Lucia Stern, Poisson Agile, Fish Decoupage Collage Painting

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This is a linen screen with stitching and cutting mounted over a panel. very unique and unusual piece by a … Read more This is a linen screen with stitching and cutting mounted over a panel. very unique and unusual piece by a prominent woman artist.
unframed it is 22.75 X 30 inches.
Lucia Stern (neé Martha Ida Lucia Karker), was largely self-taught as a painter and sculptor; her formal training was in music and literature. Stern studied at the Milwaukee Conservatory, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Columbia University from 1918-1922. She married Erick Stern, a Milwaukee lawyer, in 1930. Stern served on the board of the Milwaukee Art Institute from 1933 and became a trustee in 1967 when it was the Milwaukee Art Center. She didn't begin to work regularly as an artist until 1935. She became a docent and lecturer at the Milwaukee Art Institute in 1942, continuing in that capacity for the next forty years. Stern was instrumental in beginning the “Touch the Great” and “Women in the Arts” lecture series at the Milwaukee Art Center. Her characteristic approach in painting, lecturing and writing was to borrow styles or quotes from her contemporaries and modify them.

Stern was recognized as one of the leading promulgators of non-objective art in the United States. She absorbed the modernist spirit from Picasso and Brancusi, but experimental non-objective and abstract artists such as Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, and Naum Gabo also influenced her. She was a friend of many important champions of non-objective art, including eminent Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), who painted a portrait of her, and with whom she exhibited. Moholy-Nagy’s book on art theory, titled Vision in Motion, remained a steady influence on her.
Another friend was of Stern’s was Baroness Hilla Rebay, director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York City (later to become The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). Baroness Rebay collected and exhibited Lucia Stern's works at the Museum.Her work evolved over a fifty-year period and encompassed decoupage, drawing, painting, and sculpture, with an increasing emphasis on three-dimensional works. Stern is remembered primarily for her mixed media works combining stitched lines and cut net with more traditional artistic media, and for her early use of abstract compositions. She is also remembered for her warm, optimistic nature and for her dedication to the arts as an artist and spokesperson. In 1972, Stern was elected “Woman of the Year” by the Friends of Art of the Milwaukee Art Center.
Selected One-Person Exhibitions
1945
Detroit Institute of Art, Michigan
1959
Lucia Stern: Designer at Work, Milwaukee Art Center, Wisconsin
1962 Lucia Stern: Wisconsin Designer, Mount Mary College, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
1966
Layton School of Art, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
1968
Lucia Stern: Design in Decoupage, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Art History Gallery
1977 Lucia Stern: A Life in Design, Milwaukee Art Center, Wisconsin
1989 Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Lucia Stern: A Re-evaluation
Selected Group Exhibitions
1943
WI Painters & Sculptors Exhibition. Milwaukee. Vocational School, Milwaukee Art Institute,Wisconsin
1944 55th Annual Exhibition of Watercolor and Drawing, Art Institute of Chicago
1944-52
Annual Group Exhbitions, Museum of Non-Objective Painting (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York)
1945 Milwaukee Art institute, Wisconsin Designer Craftsmen Show
1945 Chicago Art Institute, Illinois, Institute Watercolor Show
1945 Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, Paintings by Milwaukee Artists
1951 Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris, France, Salon des Realites Nouvelle
1960 Kunstkabinet, Frankfort, Germany
1965 Wisconsin Renissance, Marine National Bank Exchange, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
1978 Mount Mary College, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
1996
Bergstrom-Mahler Museum, Neenah, Wisconsin, Collecting the Art of Wisconsin: The Early Years
Selected Publications
1955
Basic Criteria For Contemporary Painting and Sculpture,Artists Who Explore by Lucia Stern, Downer College, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
1971
Criteria for Modern Art by Lucia Stern
1997
German –American Artists in Early Milwaukee by Peter C. Merrill See less