Crown Point Press
Newsletter
April 2012
On a winter afternoon in 1972, I was talking with Bob Feldman
in his New York office when a big-boned woman with short gray-
streaked hair walked in, and Bob introduced me to Agnes Martin. I
had heard the Agnes Martin legend and, like all the artists I knew,
admired her paintings: horizontal stripes, wavering lines, or grids in
soft pure colors. The paintings had been in exhibitions, but Martin
herself had been absent from New York for the previous five years.
Agnes Martin had moved to New Mexico and built a house
with her own hands. Then she built a studio. Just as she was ready
to begin painting again, she had received a letter from Bob Feldman
inviting her to make prints. He suggested etchings—he was going
to send her to Crown Point—but she had a particular problem she
wanted to solve. She wanted the printer to straighten out her lines,
which she said she could never paint straight enough. She had seen
some silk screen prints she liked, and that was the medium she
wanted to use.
When I met her, she had already made thirty drawings in
squares all the same size using grids, lines, and bands in light gray
ink. These were maquettes for the print portfolio eventually titled
On a Clear Day. Feldman had sent them to Edition Domberger in
Stuttgart, Germany, a respected silk screen printer, which had made
proofs, straightening out her lines, and sent them to Bob. Martin
was in New York on the way to Stuttgart to finalize the color and
the paper, neither of which were right. Bob planned to fly with her
and leave her there if necessary. He would have to return after just
a day, he told me.
I said he should stay as long as she did. I was pretty sure one day
wouldn’t be enough, and I thought that after being in New Mexico
for five years without much company she would need support in
Germany. Bob said I was right and asked me to go along. That was
how Feldman did things. I hadn’t even known he was working with
Agnes Martin until I happened to visit on the day she arrived, and
all of a sudden I was on the telephone getting my passport sent
express from home.
In the years Agnes had been in New Mexico, she told me,
she had been able to have conversation only occasionally with old
friends who searched her out in the desert. She was disappointed to
learn later that at least one couple returned to New York without
finding her. Those were the days before cell phones, but even if
her searching friends had had such things, Agnes had no phone.
PAT STEIR AND AGNES MARTIN
No Pretensions
An excerpt from a memoir in progress
by Kathan Brown
Agnes Martin, On a Clear Day, 1973. From a portfolio of 30 screenprints.
15 x15 inches. Edition 50. Printed by Edition Domberger. Published by Parasol Press.
Pat Steir, Drawing Lesson, Part I, Line, 1978. From a portfolio of seven sugar lift
and spit bite aquatints with drypoint printed in brown. 11¾-x-11¾-inch image on
16-x-16-inch sheet. Edition 25.
2
When she wrote to me, later, she printed the words “no phone”
beneath her return address.
In the desert, when she wanted to talk, she said, she had talked
to a lizard that stayed unafraid at her building site. She had built
the house truly by herself, only occasionally hiring a teenage boy
from a nearby farm when she needed to set beams or do some other
work that required two people. Not having had anyone to talk to
for five years, she talked a lot to me in Germany. I started to think
she could read my mind, because when it would wander, I thought
she would alter the conversation to start talking about what I had
been thinking about.
It was snowing in Stuttgart, and I was not dressed warmly
enough. I can still visualize a country path we walked every day in
the snow to get to the shop. The people at Domberger spoke English
and were wonderful to us. Their method of operation was to trace
artists’ drawings and cut them into film that they adhered on screens
printed semi-automatically by a machine tended by people. There
was no artist’s studio, but the director loaned Agnes his office so she
could pin up proofs and look quietly at them. The only place to pin
them was the back of the door, which occasionally opened, but it
worked out all right.
The paper was the tricky part, but we ended up with a sheet
that took the ink in the right way; adjusting the exact shade of gray
was reasonably fast once Agnes had settled on the paper. We were
there about a week. As we were leaving, both of us thanked everyone
at the shop profusely, and Agnes, shaking hands, saying good-bye,
added reflectively, quietly, “You are all such wonderful people. I can’t
understand how you could have done those things to the Jews.” I
said something different very quickly, hoping they hadn’t heard or
understood the English. They didn’t act as though they had.
I, myself, have been told that “sometimes your mouth speaks
without your brain’s involvement.” I think it happened in Agnes’s
case because of spending a lot of time alone. It happens to me
mostly when I’m heeding the “secret” of this chapter: no preten-
sions. Pretensions are the skins of second-guessing, and shedding
them is not always advisable. But hasn’t nearly every thinking person
(including every thinking German) at one time or another asked
Agnes’s question, if only in his or her own mind? I showed an early
draft of this chapter to Pat Steir and asked if she thought I should
include Agnes’s question. “What the Germans did is so monstrous,”
I said. “I don’t believe it could ever happen again.”
“We could do something like it,” she replied. “A lot of money
right now is pouring into trying to develop a massive cult mentality
here.”
When I began this chapter, I had intended to focus it wholly
on Pat Steir, a mainstay of our Crown Point artist group and a
long-term friend and influence on me. But when I began thinking
about Steir, Agnes Martin came into my mind, and I started there.
Pat often says in interviews that Agnes Martin, John Cage, and Sol
LeWitt, all of whom she knew, are her three major influences.
Pat Steir was born in 1938 in Newark, New Jersey, with the
name Iris Patricia Sukoneck. Her father’s parents were Jewish immi-
grants from Russia. Their children became lawyers and accountants,
she says, except her father, who went to art school and ended up
with a business designing window displays and neon signs. Her
mother’s parents were Sephardic Jews from Egypt. Steir married
young and took her husband’s surname.
Pat Steir received a B.F.A. from the Pratt Institute in 1962, the
same year I started Crown Point Press. She had quick success in art,
being included in an exhibition that year at the High Museum in
Atlanta and, soon after, 1964, in a show called “Drawings” at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. She was barely out of school
when, in 1964, she had a one-person show at a respected gallery in
New York. Then, in 1966 she got a job as an art director for the
book publisher Harper and Row. She arranged flexible hours, was
able to continue painting, and became an active member of the New
York art scene.
Until the mid-1970s, Steir contributed to the feminist art
movement by being on the editorial board of the journal Heresies.
She says she did not make feminist art, but in her art she was trying
to escape isolation. “I wanted to be seen simply as an artist, I wanted
to be a contender, an equal,” she said in a 2011 interview with The
Brooklyn Rail, a youthful free newspaper for art and culture. “I think
my existence and survival in art, along with other women of my
generation, has political implications beyond the personal.”
Pat Steir met Agnes Martin a year before I did. In 1971 art crit-
ic Douglas Crimp, a friend of Pat’s, had rounded up some Martin
paintings for an exhibition at the gallery of the School of Visual
Arts in New York. The show was reviewed favorably, and Crimp
received an invitation from Martin to visit her in New Mexico. He
took Pat along, and for the next thirty-three years she continued to
visit Martin frequently, her last visit being a few weeks before Martin
died at the age of ninety-two in 2004.
I met Steir in 1975. Sol LeWitt was doing a project at Crown
Point for Parasol, his third, I think. Feldman’s artists stayed at the
hotel in Oakland, the Leamington, except Sol who stayed in our
guest room. Since he had worked with us when Crown Point was
in our basement, my son Kevin and I saw him as different from
everyone else.
One day near the end of the project, Sol said to me, “I’m
expecting someone. I hope it’s OK if she joins me for a couple of
days.” This is Pat’s version of the story: Sol was working on a wall
drawing at a museum in Los Angeles. She was temporarily teaching
there. Sol invited her to go to Italy with him, with a stop in Berkeley
on the way. The school term was just ending. She packed her bags
and, as he instructed, showed up at our house. She didn’t at first
even know why Sol was there, but when she saw what we were doing
with etching, she told me later, she started trying to figure out how
she could work with us.
Two years after that, in 1977, Pat Steir arrived at Crown Point
Press to make a print to be given by a museum to its contributors.
Pat and I had liked each other right away, and though I was still
working mainly for Parasol Press, I was glad to have an opportunity
to take that small job. Fortunately for me, it didn’t turn out to be
small. “I did many prints,” Pat told Constance Lewallen in a 1991
interview for View, “and I was on the telephone calling other print
publishers, trying to get somebody to publish the other prints, and
Kathan told me she would publish them.”
3
Actually, it wasn’t so many, only seven: one fairly large, one
small, and five even smaller and bound into a book. They are
restrained in color, mostly a kind of golden umber, and beautiful.
All Steir’s work has a tactile beauty slightly at odds with the restraint
of her contemporaries. The following year she came back to do
many more prints, also published by Crown Point Press. These
included a dozen in burnt sienna, some of them accented with
bright primary colors, in a series called Drawing Lesson. In the years
since 1977, we have published more than a hundred prints by Pat
Steir. She is the artist with the largest number on our list.
Although Steir’s art has always seemed to me to be romantic
and sensual, she makes clear in every interview that she does not
think of it as expressionistic. “The self is like a bug,” she said in
1989. “Every time you slap it, it moves to another place.” In an
interview for View in 1978, she told Robin White that making art
is “a desire to transcend the limits of a single human being. The urge
for art, for me, is the urge for language. I start with a mark, and the
mark is a universal desire to speak or communicate.”
In that period, a lot of ideas floating around New York were
derived from the French philosophers of deconstruction, who wrote
of language, signs, symbols, codes, and the impossibility of find-
ing Truth. For years, Steir incorporated words into her prints, and
she still does occasionally. She has also done paintings and prints,
including self-portrait prints, which deconstruct work by great art-
ists of the past. Most of her Crown Point titles through 1981, when
she did a large three-panel etching called Abstraction, Belief, Desire,
refer in one way or another to what I think of as her intellectual side.
In her recent work, Pat seems to escape intellect, but, in fact, intel-
lect is part of her nature. At one point in her life, she was actually a
practicing intellectual, an editor for a magazine called Semiotext(e).
You wouldn’t think of the word intellectual if you watched her
in the studio, though. She clunked around in high-heeled shoes
(“I’m short,” she said, “and I’m used to them”) and posed for photos,
sometimes making faces. Then, in later years, she started throwing
paint at her plates. The printers put plastic sheets up strategically,
but we still have a few drips and splats on our walls.
But what about Steir’s influence from John Cage, and how does
that fit with her involvement with Agnes Martin? Steir met Cage in
1980, through me, but before meeting him she had studied music
and been engaged with his ideas. After that, she saw him sometimes
in New York. Martin, on the other hand, resisted Cage. Here is a
quote from an undated letter I got from her, probably in 1980:
Between you and me, Kathan, John Cage is still negative because
although he has surrendered self direction to chance that does not
make art work. He does not believe in inspiration, beauty, truth,
reality but only chance. With chance one still must choose to act
and he is back to intellect. Inspiration is possible when you say to
yourself “I do not know what to do” and the answer comes to you.
It is a command. If you ask for it you have to do it. It is the cause
of effective action in this world and it is the path of life. Cage and
others like him who move according to intellect are not on the path.
Of all the words on Martin’s list, the only one I think Cage
didn’t believe in is truth (at least not in eternal or universal Truth).
I’m not sure what he would say about inspiration, but he did receive
it from nature and also from thinkers he admired—Henry David
Thoreau, for example. I am sure Cage believed in beauty. “Isn’t it
beautiful? Isn’t it marvelous?” is one of his expressions that I fre-
quently joyfully quote. And he believed in reality. It was his primary
material, and chance was a means of accessing it.
Consider Martin’s sentence: “With chance one still must
choose to act and he is back to intellect.” It is true. Not only did
Cage choose to act, but he chose the circumstances within which
he would act. He set up parameters of action, then within those
parameters cultivated a chance-directed plan. Except within tightly
Pat Steir, Self After Rembrandt #1, 1987. Hard ground etching
with drypoint. 11-x-11-inch image on 26¼-x-20-inch sheet.
Edition 5.
Pat Steir in the Crown Point studio, 1987.
4
specified situations, he did not tolerate an “anything goes” attitude.
Did Cage want to escape intellect? He created scores that
offered escape and opened unthought-of possibilities, then accepted
whatever results he obtained from following the scores. But the
scores, themselves, came from his mind. Martin’s escape from
intellect through inspiration was of the purest kind, not intellectu-
ally constrained. If that circumstance were generalized, I would be
wary of her word command. “If you ask for it you have to do it” is
a refrain that too often has been employed in the real world with
tragic consequences. In Martin’s world, however, setting aside intel-
lect means appreciating the forces of nature.
“I really think it’s great to be alive,” Steir told me in a 1981
interview, at the beginning of the Reagan years. “No matter what. I
hope that if I’m in a coma they do every operation they can to keep
me alive, in case I’m thinking or something. I would live any way
at all just to be alive. But it is a pessimistic time. I wish it were an
optimistic time, but the final way to see art is as a political mirror,
and…the new art is about the imminent end of the world.”
At this moment, in 2012, I find it difficult to remember the
“pessimistic time” when I interviewed Steir. In 1981 a financial
boom was in the making, but also a dramatic crash. After Reagan’s
term and that of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was
elected president, and he wiped out an enormous national debt and
created a surplus. That surplus was destroyed during the following
Republican administration of George W. Bush, who hosted in 2008
another financial crash, bigger than Reagan’s, and left office with
the national debt unbelievably high. In 2012 we have not recov-
ered from that crash. We hear television talkers daily bemoaning
“uncertainty” about “regulations” on business, and I wonder why
the talkers think unregulated financial markets won’t again crash
the stock market.
Every once in a while a commentator, economist Paul Krugman,
for example, says we would have been in a true depression, rather
than the recession we experienced, if costly financial manipula-
tion by both Bush and his successor, Democrat
Barack Obama, had not happened. Krugman
thinks the government should have spent more, and
should spend again now, and at the same time the
Republicans in Congress are ranting against spend-
ing and trying to cut social programs. End-of-the
world speculations are coming from both ends of
the political spectrum. Their roots are partly in the
continuing unemployment crisis (with Europe suf-
fering something similar, maybe worse) and partly
in voguish medieval-like thinking: computer fantasy
games abound and “social conservatives” assume a
religious obligation to legislate moral activity for
people other than themselves.
At the end of the sixties, I was thinking about
the “imminent end of the world” because of the
Cold War and the thermonuclear threat, a threat
that lasted about twenty years. In the early eighties,
Crown Point published the work of a young Italian
artist, Francesco Clemente, who had been living in
India. One of Clemente’s images, Not St. Girolamo, shows a peaceful
Japanese garden in the midst of a quiet sexual scene involving a man
and two lions, the whole supported by a tortured figure frantically
holding up pillars while the world caves in around him. “I’m not
sure everything is under control,” Clemente said in View. “I’m
afraid of the opposite. It’s like there is a huge evil thing coming. Not
something that has to do with ideas, but really just bad people who
overcome the good people.”
“The young people,” Steir said in my 1981 interview with her,
“are not doing something kitschy—that was possible. They’re doing
work with heavy emotional significance and doing it quite coolly.”
What Steir and I did not know then is that thirty years later kitsch
would be dominating the art world. Contrast Clemente’s statement
with remarks Jeff Koons made in 2008 regarding his forty-foot-high
topiary of a puppy: “I wanted the piece to deal with the human
condition, and this condition in relation to God. I wanted it to be
a contemporary Sacred Heart of Jesus.” Or by Damien Hirst about
Pat Steir, Abstraction, Belief, Desire, 1981. Color aquatint with soft ground and hard ground etching, spit bite aquatint and
drypoint. 35¾-x-55¼-inch image on 42-x-61-inch sheet. Edition 35.
Pat Steir, Robin White and Kathan Brown, 1978.
5
his paintings of colored spots: “They are what they are, perfectly
dumb paintings which feel absolutely right.” Or by Matthew Barney
on a scene in a film he produced: “Metabolic changes related to the
digestive process, from glucose to sucrose, to petroleum jelly, tapi-
oca, meringue, and then poundcake, a complex carbohydrate.” All
were reported by Calvin Tomkins, the dean of art writers, in The
New Yorker.
In our 1981 published discussion, Steir and I talked about
Andy Warhol, the forerunner of the new kitsch artists. Steir called
Warhol “in a very real way the artist of our time because he took
everything and made it his own. If you look at a picture of Marilyn
Monroe, you think of Warhol. If you eat Campbell soup, you think
of Warhol. If you see a picture of Chairman Mao—everything is
Warhol!” I argued that Warhol wouldn’t last. I was wrong about
that, but I wonder how people a hundred years from now, looking
at a Warhol painting in a museum, will make sense of our time.
Oh my! (As John Cage would say.) We are far afield from the
question of how Pat Steir is influenced in her art by both Martin and
Cage. But if you believe, as I do, that Cage, Martin, and Steir will
continue to be remembered in the future, it might be useful to see
them in comparison to Koons, Hirst, and Barney, who came along a
generation later and also, it appears, are destined to be remembered.
Thinking about Steir’s remark that “the final way to see art is as
a political mirror,” I notice that the art of Koons, Hirst, and Barney
is made in ways that parallel the structure of business and govern-
ment today: it is constructed remotely, by artisans in factorylike
situations, and is impossible to separate from its connection with
money. A “spot painting” by Damien Hirst sold at auction in 2011
for just over a million dollars and on January 12, 2012 the “com-
plete spot paintings,” 331 of them, went on exhibition concurrently
at eleven branches of the Gagosian Gallery in New York and around
the world. This kind of art, in addition to being about money,
indulges personal obsessions that Cage (I think) would have thought
of as “trivial and lacking in urgency.” Asked about his spot paintings
when he was being interviewed on television, Hirst said flatly, “I like
color,” and nothing more. I thought his answer typified an attitude
also visible in the political mirror of our time.
I called Steir and asked her how Agnes Martin influenced her.
“Agnes worked the way a bird sings,” she said. “The bird doesn’t
think, ‘I’m making a beautiful song. I’m making a song that’s about
this or that.’ You remember,” she went on, “how I used to wear those
Wedgie heels? On my first visit, with Douglas Crimp, Agnes took us
on a hike out in the desert. ‘You can’t walk in those,’ she said. And
she gave me her shoes. The whole time I was thinking, ‘I’m walking
in Agnes Martin’s shoes.’”
“And what about Cage?” I asked. We reminisced about the last
few days of 1984 when, after a project of Steir’s at Crown Point,
she and I and my husband, Tom Marioni, and her husband, Joost
Elffers (they had just married), drove down the coast to see Hearst
Castle. We spent New Year’s Eve at a barn dance that we stumbled
on in a small town, Pat and Joost making up steps and everyone
laughing with the out-of-towners. On the way home, we picked up
John Cage in Santa Cruz, where he had been visiting a friend, and
he started work at Crown Point on January 5 (he began almost every
new year with us).
Although we normally focus our attention on only one artist at
a time, Pat worked in the studio with Cage for a day. “John was free
and buoyant and unbelievable,” she remembers. “He was a big thing
flapping around—playful and funny and serious and hardworking.
Pat Steir with Joost Elffers in the Crown Point studio, 1988.
Pat Steir, Long Vertical Falls #1, 1991. Soap ground and spit bite aqua-
tints. 45-x-23-inch image on 53¼-x-30-inch sheet. Edition 20.
In the Crown Point Gallery
Pat Steir • Tom Marioni
April 5 - May 19
In New York
Sylvia Plimack Mangold:
Recent Works
Alexander and Bonin
March 16 - April 28
Rammellzee: The Letter Racers
The Suzanne Geiss Company
March 8 - April 21
Crown Point Press
Founded in 1962
He opened a whole new world.” I asked about his influence on
her. “For my work now, I have set up a little system that involves
chance,” she said. “Chance is like a partner, an amusing partner:
we’ll make something and see what happens.”
In a review in the May 2011 Art News, Barbara Pollack
describes Steir’s system this way: “a method of making a kind of art
that, free of constraints, is liberating to experience. It is impossible
to look at these magnificent new paintings without imagining the
strength and tenacity of this artist, who every day climbs a ladder
thirteen feet in the air, taking risks and relinquishing control.”
The system, Steir has explained, is one of choosing paint colors
and dilutions, and then pouring these from the top of the canvas.
“I can’t believe a seventy-year-old lady climbs up on a ladder and
does that work,” a young person visiting the show was heard to say.
I think both Pat and I learned from John Cage not to worry whether
or not you can manage to do what you are doing. You might be “a
big thing flapping around,” but in the next moment your engage-
ment with the task at hand takes over and you find you are doing it
seriously and with aplomb.
If Agnes Martin escaped the intellectual through inspiration
and John Cage escaped it, temporarily, through chance, what about
Pat Steir? Meditation? “Meditation, maybe, OK,” she said. “First the
meditation, then the leap. But don’t forget about Sol.”
In any exploration of the art of our time, it is impossible to
forget about Sol LeWitt. But I will save my thoughts about him for
later and only remark here that systems were to him what chance
was to Cage and inspiration was to Martin. Lewitt and Cage are
closer to one another than it would at first appear; both differ fun-
damentally from Martin, the third of Steir’s influences, in attitude
toward the mind. “I hope you have given up on the magazines,”
Agnes wrote me in an undated letter.
Pat Steir, Mountain in the Rain, 2012. Color direct gravure printed on gampi paper chine collé. 21¼-x-30½-inch image on 31-x-39-inch
sheet. Edition 20. Printed by Emily York.
The intellectual domination of the art field is a worry. I was invited to
have a retrospective at the Whitney but when I refused to have a cata-
logue they withdrew the invitation. They think that what they have
to say about my work and life is more important than showing the
work. The intellectual in art work is even more hair raising. We have
literally hundreds of thousands of artists in this country illustrating
ideas. We could have an art renaissance if this were not so.
Oh, dear. I wish the Whitney Museum of American Art hadn’t
waited until 1992 for an Agnes Martin exhibition (with a catalog),
but I can’t agree with Agnes that the world would be better off if
artists were not working with ideas, and I think Pat agrees with me.
An influence from Martin helps Steir show, in all her work, that it’s
great to be alive, no matter what. But at the same time, like Cage
and Sol LeWitt, she holds ideas in high regard.
