"Struggle for Justice"

Never did Maurice Sterne paint so hard as when onetime Banker-Lawyer Edward Bruce decided to become a painter and asked to be taught. For three years Businessman Bruce shared Sterne's 41-room castle in Anticoli, Italy, painted methodically from dawn to dark, forced his sponsor to work similar hours. This regime made Edward Bruce an artist, nearly sent already famed Artist Sterne into a decline.

In 1935 Edward Bruce, then as now head of the U. S. Government's Section of Fine Arts, gave his friend and former teacher another tough task: the painting of 20 huge murals for the library of the new Department of Justice Building in Washington. Artist Sterne has been working on them ever since. On display last week in Manhattan's Fine Arts Gallery went the fruit of his four and a half years' toil.

As the murals will be hung sky-high in Washington, critics flocked to see them at close range, found Artist Sterne had taken The Struggle for Justice as a theme. (He first thought of painting The Triumph of Justice, "couldn't think of 20 instances.") No mellow optimist, Painter Sterne started Justice's trek at Brute Force, then let it struggle slowly forward through Greed, Cruelty, Intolerance, Superstition, False Witness, Scientific Evidence and Environment to an end in Red Tape.

Most of the panels are a strange blend of allegory and realism. Sample melange: Red Tape, in which people are entangled in a clocklike cobweb with a steer's skull at its centre. A squirrel gnaws at the skull, while from the right the late great Justice Holmes, astride a white charger, levels a lance at the cobweb. In other panels: a ticker-tape Pied Piper leading men to a gambling table, a gangster having a manicure, Humanity sitting in the skeleton of the Past. Critics praised what they could, or like the New York Times's Edward Alden Jewell reserved final judgment "until the panels are installed."

Stocky, broad-palmed, Russian-born Maurice Sterne, now 61, used to tend bar by night in order to study art by day. A traditionalist who yet manages to avoid the academic, Painter Sterne is best at variations on familiar themes, when his assured technique puts down in memorable line and color "a nude here, a head there, whatever catches my eye."

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