Maurice Sterne

The Latvian-born painter Maurice Sterne was a modernist who rose to prominence in the early twentieth century in New York. In addition to his murals in the library of the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., his works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Carnegie Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Phillips Collection. In the late 1890s, Sterne studied under Alfred Maurer and Thomas Eakins at the National Academy of Design and then traveled widely in Europe and the Far East. Many of his works are based on his travels and his bohemian life in the early decades of the twentieth century, which included a brief marriage to the American philanthropist Mabel Dodge (Luhan). His reputation was established by a show at the Scott and Fowles Gallery in 1926 and furthered by a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933. In the mid-1930s, Sterne lived in San Francisco and taught at the California School of Fine Arts. He returned to the East Coast in 1945 and established a studio in Mt. Kisco, New York, where he worked until his death in 1957. He was named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1938.