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Preview image of work. oil on canvas,  After Winslow Homer #2 26315

2013.21.270

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After Winslow Homer #2

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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.