Born in New York City, Harry Sternberg was a painter, muralist, lithographer and educator. During the Depression he was a WPA artist, and his murals are in post offices in Chicago, Chester and Sellersville, Pennsylvania. From 1934 to 1968, he taught painting and graphics at the Art Students League in New York, from 1942 to 1945 graphics at the New School of Social Research, and from 1959 to 1969 was head of the Art Department in the Idylwild School of Music and Art at the University of Southern California.

He studied at the Art Students League and graphics with Harry Wickey. He wrote several books on graphics including silk screening, etching, and wood cutting.

Source: Who Was Who in American Art by Peter Falk

Harry Sternberg (1904-2001) was a student at the Art Students League during the 1920s and met Yasuo Kuniyoshi when they both started teaching there in 1933. Sternberg remained until 1968, and Kuniyoshi until 1953. During his thirty-five years at the League, Sternberg wrote several books on printmaking techniques and created prints of American city life (see examples: Builders and Blast Furnace ).

As faculty members, Sternberg and Kuniyoshi in 1943 worked together on a mural of the villains of World War II. They were also involved in each other’s work: Kuniyoshi photographed Sternberg around 1940 and Sternberg created the screenprint Portrait of Yasuo Kuniyoshi between 1943 and 1944. In it, Sternberg aimed to capture a sense of Kuniyoshi’s charisma and magnetic appeal to women, even at the height of anti-Japanese sentiment during the grueling years of the war.

Sternberg and Kuniyoshi participated in many of the same political organizations. Sternberg was a member of the Artists Equity Association and the American Artists’ Congress, both of which had appointed Kuniyoshi as a leader. The younger artist, who as the son of poor Russian immigrants was sometimes, like Kuniyoshi, considered an outsider, recalled that such organizations “gave us a sense of connection with society which we’ve never had beyond then.”

Sternberg described Kuniyoshi’s style of leadership as being dedicated and honest, despite the artist’s “mixture of naivete and lack of knowledge about the rules.”