74 OCTOBER 2019
THIS PAGE AND NEXT PAGE: ALEX MONRO/COURTESY HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDENART & DESIGN
it’s the kind of soupy late-summer
day in New York City that finds the vast
majority of acclaimed contemporary
artists happily decamped to their cool,
breezy studios on Long Island or in
Connecticut. But 79-year-old Pat Steir, a
floral scarf draped around her, is in her
Chelsea studio, surrounded by 28 towering
panels. Propped against the walls, each
nine-foot-tall canvas is a different color,
from bumblebee yellow to deep purple.
Steir is spending the final weeks of
summer finishing the suite before it heads
to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden in Washington, D.C., where it
will be installed in order of the spectrum,
from red to violet, in a solo exhibition,
opening October 24.
When the museum approached her
about a show, Steir, who calls herself a
conceptual painter, considered the quirky
doughnut-shape geometry of the gallery,
then suggested constructing a color wheel.
“There’s a huge history of color wheels,
starting with Newton and Goethe,” Steir
says, reaching for a German book on the
subject that she has long referenced. “My
color wheel is my color wheel. It’s not a
copy. It’s my own discovery.”
From a distance, the gradual gradations
of hue look monochromatic and opaque,almost like house paint. But up close, (^)
The Goods
Rainbow
Connection
Artist Pat Steir reinvents
the wheel with a
suite of 28 paintings.
BY JULIE BELCOVE
Detail of Pat
Steir: Color
Wheel, Hirshhorn
Museum and
Sculpture
Garden, 2019
G2G_Oct_GDS.indd 74 8/30/19 6:26 PM
74 OCTOBER 2019
THIS PAGE AND NEXT PAGE: ALEX MONRO/COURTESY HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN
ART & DESIGN
it’s the kind of soupy late-summer
day in New York City that finds the vast
majority of acclaimed contemporary
artists happily decamped to their cool,
breezy studios on Long Island or in
Connecticut. But 79-year-old Pat Steir, a
floral scarf draped around her, is in her
Chelsea studio, surrounded by 28 towering
panels. Propped against the walls, each
nine-foot-tall canvas is a different color,
from bumblebee yellow to deep purple.
Steir is spending the final weeks of
summer finishing the suite before it heads
to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden in Washington, D.C., where it
will be installed in order of the spectrum,
from red to violet, in a solo exhibition,
opening October 24.
When the museum approached her
about a show, Steir, who calls herself a
conceptual painter, considered the quirky
doughnut-shape geometry of the gallery,
then suggested constructing a color wheel.
“There’s a huge history of color wheels,
starting with Newton and Goethe,” Steir
says, reaching for a German book on the
subject that she has long referenced. “My
color wheel is my color wheel. It’s not a
copy. It’s my own discovery.”
From a distance, the gradual gradations
of hue look monochromatic and opaque,
almost like house paint. But up close, (^)
The Goods
Rainbow
Connection
Artist Pat Steir reinvents
the wheel with a
suite of 28 paintings.
BY JULIE BELCOVE
Detail of Pat
Steir: Color
Wheel, Hirshhorn
Museum and
Sculpture
Garden, 2019