Helen ‘Leni’ Stern, artist who founded D.C. museum, dies
Helen “Leni” Stern, a sculptor, art collector and philanthropist who helped found a museum of modern art that was instrumental in launching the careers of several major Washington artists, died Nov. 11 at a hospital in the District of Columbia. She was 89.
The cause was pneumonia, said one of her sons, David Stern.
Stern was a whirlwind of energy who worked in her studio, chaired the board of a museum and hosted dinner parties for Washington’s political insiders, all while raising five children.
She moved to Washington in 1957, after marrying Philip Stern, a journalist, author and heir to the Sears, Roebuck fortune. In the late 1950s, Stern and two business partners operated a company that rented artwork to businesses and individuals.
She was also a co-founder of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, which opened in 1962 with the first major retrospective dedicated to Franz Kline, a major 20th century artist.
As a member of the museum’s board and, for a time, its acting chairman, Stern helped establish a place for contemporary art in Washington. She was an early champion of the work of artists in the movement known as the Washington Color School, including Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Gene Davis and Paul Reed.
In its six years of existence, the Washington Gallery of Modern Art presented exhibitions of such celebrated figures as Arshile Gorky, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Edward Kienholz. It also helped propel the careers of several Washington artists, such as sculptor Anne Truitt, painter Sam Gilliam, printmakers Lou Stovall and Di Stovall, and Rockne Krebs, who created environmental sculptures with beams of light.
“Leni was a brilliant artist herself,” Lou Stovall said in an interview, “and she did a lot for other people who were making art. But she never really received the credit she deserved.”
In 1967, as the Gallery of Modern Art faced financial struggles, Stern led a fundraising and membership drive that restored a measure of stability. That year, she was influential in hiring Walter Hopps as the museum’s final director before it merged with the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1968. Hopps, who worked at museums from coast to coast, was considered one of the most visionary curators of the 20th century.
Stern was a pianist and painter before turning to sculpture. She had several gallery shows in the 1970s featuring her Plexiglas sculptures, some which were more than six feet high.
“These are complex works,” Washington Post art critic Paul Richard wrote in 1971. “To see them one must move, for interacting there within those spires are voids and planes, sharp edges and soft Brancusi curves. Seen, from here, one internal plane is just transparent; move, and it becomes a mirror; move again and it refracts and little rainbows shine.”
Her sculptures were later purchased by the Woodruff Foundation, which placed them at embassies around the globe.
Helen Phillips Burroughs was born July 4, 1930, in Manchester, New Hampshire. Her mother was a homemaker, and her father was an insurance executive who designed pension and profit-sharing plans and was an unofficial adviser to President Dwight Eisenhower.
Stern attended Wells College in Aurora, New York. and Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, before her marriage in 1950 to Henry Sedgwick. They later lived in Montreal before their eventual divorce.
In 1968, Stern and her husband co-wrote a book, “O Say Can You See By the Dawn’s Urban Blight,” which used photographs to highlight the contrasts among D.C.’s wealthier and poorer neighborhoods. They were divorced in 1972.
Stern participated in antiwar demonstrations and in 1969 helped organize a meeting in Toronto of women from the United States, Canada and North Vietnam.