Airport #1

Artist Hedda Sterne (American, born Romania, 1910 - 2011)

Dateca. 1947-1949

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsUnframed: 60 1/4 × 41 3/4 inches (153.04 × 106.05 cm)
Framed: 61 5/8 × 43 3/8 inches (156.53 × 110.17 cm)

Credit LinePurchase: acquired through the generosity of the William T. Kemper Foundation–Commerce Bank, Trustee

Object number2016.18

SignedLower left, Hedda Sterne

On View

On view

Gallery Location

Collections

Modern Art

Terms

DescriptionVertical composition, abstract with irregular gridding as in an aerial view of a city. Visual elements suggesting an airplane, helicopter blade, and mechanical devices. Soft tones of blue, tan, beige, brick.Exhibition History

Exhibition History

Uninterrupted Flux: Hedda Sterne, A Retrospective, Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL , January 21-March 26, 2006, The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, January 12-March 11, 2007, unnumbered.

Hedda Sterne: Machines, 1947-1951, Van Doren Waxter, New York, March 10-April 29, 2016, unnumbered.

Gallery Label

Airport #1 depicts a map-like, aerial view of irregular city blocks rendered in soft tones of blue, green, brick, tan, and cream. Sterne, a 1941 immigrant from Bucharest, Romania, found America’s highways, buildings, machinery, and cars "tremendously poetic and symbolic." Although she had arrived in New York by ship, the artist was fascinated by the newest mode of travel: the airplane. A careful look at this painting also reveals abstracted elements of a cockpit instrument panel and control levers, providing the viewer with two points of view at once.

Provenance

The Hedda Sterne Foundation, New York;

With Van Doren Waxter, New York, 2016;

Purchased from Van Doren Waxter by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 2016.

Published References

Sarah L. Eckhardt, Uninterrupted Flux: Hedda Sterne, A Retrospective, exh. cat. (Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Publishers, 2006), 34.

Hedda Sterne: Machines, 1947-1951, exh. cat. (New York: Van Doren Waxter, Publishers, 2016), frontpiece, 17.

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