Who was the only woman among the 'Irascible' Abstract Expressionist artists?

Hedda Sterne was the only woman among the “Irascible” Abstract Expressionist artists in the famous group photograph.

The image was taken by Nina Leen and published in Life magazine on January 15, 1951. It showed 15 artists who had protested the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s conservative selection process for its American Painting Today exhibition. The group’s nickname came from a newspaper editorial describing the protestors as the “Irascible 18.”

Sterne’s presence is often treated as a symbol of women’s overlooked role in postwar American art. She was born in Bucharest in 1910, moved to New York, and worked through Surrealism, abstraction, and spray-painted images of roads, machines, and cityscapes. Her career was much broader than the single photograph suggests.

A useful precision is that Sterne was the only woman in the photograph, not the only woman connected with the protest. Louise Bourgeois and Mary Callery were among the letter’s signers, and Sterne later said she did not consider herself an Irascible or an Abstract Expressionist.