Magic Night Fall (Primary Title)
Pat Steir, American, born 1940 (Artist)
Fifty Works for Fifty States: In 2008, in a unique partnership with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Vogels distributed twenty-five hundred works across the country, giving fifty works to one art museum in each of the fifty states. This exhibition, The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, showcases the fifty works VMFA received as part of that initiative, which bears the same title. As a diverse and rich body of work, the Vogels' generous giftattests to their passion and commitment to sharing contemporary art with the public.
Pat Steir Steir began her career in the 1960s and was associated with Conceptual artists like Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner. Since the 1980s, she has been working on her Waterfall series. Unlike traditional landscape paintings, these works sit on the border between representation and abstraction: they are as much about the layers of paint that cascade down the surface of the canvas and the role of gravityand chance in forming the composition as they are about a poetic reference to nature. More recently Steir began a series of works whose titles reference the sky rather than water. Magic Night fall consists of thin layers of paint and subtle gradations of dark colors, with only a few miniscule drips of turquoise paint to convey a sense of spontaneity.
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