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拍品专文
Cascades of paint tumble down the surface of the monumental Morning Moon, 2016-2017, a shimmering, sumptuous painting from Pat Steir. Rendered in soft, glowing tones, Morning Moon is a lustrous example of Steir’s Waterfall works, her ongoing and acclaimed series in which she allows gravity to determine the path of her pigments; the present work was included in the artist’s solo exhibition, held this year, at the Long Museum in Shanghai. In both image and wording, Morning Moon conjures the optimism and poetry of a first light, the opalescent magic of a new day. Titles are important to Steir, and Morning Moon is especially evocative. To name her paintings, she says pairs of words together until she lands upon a phrase that best describes the work at hand. “I’m walking a thin line between image and not image, between flat and deep space,” Steir has said. “I want to help the viewer see the picture. And the poetry of the title is part of the picture for me, it’s absolutely the same thing” (P. Steir quoted in A. Waldman, “Pat Steir,” BOMB, 83, Spring 2003, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/pat-steir/).
Born in New Jersey, Steir studied under Richard Linder and Philip Guston at New York’s Pratt Institute and then later at Boston University College of Fine Arts. After graduating, Steir immersed herself in the art world of the 1960s, encountering works by Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, and Lawrence Weiner, the leading conceptual and minimalist artists of the day who would later become her friends, and beginning what would become an ongoing engagement with Mark Rothko’s oeuvre; his “remarkable color[s]” she has likened to “a prayer of exaltation in the sunshine” (P. Steir quoted in “5 Artists on the Influence of Mark Rothko,” Artsy, 13 April 2021, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-5-artists-influence-mark-rothko). Initially, Steir worked as an illustrator for Harper & Row but quickly rose to prominence, participating in exhibitions at The High Museum, Atlanta, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to become one of the first female art stars within a male dominated world.
It wasn’t until the late-1980s, however, that Steir developed her now iconic technique of pouring and throwing paints onto a hanging canvas. “I realized,” Steir reflected, “that I didn’t have to use the brush, that I could simply pour the paint, that I could use nature to paint a picture of itself by pouring the paint” (P. Steir, quoted in “Pat Steir with Phong Bui”, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2011, https://brooklynrail.org/2011/03/art/pat-steir-with-phong-bui). To create the Waterfall paintings, Steir follows a set of self-constructed rules: “I don't touch the canvas. I pour the paint. They're all poured. So that's my – one of my rules. You pour the paint. [Laughs.] You don't touch the canvas. You pour or throw paint. You put each color on separately. Don't blend colors. So I have my set of rules that I stick to, limitations more than rules” (P. Steir, “Oral History Interview with Pat Steir, 2008 March 1-2,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2008, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-pat-steir-13682#transcript). The roots of her approach can be traced to her time living in Boston where, at the Museum of Fine Arts, she first found Chinese Literati paintings and Yi-pin “ink splashing” works from the 8th and 9th centuries. In such compositions, artists created free-form splashes using only shades of black, endeavoring to capture and convey the essence of a subject rather than any accurate representation. Taoist and Buddhist sensibilities continue to inform her practice, and Steir sees he work as a “search and an experiment”, unfinished and continuing to come into being (P. Steir, quoted in “Pat Steir with Phong Bui”, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2011).
To look at Morning Moon is to be plunged into a crepuscular world. Diaphanous veils of color overwhelm the canvas and harness the elemental forces of a moonlit land. Rivulets of paint stream downwards as blush, gold, and pale coral pool hypnotically. A single aquatic blue ribbon divides Morning Moon in two, a slice of new day. By ceding control to gravity to control her paintings, Steir’s oeuvre both represents and manifests the natural world. As she explains, “From an aesthetic, philosophical or spiritual point of view, the process is like unleashing something, allowing the paintings to make themselves. You just happen to be the instigator, the inventor” (P. Steir quoted in A. Waldman, “Pat Steir,” BOMB, 83, Spring 2003, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/pat-steir/). Indeed, the act of making itself has long brought Steir great joy; it is what underpins all and her means of forming connecting. “Painting, for me, has always been the greatest pleasure and the greatest scary thing to do,” she has said. “And the less – the more out painting seems in the world, the more in it is with me” (P. Steir, “Oral History Interview with Pat Steir, 2008 March 1-2,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2008, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-pat-steir-13682#transcript).
Born in New Jersey, Steir studied under Richard Linder and Philip Guston at New York’s Pratt Institute and then later at Boston University College of Fine Arts. After graduating, Steir immersed herself in the art world of the 1960s, encountering works by Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, and Lawrence Weiner, the leading conceptual and minimalist artists of the day who would later become her friends, and beginning what would become an ongoing engagement with Mark Rothko’s oeuvre; his “remarkable color[s]” she has likened to “a prayer of exaltation in the sunshine” (P. Steir quoted in “5 Artists on the Influence of Mark Rothko,” Artsy, 13 April 2021, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-5-artists-influence-mark-rothko). Initially, Steir worked as an illustrator for Harper & Row but quickly rose to prominence, participating in exhibitions at The High Museum, Atlanta, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to become one of the first female art stars within a male dominated world.
It wasn’t until the late-1980s, however, that Steir developed her now iconic technique of pouring and throwing paints onto a hanging canvas. “I realized,” Steir reflected, “that I didn’t have to use the brush, that I could simply pour the paint, that I could use nature to paint a picture of itself by pouring the paint” (P. Steir, quoted in “Pat Steir with Phong Bui”, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2011, https://brooklynrail.org/2011/03/art/pat-steir-with-phong-bui). To create the Waterfall paintings, Steir follows a set of self-constructed rules: “I don't touch the canvas. I pour the paint. They're all poured. So that's my – one of my rules. You pour the paint. [Laughs.] You don't touch the canvas. You pour or throw paint. You put each color on separately. Don't blend colors. So I have my set of rules that I stick to, limitations more than rules” (P. Steir, “Oral History Interview with Pat Steir, 2008 March 1-2,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2008, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-pat-steir-13682#transcript). The roots of her approach can be traced to her time living in Boston where, at the Museum of Fine Arts, she first found Chinese Literati paintings and Yi-pin “ink splashing” works from the 8th and 9th centuries. In such compositions, artists created free-form splashes using only shades of black, endeavoring to capture and convey the essence of a subject rather than any accurate representation. Taoist and Buddhist sensibilities continue to inform her practice, and Steir sees he work as a “search and an experiment”, unfinished and continuing to come into being (P. Steir, quoted in “Pat Steir with Phong Bui”, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2011).
To look at Morning Moon is to be plunged into a crepuscular world. Diaphanous veils of color overwhelm the canvas and harness the elemental forces of a moonlit land. Rivulets of paint stream downwards as blush, gold, and pale coral pool hypnotically. A single aquatic blue ribbon divides Morning Moon in two, a slice of new day. By ceding control to gravity to control her paintings, Steir’s oeuvre both represents and manifests the natural world. As she explains, “From an aesthetic, philosophical or spiritual point of view, the process is like unleashing something, allowing the paintings to make themselves. You just happen to be the instigator, the inventor” (P. Steir quoted in A. Waldman, “Pat Steir,” BOMB, 83, Spring 2003, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/pat-steir/). Indeed, the act of making itself has long brought Steir great joy; it is what underpins all and her means of forming connecting. “Painting, for me, has always been the greatest pleasure and the greatest scary thing to do,” she has said. “And the less – the more out painting seems in the world, the more in it is with me” (P. Steir, “Oral History Interview with Pat Steir, 2008 March 1-2,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2008, https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-pat-steir-13682#transcript).