Stephen Pace

Stephen Pace (1918-2010) was one of the distinctive American painters whose long career carried him from the heart of Abstract Expressionism into a fully realized figurative practice, an unusual trajectory that produced a remarkably rich body of work across more than six decades. Born in Charleston, Missouri, Pace served in the United States Army during the Second World War, an experience that shaped many artists of his generation. Following his military service, he pursued his artistic training at the Art Students League in New York and studied with Hans Hofmann at the celebrated German-American master's schools in New York and Provincetown, joining the extraordinary community of younger painters whom Hofmann shaped during the crucial decades of the emerging New York School.

Pace emerged as a significant second-generation Abstract Expressionist during the 1950s, exhibiting at leading galleries and participating in the vibrant artistic community that was transforming American art during that decade. His early abstract paintings combined the gestural energy of the New York School with his own developing sense of color and structural composition, and his work drew critical attention alongside that of his colleagues Grace Hartigan, Michael Goldberg, Alfred Leslie, and other painters of his generation. He was represented by leading galleries and became part of the established New York art community during the peak years of Abstract Expressionism.

Beginning in the 1960s, Pace made the unusual decision to move away from pure abstraction and toward a fully committed representational practice. His mature paintings characteristically feature figures at the seashore, domestic interiors, still lifes, and coastal Maine landscapes, all rendered with a distinctive combination of Fauvist color, confident painterly touch, and the compositional intelligence he had absorbed from his years of abstract practice. His Maine subjects, painted during his long summers in Stonington, capture the extraordinary coastal light with warmth and directness.

Pace taught for many years at Pratt Institute in New York, mentoring generations of younger American painters. His paintings are held in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum, and other major American collections, where they remain among the most personally realized bodies of work produced by an American painter of his generation.