Maurice Sterne

Maurice Sterne was born in Liepāja, Latvia, to an Orthodox Jewish family in 1878. His mother moved the family to Russia after his father’s death, and Sterne briefly attended the Technical School of Moscow before immigrating to New York City in 1889. There, he apprenticed with a map engraver and trained at The Cooper Union. He also studied painting under Alfred Maurer and Thomas Eakins at the National Academy of Design. In 1904, Sterne left the United States for Europe and traveled widely, including six weeks in Delphi, Greece, in 1908, where he was inspired to experiment in sculpture for the first time. In 1911, Sterne visited Egypt, India, Burma, and Java. He spent two years in Bali, where he produced several thousand drawings and paintings on rice paper. He first visited New Mexico in 1916 and eventually settled in Taos, where he lived until 1918. During this time, he was briefly married to the influential art patron Mabel Dodge Luhan. After he returned to the East Coast, Sterne’s work grew in popularity, thanks to notable exhibitions, including his 1933 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1938, he was elected President of the Society of American Painters, Sculptors, and Gravers. Sterne worked in San Francisco during the mid-1930s, teaching at the California School of Fine Arts. In 1941, he completed a prestigious mural commission at the U.S. Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C., illustrating Man’s Struggle for Justice through twenty panels. In 1945, he established a studio in Mount Kisco, New York, where he worked until his death in 1957.