Pat Steir (1938-2026) on Painting

Why It Matters

Steir’s blend of scientific color theory with spontaneous technique redefines abstract painting, influencing market demand and critical discourse around the political power of beauty.

Key Takeaways

• Steir learned color theory from Steven Mueller's Harvard lectures.
• She creates self‑forming paintings using poured, hands‑off techniques.
• Yellow appears flat and luminous, while blue reveals underlying layers.
• Ultramarine blue’s weight separates colors, influencing visual depth.
• She links beauty to politics, warning against fear of aesthetic.

Summary

The video features Pat Steir reflecting on her artistic practice, recalling a formative color theory course taught by Steven Mueller at Harvard, and describing how that education reshaped her approach to painting.

Steir explains her “hands‑off” method: she pours or drips paint, allowing gravity and drying time to dictate the final composition. Different pigments behave uniquely—yellow spreads uniformly, while ultramarine blue retains weight, exposing underlying layers and creating depth.

She expands the discussion to aesthetics, arguing that beauty has become politically charged in a “historically ugly” era. Using the metaphor of a halo’s blinding light, she suggests that true beauty can be overwhelming, even terrifying, and therefore often suppressed.

The insights underscore how material process and philosophical stance intertwine in contemporary abstraction, offering artists and collectors a framework for interpreting the sensory and cultural dimensions of poured‑paint works.

Original Description

Since the late 1980s, Pat Steir has slung her paint from a loaded brush, letting oils arc and flow in a signature gesture of both creation and sublime surrender. For her latest exhibition, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the American artist has filled the building’s rotunda with a new suite of thirty paintings that, together, form a color wheel—an art fundamental that dates back to the early eighteenth century. “What Goethe was really pursuing was not a physiological but a psychological theory of colors,” Wittgenstein once wrote. The same might be said of Steir’s singular approach to the subject.

This video was filmed in the artist's studio in 2019.

#PatSteir