The Wave--from the Sea--after Leonardo, Hokusai, and Courbet
Pat Steir American
In this tripartite composition, Steir vertically stacks quotations from three artists’ images of the sea: Leonardo da Vinci’s pen-and-ink drawing of a whirlpool (1507–9); Hokusai’s "The Great Wave" (ca. 1830−32); and Courbet’s 1869 paintings of waves at Etretat in Normandy. Steir described her ambition to "show people ways of seeing . . . [how] artists see through time and place." She was struck by how these three representations of the ocean from different cultures and centuries somehow "carry the same feeling." Working from reproductions, Steir engaged in an act of translation and comparison that allowed her to consider her own relationship to time and art history.
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