2013.21.270
After Winslow Homer #2
Artist
Pat Steir
(Newark, New Jersey, 4/10/1940 - )
Title
After Winslow Homer #2
Creation Date
1996-1997
Century
late 20th century
Dimensions
30 1/4 x 30 1/4 x 1 1/2 in. (76.84 x 76.84 x 3.81 cm)
Object Type
painting
Creation Place
North America, United States
Medium and Support
oil on canvas
Credit Line
Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection
Copyright
This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s
Copyright Terms and Conditions.
Accession Number
2013.21.270
Pat Steir’s title poetically implies a reckoning with an aesthetic and cultural legacy fixed in Western art. After Winslow Homer alerts viewers to the passage of time and its suspension in art. Steir observed in an interview with Anne Waldman: “I think Beauty evokes a desire to hold on to the moment; when you realize you cannot stop a moment ... everything becomes very delicate and tenuous and precious.” In her canvas (which followed a painting donated by Herbert and Dorothy Vogel to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), one perceives the crash of waves towering in a moment and collapsing in the next, the very tension that drew the work’s namesake to the sea a century earlier. So, too, does one suddenly recognize yet another dynamic at play: the relationship of the figurative to the abstract. Here Homer’s iconic seascapes atomize and reformulate themselves as pure energy—the ineluctable power of the transformation of one thing into another.