Artist Harry Sternberg

ESCONDIDO, California -- Harry Sternberg, the Escondido-based artist who was a giant in the American art scene, has died at the age of 97.

Sternberg, whose work was featured in a retrospective at the museum of the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, had been ill for much of his last year but continued to paint right until the end, friends said.

For more than 70 years, Sternberg recorded his environment from the streets of New York City, coal mines of Pennsylvania, lynchings in the Deep South to the blazing desert of Southern California.

Speaking from Philadelphia, Ellen Fleurov, former director of the Escondido museum, said curating the retrospective was "one of the great experiences in my life. Harry was truly a great American artist. We've all lost a great friend."

Don Bacigalupi, director of the San Diego Museum of Art where Sternberg had a one-man show in 1994, said Sternberg's death, "leaves a gaping hole in the art scene of the San Diego region and in American art history.

"Harry was an integral part of one of the most vital generations of American artists, intent on expressing strong humanist values and exposing social injustices. He was a marvelous painter and printmaker, a warm and wonderful friend, and almost inspiring individual. He will be sorely missed," Bacigalupi said.

Sternberg's work hangs in major museums worldwide, as well as in several private collections. He was elected a full academician in New York City's National Academy of Design. His talent was writ large in multiple art forms. He first worked in etchings, but soon expanded his activities to include oil painting, acrylics, lithographs, aquatints, offset, gouache, woodblock prints (done by hand with power tools), crayon, ink and graphite.

In the retrospective mounted in Escondido last year, "No Sun Without Shadow: The Art of Harry Sternberg," Sternberg said of the 100-plus pieces, "It's all there. From my 1920s etchings to now. Every piece represents a phase of my life."

Sternberg was born July 19, 1904, in New York's lower Manhattan. He was the youngest of eight children born to Simon Sternberg, a dealer in fur pieces, and his third wife, Rosalia. He was a sickly child, treated for tuberculosis and trachoma before he was 6 years old.

He attended Barbery School in Brooklyn. He once recalled the experience as offering, "little more than extracurricular mis-education in sex and excellent training in street gang fighting."

Sternberg studied art at the Art Students League of New York. He studied anatomy and life drawing with George Bridgman and illustration with Wallace Morgan.

In 1926, he opened his first studio. The following year he produced his first etchings. His "Philharmonia," a view of a symphony concert at Lewishohn Stadium, was chosen for the Brooklyn Society of Etchers annual exhibition. Soon afterward, he achieved his first international recognition, when his "Circus Series" was included in an American print show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Sternberg continued painting during the Depression, producing some of his strongest work. New York was a city in transition, and Sternberg recorded it all: tenements teeming with life, subway construction and the building of Rockefeller Center. As the demand for art fell off, he painted murals for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), none of which have survived.

Sternberg traveled in the Deep South, where he painted one of his most disturbing pieces. "Southern Holiday" is a stark portrait of a bleeding, castrated black man strung-up on a broken column.

Sternberg spent several months painting laborers working under abysmal conditions, and joined them in fighting for fair treatment. Some of his paintings and etchings of laborers are among his most famous works, including the 1930s pieces "Riveter" and "Drilling a Breast."

In 1931, Sternberg married Mary E. Gosney, a Wellesley College and Adelphi University alumna. She is also a poet and an artist who studied with Robert Brackman at the Students Art League, where Sternberg had been a student. In 1990, the Sternbergs collaborated on a book, "Short Shorts." It combined poems by Mary with images from Harry's 1986 "Myths and Rituals" series.

When the newlyweds visited Mary's parents in Southern California, Sternberg painted his first landscape. A year later, the Sternbergs returned to California when Harry accepted a teaching position at Idyllwild, the art school sponsored by the University of Southern California.

In 1966, the Sternbergs permanently moved to Escondido and Harry began painting landscapes, many of them scenes of the desert.

Sternberg is survived by his wife of 70 years, Mary, and a daughter, Leslie of Hawaii.