Deconstructing Visual Styles

ART: PAT STEIR'S 'BRUEGHEL SERIES'
By MICHAEL BRENSON
Published: December 14, 1984
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''THE BRUEGHEL SERIES (A Vanitas of Style)'' is the culmination of Pat Steir's career to this point. Steir has been painting flowers since 1981, she has used panels almost from the beginning and she has consistently painted paintings about painting. This two-part, 80-panel, floor-to ceiling work, at the Brooklyn Museum through Feb. 18, also seems to be a realization of a lifelong ambition, expressed last year to the art critic Frederick Ted Castle, to produce a notebook from which others could learn.

Steir's inspiration was a 17th-century still life by Jan Brueghel the Elder, in Vienna, in which a vase and flowers against a dark background are framed on top by two perched butterflies and on the bottom by a variety of busy insects, including a testy ladybug and a scavenging grasshopper. In a brochure accompanying the exhibition, Steir wrote that for her the Brueghel ''is almost like a visual crossword puzzle with hundreds of connections between artists, styles and times.'' ''Vanitas'' is a term identified with 17th-century Dutch genre painting, in particular with flowers and the transience not only of their beauty but of life.