Pat Steir

Among the most highly regarded of contemporary painters, Pat Steir has in recent years reached a new level of achievement. In the present volume, which reproduces in color seventy-seven of her most important paintings, Thomas McEvilley surveys the whole of her career as an artist, giving special emphasis to her remarkable recent work. Steir has long been admired for pictures that quote the history of painting. Outstanding among these "quotational" pictures is the virtuoso Brueghel Series of 1982-84, a group of sixty-four panels each executed in the style of a different artist or period. That group, reproduced here, formed the climax of an earlier book on Steir published 1986. Since then, her work has moved into a more fluid abstraction with The Moon and the Wave of 1986-87. Again she has drawn freely on the history of art - both Western (Courbet's The Wave) and Eastern (Hokusai's The Great Wave) - now with a new sovereignty, mastering the difficult format of the tondo.