THE MAURICE STERNE PAPERS

f I ^HE Yale University Library recently acquired the papers of I Maurice Sterne, an American artist, who was born in 1878 JL and died in 1957. Oh? The query seems in order because Sterne's name, now, is known only to art historians and to certain rueful private citizens and museum curators who, in inheriting Sterne's canvases, have acquired that rare art property one which has depreciated in value over the past thirty or forty years. For Maurice Sterne was, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, an immensely successful artist, both in terms of critical esteem as well as by financial measurement. A show of his work at a good New York gallery was completely sold out in 1926. That year Sterne paid all his debts and still had $ 100,000 left (which he entirely lost in the stock market). In 1927, he had earned enough money so that he was turning down $30,000 portrait commissions a wonderfully defiant gesture for a fifty-year-old artist who had only recently been scrounging to buy food no less paints. Professional reviews of his work were respectful; important commissions, both for murals and sculpture came his way. In 1933, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for the first time in its history, devoted most of its space to a one-man show of a living artist, a retrospective exhibition of the work of Maurice Sterne. What happened? When he was a very old man, in a spidery illegible handwriting, on scraps of paper, backs of envelopes, and interminable notebooks all now at Yale Sterne explored the nature of his own career. He concluded that his personal fall from fame had to do, not with the quality of his art, but with fashion with the aesthetic marketplace, whose rules change on commercial grounds alone. Thus, according to Sterne, when the merchants saw that abstract expressionism would sell, the work of the realists, whatever its merit, was thrown out, with great harm to long-term aesthetic values. Perhaps. Certainly, Sterne's drawings are the work of a wonderfully perceptive and extraordinarily skilled draftsman. The dark and myste-