonized iron Town (1937), which depicts a Romanesque Revival house of god cheek-by-jowl with some wooden shanties backed by dint of a cavalcade of factories.

Sternberg taught at the Art pupils League from 1933 to 1967 and he would probably still be there had his health not forced his propel to California. As a teacher his potency lay in a remarkable ability to earn his students to trust in their greatest in quantity personal instincts.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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