Sternberg's parents had immigrated from Russia and Hungary. Harry, the youngest of eight children, was born in his family's tenement apartment on the Lower East Side of New York. The family moved to Brooklyn in 1910 and Harry began orthodox Jewish religious training. At the age of nine he began to take art classes at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. From 1922 until 1926 he trained at the Art Students League of New York. He rented his first studio in Greenwich Village in 1926 and began his career in etching, printmaking and painting.
In 1937 Sternberg painted his first post office mural, Carrying the Mail in Sellersville, Pennsylvania. The mural was commissioned by the former United States Department of the TreasurySection of Painting and Sculpture, later known as the Section of Fine Arts. Sternberg traveled to Chicago where he studied the city's history, architecture, industry, and workers which resulted in his mural , for the Lakeview post office in Chicago. It depicts the history of the city from its first settlement of Fort Dearborn to the Great Fire to the life in the stock yards and the steel mills. In 1906 Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, had graphically described life for workers in Chicago's stockyards and steel mills and Sternberg strived to captured their struggle. In June 2001 a non-profit community organization, Friends of the Lakeview Post Office, was founded to facilitate a restoration of the mural. Parma Conservation of Chicago completed the work in 2003. He married Mary Gosney in 1939 and their family, including their baby daughter, are depicted in the Ambler, Pennsylvania post office mural, The Family, Industry and Agriculture. He was fond of self-portraits and painted his likeness into the scientist figure in his mural for the Lakeview post office. post office
Later Career
In 1966 he retired from the Art Students League and the Sternbergs moved to Escondido, California where he established a studio and continued to work as an artist and an educator for 35 more years, his paintings and woodcuts capturing the beauty of the southern California desert and culture. For many summers, he taught painting at the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts in Idyllwild, California. Between 1969 and 1978, he participated in The Orme School Fine Arts Festival, known as the Dean of the Festival, exposing high school students to the work and instruction of professional artists. In 1990 he published a collection of prints: Sternberg: A Life in Woodcuts, one of which depicts his painting of the Lakeview post office mural. In 2000 his life and work were celebrated by a major retrospective exhibition: No Sun Without Shadow: The Art of Harry Sternberg at the Museum-California Center for the Arts, Escondido, California. The catalog of this exhibition was researched and written by Ellen Fleurov the Museum director. Harry Sternberg died on November 27, 2001 in Escondido. He had previously written and published two books: a book on composition called Composition: The Anatomy of Picture Making, and a book on woodblock cutting and printing called Woodcut.
