Marina Stern Luminary (Essay)

From her early expressionist works of the 1950s, to her “Talking Pop” and Op-surrealist creations of the 1960s, and her Neo Immaculate paintings of the 1970s and beyond, Marina Stern has been preoccupied with capturing the interplay of light and shadow on the natural, built, and imagined environment. Stern’s contemplation of these concepts was the product of a precocious, multi-faceted, and clever mind. Rarely satisfied with a particular style or subject matter, Stern’s diverse practice explored a variety of approaches and aesthetics over the course of seven decades in her pursuit of depicting the beauty of the world around her and the world she created.

Born in 1928, Stern was an immigrant to the United States who had a deep interest in and appreciation of European art and art history, which provided fertile inspiration and sources for her practice. A native of Venice, Stern and her family fled in 1939 to escape Italy’s repressive racial laws. After living in England for several years, the family arrived in the United States in 1941. A bright and capable student, Stern graduated from New York’s Julia Richmond High School at age 15 and soon enrolled in the Advertising Design program at Pratt Institute where she graduated in 1946 at age 18. After earning her degree from Pratt, Stern began work as a commercial artist.

The few surviving works from this period suggest Stern explored the American Scene in a simplified, direct graphic style. Although immature and the product of a young painter at the very beginning of her artistic journey, key interests were already present in her early watercolors. In a group of landscapes dated between 1947 and 1949, Stern focused on architecture and the built environment. Rendered with a firm line and clear delineation of forms, Stern’s watercolors of rural landscapes highlighted the interplay of light and shadow. (Figure 1)

(Figure 1) Untitled (Early Landscape), c. 1947-49, watercolor on paper, 13 x 18 inches

By age twenty, Stern entered what would ultimately prove to be an unsuccessful marriage which ended in divorce. Stern then married John Ryder Stern, a New York stockbroker, who encouraged her to study at the Art Students League. Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the Japanese American modernist, was one of Stern’s principal painting instructors during her time at the League. In 1953, the year of Kuniyoshi’s death, Stern gave birth to her first child, Michael, who was joined by a sister, Nina, in 1957. From this point, Stern juggled her commitments as a professional artist, wife and mother.

Stern’s works from the 1950s consisted of expressionist landscape and figurative paintings, reflecting the spirit of the decade which saw New York become the center of the global art world. In paintings such as Abstract Landscape (Catalog 1), she explored the impact of diffuse light across what appears to be a riparian environment, resulting in a desaturated low-key composition that merits a long look to unravel subtle changes in tone and value. In contrast, Stern also explored deeply saturated colors and more formal and recognizable structures in paintings, such as Provincetown (Catalog 2). Despite their differences, both works share common techniques such as the use of layers of drips and glazing to create an aura of transparency that both repels and permits the passage of light across the canvas.  

By the 1960s, Stern’s practice morphed into Pop Art with a particular concern for combining auditory and visual elements into her constructions. Often larger in scale and edited down to their essence, these works garnered attention from curators, gallerists and critics. After exhibitions in 1962 at the Waverly Gallery and the Osgood Gallery, both in New York, and selection of her work for the Bertha Schaeffer Traveling Collage Show from 1963 to 1964, Stern made a splash in 1964 when Time magazine reviewed a show at New York’s Amel Gallery which featured three of her audio-visual paintings, Judgment Day, Hay Day (Figure 2) and Independence Day. The magazine’s art critic noted that Stern created the “cleverest noisemakers” in the exhibition.

(Figure 2) Hay Day (Detail), 1964, oil and canvas with audio recordings and pull string (black and white detail – location unknown)

Stern’s cleverness was based on satire. “As the eye is occupied and satiated, so should the ear be satiated and attacked” is how a Press Release from an Amel Gallery exhibition expressed the artist’s sentiment. It continued, “’Found’ sound, as Marina Stern uses it, is valid material for satiric work. Her selection of auditory effects is from toys, music boxes or taped and distorted natural sounds.”

In Hay Day, Stern depicted a small copy of Goya’s Maja Desnuda lounging along a high horizon line with a drawstring projecting through the canvas. When pulled, the work’s voice mechanism which was scavenged from one of her daughter Nina’s Chatty Cathy dolls playfully asked, “Will you play with me?” while subsequent pulls elicited “I’m sleepy” and “Please change my dress.” In Judgment Day, Stern fixed a large vintage car horn to the right side of the composition above a trumpeting angel proclaiming the word “Repent.” Independence Day featured a small Statue of Liberty mounted atop a large black pyramid. When activated by a switch, the work released what Time called “a mounting hysteria of urban cacophony.”

Although these works gained notoriety for their integration of sound, each provided Stern with an opportunity to explore light and shadow as integral parts of a full sensorial experience. The introduction of three-dimensional objects on the surface of two-dimensional canvases allowed Stern to consider the effects of cast light over a flat plane. Whether falling on the surface of the horn in Judgement Day or the ring and pull string to activate the “talking” element in Hay Day, direct light created clear, hard-edged shadows against the monochrome painted backgrounds. By altering the intensity and direction of light, Stern had the ability to shift the nature and impact of the composition, as shadows lengthened, softened and diffused. The tiny Statue of Liberty of Independence Day had its own light source in the form of the red blinking bulb of Lady Liberty’s torch. As the bulb illuminated and dimmed, the red light cast eerie syncopated shadows that appeared and disappeared in rapid succession.

(Figure 3) Covers, The New American Realism, Worcester Art Museum, February 18 – April 4, 1965

Following Stern’s recognition for the Amel Gallery show, Judgment Day was included in The New American Realism at the Worcester Art Museum in 1965 —a major showcase of leading contemporary artists, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Indiana, and Jasper Johns (Figure 3). The following year, several of Stern’s 1964 “Talking Pop” paintings were selected for Sound at New York University’s Contemporary Art Gallery, which featured artists as diverse as Joseph Cornell and Tom Wesselmann. Also, in 1965, Stern was included in Pop and Circumstance, a selling exhibition that was billed as “New York’s largest showing of pop art.” In addition to the usual suspects, Johns, Lichtenstein, et. al., this effort included Alex Katz, Allen D’Arcangelo and Rosalyn Drexler. Stern’s inclusion with these well-regarded artists in her first major institutional and commercial exhibitions marked her arrival as a serious, but playful artist. Moreover, inclusion of Hay Day in Encyclopedia Britannica’s 1965 Book of the Year reinforced Stern’s place among 1960s Pop artists.

Around the time of the Worcester exhibition, Stern began to shift away from her “Talking Pop” paintings to mysterious Surrealist-inspired Op Art compositions - interior scenes in orange, blue, gray, or black with windows, doors and portals surrounded by checkerboard patterns, sometimes depopulated, but often with figures. In reviewing a 1965 Amel Gallery exhibition, The New York Herald Tribune described these works as “neat and sparse hard-edge scenes in bright contrasting colors in which tiny Renaissance images of knights, nudes, castles, ships and monuments are strategically placed in her composition.” The New York Times added, “There are tiny old-master figures, such as Raphael’s Three Graces, that teeter in huge geometrical depths.” Those “huge geometrical depths” often created a sense of pulsing, vibrating light as the eye adjusted to falling into the center of Stern’s checkerboard vortices. Nocturne (Catalog 3), a hexagonally shaped 1966 canvas, is a prime example of this effect.  

The Herald Tribune dubbed these works “Op-surrealism” and noted that Stern’s figures were “Disassociated from reality and from each other, they exist in a vacuum. There is an amusing, inventive, and mysterious quality created by these works.” In a nod to her husband’s profession, Stern’s playfulness was evident in her 1967 work, Bull and Bear (Catalog 4), which substitutes symbols of Wall Street’s booms and busts for her more commonplace human figures.  Reflecting on the sly references in works like Bull and Bear, Art News observed, “The simplicity of the paintings is deceptive; there are many things constantly happening.” An important milestone in Stern’s career occurred in 1966, when one of these OP-surrealist works, Seven Minus Twenty-One Equals Seven (Figure 4), entered the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art where it remains today.  

(Figure 4) Seven Minus Twenty-One Equals Seven, 1966, oil on canvas, 50 x 50 inches, collection Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

These works were commercially successful as Stern’s gallery representation expanded beyond New York to include Boston’s Eleanor Rigelhaupt Gallery, where she was honored with both group and solo exhibitions. Stern’s easter egg references to tiny portraits by Gainsborough, Gilbert Stuart, Raphael, and classical Italian sculpture and wink-and-nod approach to artmaking served the artist well as she created what one observer called “an Alice-In-Wonderland world.” As a critic for The Boston Globe noted, “What’s more, she seems to be having fun. And you will too.”  Stern’s work from this period was placed in over forty private collections, including Harry Belafonte and Jackie Kennedy, and institutional collections, such as Chase Manhattan Bank.

Through the end of the 1960s, Stern continued to explore the checkboard motif, though figures appeared less frequently. In their place, Stern’s compositions focused more on the repetition of doors, windows and portals, either receding into the picture plane or spread across it. Created in both oils and graphite and acrylic mixed media works on paper, some of these works introduced floating orbs as sources of light (see Catalog 6 and 7). Regardless of whether illuminated by a moon or not, these works depended on a distant glowing light that shined through openings in walls and reflected off door and window jams. By arranging the receding checkerboard patterns with linear perspective, Stern drew the viewer’s eyes toward the distant light of a mysterious world beyond the picture plane.  

By 1969, Stern began to incorporate industrial images into these scenes, and in the early 1970s, Stern created her first fully Neo Immaculate works of rural and urban landscapes, which she described as her most satisfying work. Gone were the checkerboards, Old Master figures, and brightly illuminated portals. In their place, Stern substituted architecture set against brightly lit skies. Often depicting muscular scenes of factories, barns, bridges, oil tanks, freeways, warehouses, office buildings and other vernacular spaces, Stern’s shift was dramatic (e.g. Figure 5). Her work became real, specific, tangible, and not reliant on the Alice-In-Wonderland fantasies of the mid to late 1960s. Her compositions were clean and hard-edged with clearly defined lines and smooth – almost machine-like – surfaces which often reached the level of finish fetish. Informed by photography, she simplified principal forms and severely cropped compositions. Stern celebrated the beauty of the commonplace and perfected it through the elimination of extraneous details and any signs of wear or deterioration. And throughout, Stern bathed her compositions with a crystalline light that highlighted and invigorated her geometric structures and formed deep, contrasting shadows.

(Figure 5) Rooftop, 1972, oil on canvas, 25 x 35 inches, Marty O’Brien Collection of American Art, courtesy of the O’Brien Art Foundation

In the early 1970s, she became the most proficient heir to the Precisionist painters of the 1920s and 1930s. Writing about Stern in connection with one of her solo exhibitions, New York’s Forum Gallery noted, “She is directly in the line of the Precisionists – painters such as Charles Sheeler, Ralston Crawford and Charles Demuth,” and a second commenter recorded, “Her pristine images dry and geometric . . . pay homage to some of her most venerated early twentieth-century precursors, in particular to the Precisionists, and thereby sustain one tradition of modernism at the same time they expand its relevance to the present.” Art News also drew a connection to the first-generation Immaculate School painters, as well as the Surrealists when it commented, “Imagine a Charles Sheeler with the poetic color sense of de Chirico; or, to give Stern her due as a contemporary painter, call it ‘Photo Surrealism.” Snowy Barn #1 (Catalog 10) from 1971 is a prime example of Stern’s approach from this period, particularly in relation to Sheeler’s Connecticut barn paintings.

Stern’s work was not, however, a mere continuation of Precisionism from the first half of the 20^th Century for three key reasons. First, the first-generation Precisionists had passed and Precisionism itself was already considered an older historical style ripe for re-examination. That artists like Edward Biberman, Edmund Lewandowski and Ralston Crawford continued their respective practices into the 1970s, did not change the fact that intervening modes, such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Op Art and even late Surrealism, had transformed the artistic landscape and marked a significant break with the past. Second, Stern’s obsession with meticulous surface, complete elimination of brush strokes, strikingly imaginative palettes, lack of overt social content or commentary, severe editing of extraneous details, and increased scale of paintings and prints all represented a departure from earlier Precisionist practices. No one would confuse a Neo Immaculate painting by Stern with one by Sheeler or Demuth. They are often cut from the same cloth but constructed using very different patterns. Lastly, some of these intervening styles which interrupted the march of Precisionism beyond World War II provided fertile material for Stern to incorporate in her effort to create a newly updated form of modern realism.

Surrealism provided not only a break from the past, but also a launching point and natural culmination of Stern’s development through her many styles. “The consistent theme through most of these seemingly disparate stages of development, including the Pop paintings, is a quality of surrealism,” wrote a critic concerning Stern’s work. “The imaginary room interiors which preceded her mature style have the timeless atmosphere of a de Chirico. Stern says the decision to move from the imaginary rooms to real architecture came upon her as a natural and obvious development.” Stern’s new realism represented a return to Classicism which stood in contrast to the Romanticism of her earlier Abstract Expressionist and Op-surrealist works. Exactly why she sat so comfortably with a renewed Classicism is not clear. Perhaps it was a desire to go against the grain of artworld fashion, a reaction to the messy societal, cultural and political struggles of the 1960s, an exploration of nostalgia and memory or a straightforward desire to reflect the grandeur and wonder of the built and natural worlds. What is clear is that Stern undertook a deep and complex synthesis of American styles from across the 20^th Century to develop her unique brand of Neo Immaculate painting.

Although Stern’s works from the 1970s bear a passing similarity to the Photorealists, there are significant differences and Stern herself dismissed the comparison. Commenting on Stern’s paintings, a critic noted, “Because of the photographic accuracy of form and detail in all of her work, it is tempting to compare it with that of the Photo-Realists. There is a difference. Whereas their work is often filled with detail rendered exactly from photographs, sometimes even projected photographically onto the canvas, hers is selective and restrained. Values, forms and detail are simplified, highlighted, and accentuated for a strong overall design. Unlike the Photo-Realists’ works, her paintings are never anecdotal.” By eliminating the dirt, grime and other messy details of the metropolis and the farmyard and the fussy details of subjects that might interfere with their stripped-down vision of the American landscape, Stern deviated from the Photo Realists. She did not seek memetic verisimilitude. Rather, she created a beautifully designed alternate reality by editing and essentializing the building blocks of the observed world.

(Figure 6) Park, 1973, oil on canvas, 42 x 48 inches

Constructed forms were Stern’s muse. Her depictions of New York’s built environment took on the quasi-religious significance. As one writer noted, “every object that does appear in them has come off someone’s drafting board and passed through the hands of a multitude of thinking, building, practical men . . . Marina Stern’s tanks, towers, ventilators, bridge-spans, street-signs, cornices and windows become lucid commentaries on that modern miracle: Metropolis.” (see Figure 6) In addition to the formal qualities afforded by the built environment, Stern viewed the structures of the American landscape as a point of departure for exploring concerns for and relationships to the past. “Through the places and paths of the social environment, both urban and rural, and in the cathedrals of twentieth century industry, Stern’s contemporary messages are constituted through the icons of cultural memories, the nostalgia for progress, and the history of habitation and inhabitation of the earth,” is how one commentator described Stern’s Neo Immaculate paintings. Stern often depicted locations she held close as part of her own personal history -- New York, New Jersey, Iowa (where her son attended college) (see Figure 7), Sharon, Connecticut (where her family spent weekends and vacations) and her native Venice, Italy.

(Figure 7) Iowa White, 1974, oil on canvas, 50 x 50 inches

Although commentators often focused on  Stern’s idealization of the constructed environment and its accompanying grandeur, the artist herself could be ambivalent about her choice of subject matter. Like many of the Neo Immaculates, Stern used the structures of humanity as a foil for exploring her real interest – light. “Subject matter as such is of no importance to me,” she recalled, “Whether I am painting a barn, an industrial structure or a cabbage, my concern is light.” The magical appeal of light portrayed on canvas is enhanced by its counterpart, shadow. In connection with her first solo exhibition of Neo Immaculate paintings, Lee Ault & Co. Gallery recorded, “Marina Stern loves light. But because she loves light, she is also obligated to love shadows.” The author continued, “Marina Stern’s paintings reveal the majesty of light by meticulously recording the traces of its absence. Lovingly, she observes the shadows as they twist, turn, cross, caress, soften, harden, lengthen and shorten across the surfaces of the forms she chooses for her impeccable compositions.”

Stern used photography as a tool for the development of form and structure in addition to the tonal qualities of light and shadow. This approach was also common among the Precisionists, particularly, Sheeler and Crawford. The Stern family still retains hundreds of snapshots taken by the artist during the 1970s and 1980s of the structures that caught her eye across New York and Connecticut. From these photographs, Stern then developed working drawings. Her process was described as follows: “Stern collects ideas for paintings, taking photographs, and making precisely rendered drawings. . . She uses photographs in her work, but only as aids, cropping and adjusting them for design.” Stern’s children also recall their mother using a projector to enlarge photographic images onto canvas as an aid for composing and editing her paintings.

From the early 1970s through her final unfinished paintings from the mid-2010s, Stern explored a variety of different approaches to landscape including her quest for capturing what one commentator called an “uncanny light.” Her first Neo Immaculate paintings of industry and cityscapes were large, often brightly colored affairs, which dwarfed the diminutive artist. Silos/Iowa Yellow (Catalog 11) is typical of Stern’s canvases from the first half of the decade. Its industrial subject matter, unexpectedly sunny palette, and large fifty-by-fifty-inch format are all common features of the types of works she exhibited at her first solo exhibition with New York’s Lee Ault & Co. Gallery in 1973 and James Yu Gallery in 1974. A similar composition from the Ault exhibition, Gas Tanks (Figure 8), was acquired by The Gibbes Museum of Art the year after it was exhibited at the Art Gallery of the University of Massachusetts in Objects & - 8 Women Realists, a show which also featured Audrey Flack.   

(Figure 8) Gas Tanks, 1972, oil on canvas, 50 x 50 inches, collection Gibbes Museum of Art, Museum Purchased with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts Living Artist Fund

Stern’s largest works were completed during the 1970s. In 1971, the Port Authority of New York commissioned her to paint a pair of Neo Immaculate murals, George Washington Bridge #1  and #2. Several years later in 1976, Stern received another commission from the NY Cityarts Public Art Program for a mural on Mulberry Street. During this period, she also produced some of her smallest works. In addition to her fine art practice, Stern occasionally continued to work as a commercial illustrator for brands such as Bloomingdales, as well as for her own projects. In 1978, she authored a well-reviewed and widely published cookbook, A Book of Vegetables: Recipes and Drawings, which contained meticulously crafted illustrations to accompany her recipes.

As the years passed, Stern no longer routinely produced the large canvases or murals, opting instead for more manageably scaled works, many of which were presented at one of Stern’s seven solo exhibitions with New York’s Forum Gallery between 1977 and 1993. Stern was also selected for many of Forum’s group shows during this period. Although oil painting was the focus of Stern’s production during the 1970s, she occasionally produced drawings and color lithographs, such as Con Ed Smokestack (Catalog 12), which was used as the key art for her 1979 solo show with Forum. By the 1980s, Stern began working more consistently in mixed media pastel works on board. These remarkable works explored the same concerns for light and shadow as her oil paintings, but in a more technically demanding and unforgiving medium. The level of finish and polish she achieved is reminiscent of the Precisionist artist Preston Dickinson.

Architectural exteriors came and went. After focusing primarily on the outside of structures, during the 1980s, Stern turned her attention to interior views through windows and doors looking outward to sometimes sunlit, sometimes overcast views of the natural and constructed landscape. In these works, Stern used dark interiors to contrast with natural ambient light streaming through windows and doors with their sparkling frames which seem to glisten. The windows and doors harkened back to the mystical portals of her works from the second half of the 1960s but stripped bare of their overtly Surrealist overtones. The 1984 oils Autumn Window (Catalog 15) and Central Park (Catalog 16), as well as the mixed media pastels, White Church (1985) (Catalog 17) and New York Window (1986) (Catalog 18), all featured Stern’s use of windows as framing devices to develop sharp contrasts of tone and color, light and shadow.

Stern’s architectural paintings were not limited to American scenes. Some of her most compelling cityscapes were inspired by her time in Italy, where she captured the unique glow of Venetian light in her depictions of the famous and quotidian. Street Lamp (1988) (Catalog 22) features a distant view of the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute interrupted by a modern junction box and projecting electric light and Malamocco (1989) (Catalog 23) centers the bell tower of the church of Santa Maria Assunta as seen from the village square, while Tea Towel (Large)/Cypress (1991) (Catalog 24) depicts a neighbor’s laundry hanging against the background of a single tree and an unadorned wall. The sunlight and shadow falling on the soft, changeable surfaces of the shirts, sheets and towels created a strong contrast against the brightly lit sky and solidity of the distant building.

By the early 1990s, Stern reintroduced a concern for more somber, diffused light that related to her earliest Abstract Expressionist paintings from the 1950s. These experiments culminated in a group of small nocturnes which were exhibited at Forum Gallery in 1993, including Silverman’s Barns (Catalog 26) and Up the Road (Catalog 27), both from 1992. Although recognizable barns, roadways, bridges and the natural world are present in these works, Stern’s interest was in capturing the barely visible forms hiding among the shadows and low light of the already setting sun or reflections of the moon.

In addition to landscape, Stern’s concern for light and shadow extended to still life painting. During the 1970s and 1980s, Stern created large harmonious paintings of carefully composed flowers, fruit and vegetables often set against the backdrop of her New York studio. Examples include Still Life with Lily (Catalog 19), Red Tulips (Catalog 20) and Red Pears (Catalog 21), all from 1987. Within these compositions, Stern sometimes included images of her own and other artist’s paintings, such as Interior with Cabbage (1979) (Catalog 13), which paid homage to the illustrations she created for A Book of Vegetables: Recipes and Drawings and Park View (1980) (Catalog 14), which depicts a self-referential painting within a painting.

In 1997, Stern created an imaginative work combining abstract, still life and landscape elements, as well as references to a pair of her significant influences, Johannes Vermeer and Josef Albers. Jan and Josef  (Catalog 29) brings together six small canvases, encapsulating much of her work to that point. The top left panel is an interior window with a view of the outside world. Next, is an industrial scene followed by a Vermeer-like still life. The bottom row consists of a modern studio still life featuring the tools of the artist’s trade - pencils and paints - a New York cityscape, and finally a series of receding squares which not only pay homage to Albers, but also her own Op-surrealist works from the 1960s.

By the 1990s and early 2000s, Stern’s still life compositions became more stark and almost exclusively focused on subjects that showcased the interplay of light and shadow. The culmination of this concern was a series of over fifty paintings of paper bags. Stern folded, crunched, twisted and otherwise manipulated ordinary lunch bags and arranged them in her studio under strong, sometimes harsh light. She then depicted the resulting compositions - often a single bag, but also groups of two or more – with a focus on how light reflected off the opaque surfaces, as well as how strong light passed through the brown paper to form a translucent glow that fundamentally changed the colors and tones of surfaces. And, of course, she explored the resulting shadows that were cast along the surface of the bags themselves and the surrounding background. Stern exhibited these works in 2002 at the Tremaine Gallery at The Hotchkiss School in a solo exhibition titled, In Light and Shadow. The display of fifty-two of these works installed in a straight line along one long wall of the gallery made a convincing statement that “Subject matter as such is of no importance to me . . .  my concern is light.”

During the last fifteen years of her life, Stern continued to paint consistently, producing both still life and landscape compositions. Often working in a small scale on Masonite supports, Stern produced some of her most meticulous surfaces, a remarkable feat considering she was in her mid-seventies. In a series of paintings from the early 21^st century, Stern returned to barns as her subject. In works such as 2 Barns (Catalog 35) and MGM Barn, West (Catalog 36), both from 2005, she contrasted the pristine flat planes of the red structures with the organic greys and umbers of the surrounding trees and grass, while also exploring mysterious cast shadows.

Her still life painting from the same period often featured fewer objects and simplified compositions. Sometimes created in pairs of the same size, Stern used the same or similar arrangements to portray changes brought about by altering the source and intensity of light. In Water Jar 1 (Catalog 31) and Water Jar 2 Horizon (Catalog 32) Stern depicted a nearly identical arrangement of a tea towel, a jar of water and a single piece of fruit to explore shifts in color and tone resulting from the orientation, strength and direction of artificial illumination. In another pair of paintings from 2004, Two Strings (Catalog 33) and String (Catalog 34), the use of a limited palette and the contrast between flat planes and twisting cords resulted in compositions that are not about the objects themselves, but rather about the shadows they cast.  

(Figure 9) Photograph of Marina Stern working on Park, 1973

By the dawn of the 21^st century, Stern was represented in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, in addition to the Museum of Modern Art and the Gibbes Museum of Art. A decade before her passing, the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art hosted a retrospective of four decades of Stern’s work, entitled Perception and the Cultural Environment: The Paintings of Marina Stern. Writing in the short essay for this exhibition, Stephen Foster, Professor Emeritus of Art History, University of Iowa, reflected, “Stern’s works evoke a humanity realized in its absence; its presence is implied in its achievements, but never revealed.” He continued, “Hard to characterize, based on the complexity of her debts and the sophisticated use to which they are put, the work, without looking pop, realist, or minimalist, achieves an impressive aesthetic intersection of all three.” Through the years, that “impressive aesthetic intersection” was held together by the throughline of Stern’s quest to capture the uncanny beauty of light and shadow.

Chris B. Walther