Pat Steir

Michael Klein, Inc., New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in March 1988

Kunstmuseum Bern, Pat Steir: Paintings and Drawings, December 1987 - January 1988, no. 3, illustrated in color in the exhibition brochure

Thomas McEvilley, Pat Steir, New York, 1995, p. 122, illustrated in color 

In excellent condition; Unframed.
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In the early eighties, New York based abstract artist Pat Steir began a series of wave paintings that examined an art-historical motif explored in the 19th century by Katsushika Hokusai in The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1823-29), Gustave Courbet in the The Wave (1869) and various works by J.M.W. Turner, especially Light and Color (Goethe’s Theory)—The Morning after the Deluge—Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843). In this picture and others of the 1840s, Turner pursued the theme of the sublime as the storm at sea. Steir’s work on the wave may be seen as an attempt to re-interpret this Romantic-era trope of the sublime in a contemporary aesthetic. “The wave was really more about fear and death, terror of death, than image,” Steir remarked. “I think in the artists I took it from it’s about that too, in the Hokusai, in the Courbet.” (Exh. Cat., The Tate Gallery, Pat Steir, Gravures/Prints, 1976-1988, London, 1989, p. 11).

Many of the wave paintings, including The Moon and the Wave Series: Victor Hugo’s Boat, are rendered with fully extended, circular arm gestures that correlate the representation of the wave with the size of the artist’s body. As Thomas McEvilley observes: “Steir’s desire to insert the reality of her own body—its particular scale and movement—into the work suggests a microcosm/macrocosm relationship between the individual and the circle-as-totality or wave-as-totality, somewhat as in Leonardo’s famous drawing of a man inscribed in the middle of the round of cosmic totality. To some extent, it also indicates a desire to avoid decisions based on pure sensibility, and allows aesthetic questions to be decided by other factors; in this case the factor is the physical reach of the artist’s arm” (Thomas McEvilley, Pat Steir, New York, 1995, p. 59). Similar to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, Steir creates pictorial events in the wave paintings that dissolve the illusionistic image and involve the viewer in the instant of painting, so that the experience of something absolute coincides with the act of painting (Doris von Drathen, “Within the Interspace between Reality and Reality,” in Pat Steir: paintings, Milan, 2007, p. 20).