Season 4 Episode 4: Pat Steir: The Romance of Painting

Pat Steir: The Romance of Painting

Pat Steir: My painting is like a performance.  It's been a long journey,  with many ups and downs.  The romance of oil painting, the romance of art history, the history of painting  is, is my thing. And now everything is so fast. It is a miracle to stay an artist for so many years. Who knows who's gonna have the courage and power to last.

Jacob Proctor: Hi, and welcome to season four of ARTiculated. I’m Jacob Proctor, the Gilbert and Ann Kinney New York collector at the Archives of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution and the home of the world’s largest collection of interviews related to the visual arts. This season, we are catching up with four trailblazing artists who have made big moves later in their careers as they continue to build their legacies. 

This podcast is sponsored by Next50, the Denver based national foundation that works towards creating a world that values aging.

Episode intro

Jacob Proctor:  Pat Steir is synonymous with bold painting, having started her career at the crossroads of conceptualism, minimalism, and abstraction in the 1960s. She has come to be celebrated for her operational approach to the medium, making incisive pours and splashes that invite the interplay of chemistry, color, and gravity across large surfaces. Born in 1938 in Newark, NJ, Steir continues to make her mark in New York, taking pleasure in the history of art through series that explore the material and formal limits of her virtuosic practice. 

In 2008, Steir was interviewed by Judith Olch Richards for an Archives of American Art oral history, a format where she could relay the full arc of her life and art. This episode draws from that interview and a late 2024 conversation between Steir and the Archives.

Pat Steir: All oil-based. But I don't use too many different things. It looks like I do, but I don't. I don't use varnishes. I basically just use oil and vinegar. Oil and turpentine.

Judith Richards: You were talking about the different mixtures required, the different formulas for the different layers. What are those?

Pat Steir: They're different weights of oil and different amounts of oil to turpentine, like salad dressing.

Judith Richards: Oh, okay. The pigment, the oil paint, you're using is the same?

Pat Steir: No. It's never the same. Every pigment has a different weight.

Judith Richards: But I meant the brand or the –

Pat Steir: No. I use several different brands. I use Schmincke. Old Holland. Blockx. Schmincke, Old Holland, and Blockx.

Judith Richards: Depending on the color?

Pat Steir: The color and the weight, because one of the things with my – people say I use resist technique. No, nothing like that. Different colors – if you mix two colors together, one is heavier than the other. So one sinks to the back, and the other rises forward. So if you know which is which, you can control the color, and you know what amount. And that's all experience. That's not – you know what amount [00:03:00] of what color affects it so it'll look like what color. But I could never do that with acrylic, because I wouldn't know how. It's too late for me and acrylic. But with oil paint, I know a lot about the paint itself. And for me, that's half the fun of it, is mixing the paint.

Judith Richards: And do you enjoy the connection to the Old Masters and to the history of oil painting?

Pat Steir: That's my thing. [Laughs.] I mean, that's the thing. That's the romance of the smell of the oil. The romance of oil painting is my thing. The romance of art history, the history of painting, is my thing. It's like in the last show – I mean, for the last show, it didn't get big reviews. But I got love letters from three major museum directors. I mean, not love letters, but how much they loved the work.

Ben Gillespie:    I'm guessing it's a variable, but how? How long do you usually  wrest with each painting or work with each painting? Because that also depends on the size. There a lot of factors.

How long do I work on a painting? The size makes a big difference, but usually I work on them over a number of months because I use so much wet paint. They stay wet for a long time, so I work on several at a time and sometimes on the whole show at once because they stay so wet. And most of the time I don't like wet paint, mixing with wet paint. Sometimes I like it, but often not. 

Ben Gillespie: And the series are so often kind of in dialogue, or in a dynamic together.

Pat Steir: If I work on them all at once, they have a similar look. And I like that, that, that a group of work looks like a family resemblance.

I actually use what I consider a mistake in my work. Oh God, the brush flicked and look what happened. I consider that a mistake. Something to move forward from, to learn to make it the subject of a painting and a lot of my best paintings have that.

Jacob Proctor: Steir has been a major painter for a long time, but she has also been prolific in publishing as an editor, book designer, and writer. She was an early editor at Semiotext(e), an independent press perhaps best known for introducing French literary and cultural theory to American Readers. And in 1976, she was a cofounder, along with Sol Lewitt, Lucy Lippard, and others, of the artist book publisher Printed Matter, an organization that continues to support artist publications to this day. 

Pat Steir: So I was very active in New York. And I was an editor at Semiotext(e) magazine, which had, among other agendas of inclusion, a feminist agenda. And one day Sol and I were crossing a street in Genoa [Italy], and I said, "You know, if art doesn't work out for me, I need to have another business. I would like to publish artists' books. Will you back me?" And he said, "Yes." And we started [00:06:00] a little private company called Printed Matter. And after we did about 10 books, we realized, this is not going to – [laughs] – this was not my alternative profession. And we wrote to Edit deAk, who wrote to Lucy Lippard and Carl Andre and a number of other people – Walter Robinson –

Judith Richards: When did you start Printed Matter? When was that?

Pat Steir: I think it was '75, '76. And –

Judith Richards: You started it thinking that it would be supporting you, besides that you really love to do it? And –

Pat Steir: Yeah. I thought it would be a business, like a little –

Judith Richards: And then it turned out that it was very successful, but not financially?

Pat Steir: To say the least. It's never been financially successful.

Judith Richards: It's a nonprofit. Right?

Pat Steir: It's a nonprofit. And so then we had – Ingrid Sischy became our manager later, a year or two later. And she, with the help of some of us board members, wrote a – applied for not-for-profit status, which was very hard to get for a store. And we wrote a little – in our application, we said, well, actually, books are – performance spaces get not-for-profit, and books are a not-for-profit for shut-ins, are performances for shut-ins. Anyway, miraculously, we got to be a not-for-profit, and quickly, I think within a year or so of opening Printed Matter. And when we were a for-profit, we published some books. And altogether, Printed Matter published 10 books. And I worked as the art director when – [laughs] –

Judith Richards: Did that mean –

Pat Steir: Not for profit. [Laughs.]

Judith Richards: What did that mean, being art director of Printed Matter?

Pat Steir: Well, it meant nothing except we were going to publish books, and somebody had to put them together. Without a computer, it meant doing pasteup, design –

Judith Richards: So the books you printed weren't designed and made by artists? They weren't [inaudible].

Pat Steir: Well, some of them. Some of them. But a lot of them, like – what's her name – Eve Sonneman - she had pairs of pictures, but somebody had to make it into a book.

Judith Richards: I see. So you designed the book?

Pat Steir: So I designed the book. And we did a really marvelous book for – I have to do my homework. I'll tell you what it was. So we did 10 books altogether, and somebody had to design them. People – because later, when it became a not-for-profit, and we got clear what we were going to do, see, the 10 books were still maybe – when it got clear what we were going to do, people just came with a book, a [00:09:00] totally designed, printed book. And Printed Matter became the distributor for the book. But with those 10 books, they came with an idea and some material.

Jacob Proctor: Though she has enjoyed success in a variety of disciplines, Steir’s foundation in painting continued to settle as she worked outside of it throughout the 1970s: 

Pat Steir: When I met my husband, I was thinking of going to Columbia [Columbia University, New York City] for – I was working on Semiotext(e), and I was going up there all the time. It was a nonpaid job, but the magazine came out of Columbia. And I was thinking of trying to get a degree in comparative literature, a graduate degree at Columbia. I was riding my bike up there every day from Mulberry Street, and I was seeing a psychoanalyst on 87th Street named Phyllis Greenacre, who was a kind of – one of the early – one of that group of women, with Karen Horney and so forth, who rewrote [Sigmund] Freud, the first active rewrite of Freud. She was 40 years old when Freud died, so she was 84 when I started treatment with her. I was her last patient. I convinced her to – one other artist was her patient, but I can't say who. Probably – but she changed my life. But she was up near Columbia, too – [laughs] – so I thought, well, I could go there in the morning and go work at the Semiotext(e) a little bit and then go take classes. But then I met Joost [Elffers], and I was going to give up painting.

Judith Richards: You were?

Pat Steir: Yes.

Judith Richards: You were? You were going to give up painting? When was that?

Pat Steir: In the late '70s. '78.

Judith Richards: Joost is spelled –

Pat Steir: J. J-O-O-S-T.

Judith Richards: Joost.

Pat Steir: And Joost's mother was an artist, a photographer, and she was famous in Holland. And, well, he loved to live with a woman artist. [Laughs.] And so he said, "You can't give up painting."

Judith Richards: In the late '70s, you had achieved some success. You had –

Pat Steir: Yes. But you always give – you always fight with something you love. You fight with your husband. You fight with your children. Why not fight with painting?

Judith Richards: So you threatened to give it up?

Pat Steir: I threatened to give it up. But then I was easily convinced not to. And then that's when I started the Brueghel painting, that research into painting.

Judith Richards: Was that – did you remember the experience as a kind of a crisis in your work?

Pat Steir: Yes, it was.

Judith Richards: And a lack of self-confidence?

Pat Steir: No. It wasn't exactly like self-confidence. It's like, well, okay. If that's the way you feel. It was as though – [laughs] – the paintings were living things. Well, if you're so uncooperative, then I'm going to go away. I'm very stupid in that way. I'm a stupid fighter.

Judith Richards: Was it a question of, I have to believe that I'm doing something that's really historically important in order to take my time to do it? Was it a kind of a judgment you were making about the importance of what you were doing?

Pat Steir: I don't know. I really don't know.

Judith Richards: How long did that crisis last?

Pat Steir: I would say six months. Not too long. It wasn't too long. I like to work. That's the problem. I mean, I like to make paintings. I like to work at making paintings. So what happened is it happened. It was part of that whole postmodern crisis that I had. It was a crisis.

Judith Richards: Did it have to do with critics saying painting was dead?

Pat Steir: No. I never cared – I lived with a person who said –

Judith Richards: Sol?

Pat Steir: Yeah. And then he would say to people, "Oh, look at Pat's paintings. They're wonderful." And I had to say, "Please stop. Don't do that. You program them to hate it." But he only meant – he didn't mean my painting – [laughs] – or he didn't mean painting at all, you know. He collected a lot of paintings.

Judith Richards: Yes. Yes. So Joost convinced you to continue painting?

Pat Steir: Yeah. Yeah. But it was easy to convince me. It was more like a family fight.

Judith Richards: Has that ever happened again?

Pat Steir: No, because what happened is, when I did the Brueghel painting, I opened up a nest of ideas, endless, for two lifetimes. I could go on now for two lifetimes. Maybe I had come to a crisis of thought. I couldn't think where to go.

Judith Richards: Mm-hm. [Affirmative.]

Pat Steir: I couldn't see – but now, when I did that, when I did the Brueghel painting, with the 84 panels, I opened up enough questions, enough questions to solve in painting for a lifetime. With the last paintings, it wasn't an influence of Newman. It was an homage and a good-bye to that painting, that kind of way of thinking. And if you look at the paintings, really look - you have to know modernism to look. You can't just look. You have to know modernism to look.

Jacob Proctor: Steir’s intimate familiarity with the tradition and craft of painting led her to new spaces of formal innovation that pull from historical threads into something new and undeniably/wholly her own: 

Pat Steir: Pat Steir: Basically, when I stopped doing figurative work, besides the Brueghel [series], painting flowers, when I stopped painting people – I think of my work as figurative. [Laughs.] Not this past show, but the Waterfall paintings. I call them Waterfall [paintings].

Judith Richards: Yeah.

Pat Steir: And I thought what –

Judith Richards: Maybe the word “representational” rather than “figurative”?

Pat Steir: Yeah, because I thought using the icon of minimalism, the single – of abstraction, the single brushstroke, and letting it make a picture itself – was the ultimate image painting.

Judith Richards: Mm-hm. [Affirmative.]

Pat Steir: They look like waterfalls. And when you reduce them to the, you know, they look like a miniature. So I always hung on, until the last show, to that. The last show was a conversation with Barnett Newman – not inspiration, not going back to – it was Barnett Newman and then, good-bye. It was a good-bye. It was an homage and a good-bye.

Judith Richards: And why did that come up at this point in time, Barnett Newman?

Pat Steir: Because I've always loved Barnett Newman's work and Rothko's work. And so I never dared to publicly play off of it and bid it good-bye. But it's good-bye because 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.

Judith Richards: When did those come into being?

Pat Steir: When I started the Waterfall paintings.

Judith Richards: In the late '80s?

Pat Steir: Late '80s. About '89, '88.

Judith Richards: So it's been almost 20 years.

Pat Steir: Almost 20 years of not painting brushstrokes with the tip of a brush.

Judith Richards: That was a major shift. Did you feel that was a major shift when it happened?

Pat Steir: It was, but I didn't think so. I was thinking more about antimodernism, but –

Judith Richards: And postmodernism?

Pat Steir: Well, antimodernism.

[They laugh.]

Judith Richards: Okay.

Pat Steir: Though these look like modernist paintings, you know, and minimalist paintings. But I was thinking about antimodernism. Yes, you could call it postmodernism. I was thinking, is there postmodernism? Is there such a thing? And now, with the art that's being done now, it's hard to say there is

Jacob Proctor: Today, Steir is often associated with her waterfall paintings, large canvases produced through precise pours and improvisatory splashes, as she integrates paint’s potential in liquid and graphic form. She happened upon this process in the late 1980s and continued the experiment for three decades:

Pat Steir: This is the first waterfall painting. I did it, and I couldn't see how good it was. I couldn't see it. And I thought it was a big mistake, I was going to paint over it. But somebody came into my studio and said, No, no, no. And so I didn't. And I considered it a mistake, and it was the beginning of a whole new group of work that lasted 30 years.

Pat Steir: Okay. From the beginning, I had somebody who helped me stretch and prime canvases. That was just from the beginning. One of my first assistants was Amy Sillman. She was a student and assistant of mine.

Judith Richards: That must have been in the '80s?

Pat Steir: No. In the '70s. [Whispers.] Because of when the work got seen first, actually. So she was a great companion. I've always had somebody. Not every day. Now I have somebody who comes two days a week. I wish he would come more, because the paintings have gotten bigger and bigger. I paint the paintings. Nobody else can do that. But he stretches canvases. He helps me do the underpaintings and mixes paint. I have a very clear – to get my paintings to look the way they look, I have clear formulas for mixing the paint. Each layer has to be mixed differently. Even though the recent – the last paintings look black and white, they're different colors of black and different colors of white. So those colors are mixed colors.

Judith Richards: You've always been careful about your techniques, in terms of the durability, the lasting quality.

Pat Steir: Yeah. I am. When – I am, yes. I am. In the beginning I didn't know how, so some of those early paintings are very delicate. But once I knew how, I stuck to it. [Laughs.] My painting is like – it is like a performance, what I do. And I'm about to, myself, make a videotape of – I made one, but it's not good quality – of the process, the performance, because a lot of it - what I realized is the best part of the painting is the painting of it, is the act of painting it, and the thought that goes into every layer of paint – there are many layers – and the time I take between layers to contemplate or meditate on what's going to be done.

Pat Steir: Since the Waterfall paintings, I try to keep the titles to two words, sort of two-word poems that describe the image, so that when somebody says the two words, I can see the image. So two-word descriptive poems, like Sea Storm [2001]. Night Sea [2000-02]. Night Sea is a double title because Agnes Martin did a painting called Night Sea. So it's a –

Judith Richards: Ah. It's an homage, as well.

Pat Steir: Yeah. But only the title. The painting doesn't look like it. I mean, my painting is black, and hers is white.

Judith Richards: So those paintings have those titles. But other works before those paintings?

Pat Steir: No. Others came from poetry, not my own poetry.

Judith Richards: And were those titles supposed to be descriptive in any way?

Pat Steir: Yes. Always descriptive. Like The Way to New Jersey, the painting looks like a –

Judith Richards: Visually descriptive?

Pat Steir: Yeah. Visually descriptive. The painting looks like a map. But the quote is from – the quote came – that did, yes. They usually come while the work is being formed, while the image is being formed, what – the early paintings were often quotations of T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound or –

Judith Richards: And that's where your work differs totally from the – minimalists and the –

Pat Steir: Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, totally. And recently they were more simple.

Judith Richards: Your titles?

Pat Steir: Yeah. Like Black and White [1991]. Black and Black [date?]. Black and Silver. [Laughs.] 

Judith Richards: And the prints also are titled in your work that way, in a descriptive way?

Pat Steir: Yeah. Very simple and descriptive, and like poetry.

Judith Richards: How does your poetry relate to your paintings now?

Pat Steir: I think they always paint a picture rather than – I've been trying to write a poem that describes a feeling, and it's not very good. They always paint a picture, though abstract, the way that I do in my painting.

Jacob Proctor: As a witness to several generations of the arts scene, Steir has watched and been shaped by an industry that was slow to acknowledge women’s advancements. As a major force in paint and print, she has helped to turn that tide: 

Pat Steir: Yeah. I think the woman thing has been very hard. I always complain I don't get enough critical attention.

Judith Richards: I think that that's continuing. Do you think that there's been improvement over your time, since the Guerrilla Girls and all kinds of changes have prompted –

Pat Steir: There has been. But a few years ago, Anne Waldman interviewed me for BOMB magazine, and she asked me the question, "How is it to be a woman artist different now for the young women of today?" And at that – I said, "Well, Vogue magazine just printed a picture of five cute women artists. Okay. How are they going to feel - Vogue going to feel - about them when they're not cute any more, when they're mature women?" And every one of those women called me up and said, "Could we have a drink? Could we have a coffee?" They know. They know.

Now, when I was a young woman artist, the first two paintings I sold were bought by Si Newhouse. And he was a friend until he asked me if I would pose for Vogue magazine in dresses. He had some artists who would do that. And I said, "Well, Si, no. That's what I did before you bought my paintings. I don't want to do that now." I thought, that's humiliating. But now people do that. And now everything is so fast, it is a miracle to stay an artist for so many years. It is a true miracle, because now there are so many artists, who knows who's going to have the courage and power to last? I mean, there are too many. Is everybody just going to be famous for Andy Warhol's 15 minutes? Or are people going to be able to ride out the duration?

Jacob Proctor: After more than six decades of art making, Steir continues to create ambitious works that reflect her expansive perspective into the nature of paint even as her body and technical approach change with time. 

Pat Steir: I had an eye test, and the eye doctor said, you're colorblind. I said, what? And he said, you don't see the color blue very well. And so I decided to make a show using color blue. So those paintings in the L. A. show all have some color blue. And they're all different colors of blue with different figurations on them.

I use the grid for placement of the mark. If I didn't have the grid, I would, you fall off the edge of the paper. I need the grid like you need a map when you're driving. 

I'm lucky because the Parkinson's has affected my movement, but not my mind. So that's very lucky. I still can sit in this chair and figure out what I'm going to do next and then I can do it. I'm so excited. I understand what my limitations are. I can make art. Visual, big paintings. Like those down there. Those were shown. four years ago in Rome with Gagosian. All I needed was to be on the lift to do them. Then I made my gesture and it can look many different ways. It's the same gesture. So there's a lot to think about.

I did a big show at the Hirshhorn Museum of the Color Wheel, and that, that was 42 paintings starting with a red painting and going through all the colors and their relationships to each other. The museum is a circle, and the color wheel is a project I've thought of for a long time, and the Hirshhorn was absolutely the perfect place to do it. So I did it.

It was very good. A lot of work to get the color, the radiation of the color from canvas to canvas. It took a long time to do. And it, it wasn't open for very long because covid came and they closed it down.

Pat Steir: Yeah. And my young nephew said to me – I didn't know him; I only just met him, and he's 18. He said to me, "Was it worth it?" And I said, "Worth what?" [Laughs.] He said - well, because it's been built up to him how hard it was for me. But I'll tell you, it was easier for me than working in an office, easier for me than teaching, easier for me than sitting in a room day after day with neurotics telling me – I would lose my patience doing any of that. I couldn't be able to do it. This was the easiest thing for me to do.

Judith Richards: Is that another way of saying it's the only thing you could do?

Pat Steir: No. I could do a lot of things. I could run a big company. But I would hate it. I could have – let's see. I couldn't have been a ballerina or a pianist. But I could have been a decent journalist, maybe not great but decent. A decent poet. But this is what I wanted to do, and so it became – because I wanted to do it, what I could have been doesn't count. This is what I wanted to do, and I did it because I wanted to do it. And long ago, I had to be the best. I always had to be the best. But now that doesn't matter.

I'm not looking for new ways to say what I'm trying to say, what I'm trying to say. More like that. I have nothing to say, but I'm trying to say it.

Pat Steir: I just want to say one more thing. Life is hard for everyone. And so it's not particularly harder to be an artist. I think it's particularly easier, because whether you starve or you flourish, financially, emotionally, and every other way, or when you starve and suffer, it's your own choice. And very few people take the opportunity to make their own choice and to live with their mistakes. You have to live with your mistakes. You can't deny them. They're right there, both social, political, business, and visual.

CREDITS

Jacob Proctor: Jacob Proctor: ARTiculated is produced by Ben Gillespie and Carlos Morales

Our music comes from Sound and Smoke composed by Viet Cuong and performed by the Peabody Wind Ensemble with Harlan Parker conducting

For show notes, works cites, and additional resources, visit aaa.si.edu/articulated. 

If you enjoy ARTiculated, please consider rating and sharing it. 

The Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution is a nonprofit organization that relies on donations from individuals to sustain our ongoing operations and special programs like ARTiculated. To support our work, please visit aaa.si.edu/support. Thank you. 

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