Nudist

In 1880 a scrawny, 17-year-old boy with a strong British accent got his first job as floor sweeper and general retoucher in the Chicago lithographic firm of Shober & Carqueville. A year later he was a scene painter for the Chicago Opera, priming the enormous backdrops with a large brush dipped in glue. This job he attacked so earnestly that at the end of his first day's work he fell in a dead faint on the floor. His name was Albert Sterner, born a U. S. citizen, in England, of naturalized parents.

Last week the same Albert Sterner, now 74, held an exhibition of 18 paintings and 32 prints, drawings and monotypes at Manhattan's Kleemann Galleries. The art world paid respectful attention, for Artist Sterner, who has been called the "ablest figure painter in America," is at least one of the ablest and most forceful draftsmen of the nude in the U. S. At last week's exhibition his portrait heads, still lifes and landscapes were unexceptionable, but several of his nudes showed that his rapid, unerring draftsmanship has not faded with the years.

One of the last survivors of the generation of artists that preceded Henri, Bel lows, Glackens and Sloan, dapper, white-bearded Albert Sterner is proud of the fact that he taught George Bellows and Rockwell Kent to make their first litho graphs, that the fluttering ribbons of his eyeglasses have been in the thick of every U. S. art battle for a quarter of a century. His first wife, Marie Sterner, long a Manhattan art dealer, was among the first to introduce modern French painting to the U. S. His son, Architect Harold Sterner is a World War veteran and designer of the Helena Rubinstein beauty parlor.

"Harold," explained his father recently, "is always reading abstruse meanings into my pictures that frankly I can't see. To tell the truth, he's a damned esthete."

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