Pat Steir, I Don't Know (1976)
Pat Steir died on March 25 of this year, age 87. Painter, teacher, a founding member of Printed Matter, Inc. ("the world’s leading non-profit organization dedicated to the dissemination, understanding and appreciation of artists’ books") and of the feminist journal Heresies, and a member of Semiotext(e)'s editorial board.
Her style, over her long career, changed and shifted, with the "Waterfalls" series of drip paintings coming to be considered as emblematic of her work, which it was not.
For example, her 1984 The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style), in the words of Artforum:
"…is a complex piece of painting related to the mode of combining images that Sergei Eisenstein called 'intellectual montage.' Its image complex begins with a quotation of a 16th-century Netherlandish painting, Jan Brueghel’s Flowers in a Blue Vase, 1599. The piece is often reproduced—Steir copied her version of it from a museum poster [and she] divides the Brueghel painting twice, first into 16 and then into 64 equal-sized rectangles, and reproduces every rectangle on its own canvas. The 16-panel version is painted in a green brown monochrome, the 64-panel one in full color; all the panels are the same size, about 26 by 21 inches, and each is painted in a specifically allusive style, such as that of van Gogh, Matisse, Cezanne, Mark Rothko, or Jackson Pollock. When assembled on the wall as in this installation the canvases form two paintings, the larger nearly 20 feet high, through which flow a multitude of stylistic currents. The Brueghel vase now reveals a history of oil painting."
Pat Steir, Painter of Luminous ‘Waterfalls,’ Dies at 87
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