Hedda Sterne began her “Machines” series of paintings and works on paper in 1947 after encountering farming machinery on a trip to Vermont. The result: Anthropographs, abstracted machines with a humanlike nature. Sterne, a recent emigre from Romania, was deeply affected by the cultural and aesthetic shift she discovered in the United States. Sterne was fascinated by the notion that people subconsciously designed machines as self-portraits in an attempt to capture their deep seeded need for consumption. Machines distills this fascination into a series of almost futurist forms, evoking America’s subconscious preoccupation with post-war infrastructure.