Pat Steir has a thing for colour. Her studio in New York is a church to it, every inch of wall and floor given over to exploring its countless possible gradations. “I’m about to have cataracts removed,” the artist tells me, “and the doctor said, ‘you’ll be amazed at the way you see colour after’, so now I’m really curious. I don’t think he knew that seeing colour was my job.”
Steir is 87, with the flittery energy of a house sparrow and a sense of humour as fast and sharp as New York itself. The city has been her home since she pitched up here from a suburb of Philadelphia to attend art school in 1956. Her studio is on the 14th floor of a warehouse building in West Chelsea and overlooks the Hudson river. Its rear wall is entirely windows, flung wide to the warm drizzle of a May afternoon.
Propped against the wall in a chromatic ripple are paintings from her Waterfall series, the focus of her work for almost 40 years; the most recent are about to be exhibited at Hauser & Wirth Zurich.
To make them, she applies Turpenoid-thinned pigment on to the upper portion of a canvas, then lets it trickle at will. Once the rivulets are dry (which can take days), she applies a different hue on top. A single canvas might contain a dozen of these layers, each subtly altering the one beneath. “What you see is being mixed in your eye, not on the palette,” Steir explains.
Up close, you can make out the phases: beneath the whiteness, a sort of pink; in the blue, echoes of green. The colours sink or bloom according to each pigment’s weight, and the ratio of oil paint to thinner — “like salad dressing”, Steir says. Her understanding of colour is extraordinary, though she insists some remain a particular struggle: “I would say blue, red . . . ” She stops to laugh. “They’re all struggles really. And these paintings discuss that struggle.”
Layering dried colours rather than blending them is one of the conceptual “limitations” — in her parlance — that Steir developed to take her ego out of the frame and let the paint itself (plus gravity) make the picture. “A lot of my paintings change overnight,” Steir told me. “I say, ‘Stop, stop. Don’t change any more — this is good!’ But they keep changing.”
The idea was inspired by her friend John Cage, the avant-garde composer who advocated chance as a creative principle. Was it hard to learn to resist controlling the outcome? “Yes, I still have to stop myself.” What’s happening in her mind in the seconds before she makes the pour? “I take a deep breath and do it. Like, you’re playing basketball: what you think is, ‘I want to get the ball in that basket’, and nothing else. It’s a form of meditation.”
Steir is without a doubt a world-class artist. In the US, she has had solo exhibitions at the likes of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, though a proper institutional retrospective is sorely overdue. In the UK, she hasn’t the same prominence as some of the women artists she came up through the ranks with — Marina Abramović, for instance, or Joan Jonas, who had a retrospective at Tate Modern in 2018. Steir, though, is easily as groundbreaking and as influential. Younger artists including Mickalene Thomas, Rita Ackermann and Julie Mehretu are admirers.
“I saw Pat’s Waterfall paintings in an art magazine when I was still in school in Budapest,” Ackermann told me in an email, “[with] a photo of her in action, throwing paint. There was an elemental happiness in her gesture that could have been done by a child or a Zen master.”
Steir has spoken often of her fascination with Zen and other eastern philosophies, bolstered by her love of traditional Chinese shan shui (“mountain water”) paintings, with their vast, almost infinite vistas. These have been crucial to her thinking for the Waterfalls: “How small we are in the whole big universe.”
Ackermann had visited the studio the day before my visit. They had talked about her work, but not Steir’s own — “I’ve been doing it too long to need to discuss it,” says Steir, a little tersely. The reclusive painter Agnes Martin was for a long time Steir’s principal artistic confidante. They spent every August in New Mexico together for 30 years. She was also very close to Cage. When she married the publisher Joost Elffers in 1984 (whom she met at a roller-skating rink), Cage even came along for the honeymoon driving the California coast.
Born in 1938, Steir settled on being an artist at five. She sat so long and often in the galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art “that after a while the guards didn’t even chase me away. They just said, ‘there’s that kid again.’”
At Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, Steir learned painting under Philip Guston and Richard Lindner. A hasty marriage to a high-school sweetheart prompted a transfer to Boston University, but by 1960 Steir was divorced, back at Pratt, “and I was going to prove myself. I had no room for ambivalence.”
There was a solo show in 1964 of Lindner-esque paintings, but in the main Steir felt out of step with the reigning fashions for pop art and the idea that painting ought to be a revelation of authentic identity, as established by Jackson Pollock and co. “They took up a lot of room,” she says. “I thought they were gonna be here forever.” She met Mark Rothko once, and told him she loved his paintings. “You’re a pretty girl,” he replied. “How come you’re not married?”
Little did Steir know that, not far from her draughty loft downtown, artists such as Jonas, Joan Snyder and Mary Heilmann were also trying to establish themselves. “I had no idea that other women were having the same struggles,” Steir has said. In 1969, she was introduced to the women’s movement and helped found the feminist collective Heresies.
Painting and drawing were fitted in between a job in publishing and stints driving the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, her then boyfriend, across Europe for his exhibitions. They met in Pasadena in the early 1970s and remained friends until his death in 2007. When she and Elffers moved into their Greenwich Village townhouse in 1990, he gifted them one of his much-prized wall drawings — a white circle on yellow. She is forever telling people not to lean on it. Is her own work up at home? “No, because I would always be changing it.”
Though Steir’s new paintings were being assessed for condition while we talked, there were still about a dozen pieces that she could show me. Each displayed the same linear elegance and revelry in colour; the same blend of delicacy and inner strength that is present in the artist herself.
Earlier, when we had been speaking about the downtown scene in the 1970s, she told me that many of her female peers felt oppressed, that men were stopping them. “I only ever thought, ‘well, that’s inconvenient,’” she says. “I only felt I was stopping myself and that I had to go on, no matter what the issue. I’m old now — that’s inconvenient too. I just want to do my work.”
‘Pat Steir. Song’, Hauser & Wirth Zurich, June 13-September 13; ‘Pat Steir. Mirage’, Hauser & Wirth New York, July 9-August 15, hauserwirth.com;
Art Basel in Basel, booth C10, June 16-22
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