Summary
Torrents of thick, white paint cascade over the rich black surfaces of Pat Steir's best-known, monumentally scaled canvases, evoking the sublime forces of the natural world. Although references to the Abstract Expressionist painters, particularly Jackson Pollock, are perhaps unavoidable, the New York-based artist's inspirations are not what one might expect when viewing her technique of drips, washes, and thrown splashes of paint. Instead, it was the impact of her personal relationships with Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, Minimalist Agnes Martin, and avant-garde composer John Cage that would prove most influential. Through these connections, Steir was introduced to ideas of process art, Zen Buddhism, and the techniques of yipin, or Chinese "ink splashing." Her mature painting technique is an amalgamation of these diverse influences, a synthesis of action and non-action, through which she embraces the dichotomy of choice and chance as the basis of her work.
Key Ideas
Most Important Art
Self Portrait (1958-1959)
At its core, this painting is about struggle. It becomes a metaphor for the social pressures she faced as a young female artist, and the formal conflict between abstraction and representation. In a 2011 interview with The Brooklyn Rail, Steir recalls the work as a "picture of a female fighting her way through the atmosphere of paint, smooth paint, rough paint. It's me struggling with the profound desire to be an artist, and the desire to make my mark." Steir continues, "When I was growing up here in America in the '40s and '50s, we were fed the idea that there was a choice to be made between work and family, that a woman could not do/be both. You see in the painting the little fire in her belly, conflict of desires - the desire to step out in the world alone to be what I am, and the desire to be an ordinary, acceptable woman in my family's eyes."
Nothing (1974)
Steir created the rose paintings during the early 1970s, during her brief tenure teaching at the experimental CalArts program. In these nearly monochromatic canvases the symbol of the rose was both painted and crossed out. The frequent symbol evokes both Shakespeare's famous line, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" and Gertrude Stein's infamous quote, "A rose is a rose is a rose." The titles for this series directly reference lines from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, which offer poetic meditations on themes also prevalent in Steir's work, namely the relationship between man, the universe, and time.
For the artist, this act of effacement was an effort to move beyond a reliance on figurative imagery. This series of work also grounded Steir in a semiotic dialogue, deconstructing the relationship between the signifier and signified, the symbols and that which it represents. This exploration was both theoretical and personal, examining the artist's potential role as both a maker and destroyer of images, symbols, and meaning. In the context of her career, the crossed out symbols can be understood as a metaphor for her decision to turn away from figurative representation toward conceptual abstraction.
Bruegel Series (A Vanitas of Style) (1982-1984)
Steir began The Bruegel Series as an investigation of postmodernism, and in the artist's words, "to try to discover if we were in the postmodern time," later realizing that the very question and her method of critique was, itself, a postmodern action. She organized her inquiry by breaking the vanitas image into a grid, the rigid emblem of modernism in Western art history. The symbolism of this structure is rooted in the geometric abstraction of Cubism and the myriad styles that followed, each declaring themselves to be of the present, and a symbol of artistic progress. The end result of Steir's exploration is a postmodern pastiche of artistic styles. Using the grid to explore and organize a seemingly arbitrary sequence of artistic styles, becomes a postmodern critique of the linear notion of progress associated with the modern period. Through this action, Steir deconstructs, or levels, the implied hierarchies within this evolution. Ultimately, each style becomes a symbol of the past, and a metaphor of its own vanitas.
Dragon Tooth Waterfall (1990)
Steir's Waterfall paintings were equally influenced by her interest in Chinese yipin, or "ink-splash" painting, introduced to her by a student of John Cage. Through an initial misinterpretation of the term's meaning, Steir began to throw, and subsequently pour paint onto the canvas. Although she determined the initial places of the paint on the canvas, she ultimately allowed the elemental forces, particularly time, gravity, and the materiality of the paint, to determine the final image. The act of letting go provided a deeply spiritual experience for the artist, one that washes over the viewer like the waterfalls abstractly referenced in these paintings.
The dripping paint of Steir's Waterfall series inevitably invites comparisons to the gestural abstractions of Jackson Pollock. Although visually similar, each artist developed their own distinct method of approaching the canvas. While Pollock would throw and fling paint while circling an unstretched canvas lying on the ground, Steir stands atop a cherry picker to reach the top of her towering compositions and drip paint onto a canvas tacked to a wall. Beyond technique, there is also a fundamental difference between the objectives of each artist. While Pollock's abstraction was rooted in ideas associated with expressionism and artistic gesture, Steir's work is grounded in the conceptual, balancing the notion of human interaction with the element of chance and other natural processes.
The Nearly Endless Line (2010)
Upon entering the gallery, viewers found themselves inside of the work, immersed within the darkened gallery, lit only with a blue light. The line, glowing an electric blue, becomes a path to follow, leading the participants from room to room, and eventually back to where they began. The work seemingly hearkens to the artist's own beginnings, but now transforms the viewer into the figure of the artist's early self-portrait, whose movements were also confined to a similar blue stripe. Steir is particularly interested in transforming the traditional relationship between the viewer and work, stating "Installation allows the artist to paint out of the painting and into space and the viewer to move from space into a painting - the space where the act of painting takes place is in the imagination of the viewer." Steir embraces conceptualism by emphasizing the viewer's experience, rather than the painted object, as the true content of her work.
Angel (2016-2017)
Each of the works in the Kairos series explores strikingly different color combinations, yet share a palette dominated by earthy colors. Steir's interest in color is related to its physical properties and her desire to express the nuance of light and its affect on the human psyche. Rather than mixing colors herself, Steir layers the various colors directly on the canvas, with certain layers drying at different speeds, and therefore cracking to reveal the multiple layers of color underneath. This process of layering can take several days, even weeks, as she must allow each layer to dry before pouring the next one. Describing what she has called a "chaotic plan," she says, "each pigment has a weight and, of course, some pigments are heavier than others, so the weight of the pigment affects the tone of the final product. The color that you end up with is what the transparent layers of paint make, one on top of the other." She continues, "The way colors mix and the way they touch each other explains the world to me like mathematics explains the world to a physicist."