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Pat Steir: Moons and a River
Cheim &Read
31 MARCH- 7 MAY
Pat Steir's vocabulary of splashes, splatters and rivulets has always generated
a paradoxical response. Up close, her handling of paint appears haphazard, rash
and uncontrolled. But at a remove, those same loose, aqueous marks resolve
into precisely depicted and coherent images. With these six oil-on-canvas
paintings - five large and one mural-size - Steir introduces quasi-mystical
motives and nature references into abstract works that nonetheless preserve
her signature, watery world.
At first pass, the eleven-by-thirty-seven-foot Blue River (all works 2005) is
a massive painting that brightly dominates the show's darker moods. Columnar
washes of blue and white (slightly tapered into gentle curves at the top of the
canvas) compose the picture's central, Niagara Falls-like expanse. This vast area
is flanked and foregrounded by opposing swathes of thicker paint - hot red on
WayneThiebaud
the left-hand edge and icy silver on the right.
Like visual onomatopoeia, Steir's painterly gestures feel at one with what
Since 1962:A Survey
they depict. We've come to take this effect for granted, but it's extraordinary
Allan Stone Gallery
how Steir translates a physical flinging of paint into a representation of
2APRIL-27MAY
splashing water. That shift from physical action to illusionistic space is so direct
The story goes that upon seeing two
and uncomplicated that it feels magical, even a little spooky. As usual, Steir's
different paintings of Coca-Cola
new work makes this transforming leap appear instant and effortless.
The other five paintings have a hushed quality that fairly drips with gravitas. bottles - one in the style of the
ubiquitous print-advertising of the
The liquid effects inthe Moon pictures variously suggest dripping wax, flowing
day, with its hard lines, abstracted
or spattered blood, and, as the titles of the works promise, even the pour of
shadows and perfectly executed logomoonlight. InSummer Moon, a mottled, dark green form hovers inthe upper
centre of the canvas. Itis further obscured by a shimmering, streaky veil of gold type; the other exhibiting a similar,
though seemingly unfinished, design
and pale green paint. The form and the entire image are gashed, top to bottom,
struggling against the imposition
with a bright, bisecting streak of red paint.
of so many Abstract Expressionist
Black Moon and Sun Moon feature the same general forms hovering inthe
brush strokes - Andy Warhol's friend
same upper-centre location - simple, incomplete circles suggested by arcs of
Emile de Antonio remarked, 'One of
heavily daubed paint with trailing drips. The first canvas, black on black, has a
these is crap. The other is remarkgreen undercoat that emerges almost imperceptibly inthin, slicing marks. The
second canvas, white on white, sports a red- and a yellow-painted support edge able... it's absolutely beautiful and
naked and you ought to destroy the
on either side, which bounce faintly glowing colour onto the gallery wall.
first and show the second'. That was
GhostMoon and Moon Beam are curiously sublime works. Inthe first, the
1962. Later that year, one of those
moon form is a gloppy lobe of white paint, bathed in a dense, striated shower of
the palest greens, greys and blues. The second picture repeats the earlier top-to- two paintings became the first Warhol
exhibited ina gallery show in New
bottom bisecting gash, but this time it's a thick spike of gold on a sparkling silver
field. Around it gathers a gossamer shroud-like effect that is actually mostly blank York. It shouldn't be too difficult to
figure out which one.
canvas and faint traces of pale green paint scraped from the surface. As we've
If inthe first years of the 60s
JE
come to expect from Steir, the pictorial and the physical are inextricable.
Warhol was tentatively measuring
how much of his commercial design
..
,
•Above
WayneThiebaud River
background he could apply to a high
Cloud,2002,oilon
art enterprise, then inthose same
canvas, 152:K183cm
GALLERY,
COURTESY
ALLANSTONE
years Wayne Thiebaud appears to
"NEWYOR'
,
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have been measuring the materiality
Pat.SteirSummerfton,
of paint against similar exigencies
2005, oil oncanvas,
of draftsmanship. That his metric
278x348cm
A
~COURTESY
CHEIM&READ,.NEWYORK
derived from the offerings of delis and
automats may be more a measure of
the persistence of the 50s than the
ascendancy of Pop's billboard and
broadsheet aesthetic.
Given the exercise of this small
and apparently misnamed retrospective of Thiebaud's work at the Allan
Stone Gallery (much of the work is
dated prior to 1962), it is worth trying
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to locate the moment of Thiebaud's
breakthrough to the painting of fudge
and cake. The iconography won't
help us here, however, because after
only a quick scan, we can see that
the move must have come at some
point between the heavy, but broken,
impasto of Store Window (1957), and
the still-thick, but settling, ground of
the sandwich counter in FrenchFries
(1961). The banality of these works'
subjects is now surely besides the
point, for between them the figurative possibilities bound by single
strokes of thickly applied paint begin
theirjourney towards the controlled and subtly articulated surfaces
of Thiebaud's signature works like
DelicatessenCounter (1963) and Man
Reading (1963). This is not to say that
a work such as FrenchFries doesn't
still show a readiness to let the paint
speak for itself; it's simply to point
out that material thickness, played
as figure, gradually trades roles and
begins to shine as ground.
It is a testament to Thiebaud's
confidence as a painter that, in
SLeft
his later landscapes, he remains
willing to render vast, empty
stretches of pictorial space as craftily laid (rather than mechanically
applied) stretches of paint. But it is
still those brushstrokes from the
earlier backgrounds, the ones that
echo the contours of the figures that
they approach, which make of those
paintings singular, hermetic surfaces;
surfaces, nonetheless, that beat with
JTDN
no uncertain intensity.
MODERNPAINTERS
103
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
TITLE: WayneThiebaud Since 1962: A Survey: Allan Stone
Gallery
SOURCE: Mod Painters Jl/Ag 2005
WN: 0518201632033
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