Contributed by Jason Andrew / Hedda Sterne was the only woman made famous by Nina Leen’s photograph The Irascibles for Life magazine in 1951, and the group’s last surviving member when she died at 100 in 2011. While many of those featured in that iconic photograph achieved mythic status, Sterne was consigned to the margins of art history. “I am known more for that darn photo, than for 80 years of work,” she once remarked. Implausibly inventive and unwilling to adhere to a single style nor embrace prevailing aesthetic trends, Sterne didn’t cast herself in the heroic mold favored by the brooding boys associated with Abstract Expressionism.

















