When Stephen Pace left Mexico, where he had travelled in 1946 to study art under the G.I. Bill, his first stop was New Orleans. He considered returning to Indiana, but that would have meant being put to work on the farm - a destiny that each of the Pace siblings had managed to evade. While in a New Orleans bus station, Pace decided to leave his future up to a coin flip: a Zen confidence in fate that foreshadows the future acceptance of chance in his painting. Tails would have sent him to San Francisco, but the coin landed heads up so he boarded a Greyhound bus for New York, where he lived in a cheap hotel across from the bus terminal and rode a bus around the city looking for a neighborhood in which he might want to live. During that first year in New York City he did not attend classes, but lived on the unemployment insurance he had accumulated while in the army and painted in a cold-water flat on Mulberry Street in Little Italy that he rented for ten dollars a month.
One evening in 1947, Pace stopped for a beer at the Cedar Tavern, a bar that would later become the favorite hang-out of the New York School artists. The man sitting next to him at the bar turned out to be Franz Kline, an artist who, like Pace, was engaged in a shift from representational to abstract painting. Absorbing the heady atmosphere of New York, Pace became an excited and active member of the group. Among his active friendships were Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Ernest Briggs and Edward Dugmore, all of whom showed interest and support for the emerging younger abstract expressionists.
While painting and frequenting all the popular artists’ watering holes, Pace was singled out by Hans Hofmann as one of the finest young painters to emerge from that generation of artists. Pace began studying with Hofmann in New York, and using his remaining funds from the GI Bill, continued his training during the summer at Hofmann’s school in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Stephen Pace in his studio.
Jack Tworkov, Philip Guston, Mercedes Matter, James Brooks, and Giorgio Cavallon at Cedar Tavern, 1959.
In 1953, one of Pace's large watercolors was prominently included in the Whitney Annual Exhibition of Sculpture and Works on Paper, hanging between works by Kline and Hofmann. The work was singled out for enthusiastic comment in ARTnews by Henry McBride, who referred to the "elegant outpouring" of his paint. Throughout the 1950s Pace continued to be included in the Whitney Annuals and in 1956, Pace was introduced to Elinor Poindexter, a former partner of gallerist Charles Egan who had introduced the work of de Kooning and Kline to the public. By the mid-1950s Poindexter had her own gallery and was showing a combination of figurative and abstract artists including Nell Blaine, Robert De Niro, and Richard Diebenkorn. She began showing Pace's large abstract canvases characterized by gestural and intense yet chromatically sensitive applications of color when ARTnews critic Larry Campbell called them "enormous landscapes of cascading shapes, an orange and black mountain tundras with moonstones gleaming bleakly."
Although Pace’s compositions are created by overlapping configurations of completely abstract forms, his work from this period may evoke his recollected visual experience. Pace spent many hours in his formative years working outdoors, first surrounded by the black soil of the Missouri flatlands and then by the verdant hills of Indiana. Reflecting Hofmann's belief that abstract art should be rooted in nature and the artist's perception of it, in Pace's work from the 1950s we see drifts of white emerge among bold black configurations, intense red and orange themes arise in diagonal jabs, suggesting, still incompletely abstract terms, the dynamism and energy of natural phenomena. All the while his loose application of paint keeps the shapes in tension, preventing the solidification into definitive forms, an essential component of painterly abstraction.
Sally Michel, Stephen Pace, Pam Pace, and Milton Avery at Bearsville, New York, 1949
Pace's work, Untitled 58-26 dating from 1958, expresses the visual language of 1950s Abstract Expressionist painting: hints of the ragged shapes of Clyfford Still, a vibrating chromatic opposition, and an overall expanding and contracting composition that activates the surface and suggests movement. Expressing the ethos of Action Painting, the work strongly exemplifies the principles of Hans Hofmann regarding contrasting elements, the recession of cool colors and the advance of warm ones, and the creation of a pulsating sense of dimension. The jagged royal blue configuration that pervades the canvas is confidently broken up by warm red swaths in the bottom and top right corners of the composition, as irregular, cool gray and white forms subtly emerge from the blue sea. In the left side of the composition the blue expanse is interrupted by bold black configurations, perhaps reminiscent of Franz Kline's gestural use of the color, breaking up the organization and forming a lyrical chromatic analogy with the color blue that balances the intensity of the red on the other side of the composition. Just above and to the right of the center of the canvas, a delicate network of yellow pigment emerges from the dominant blue and black, raising the temperature of that area of the canvas while beginning to produce the color green by amalgamating with the royal blue. By this time Pace had begun applying and mixing the linseed oil medium directly onto the canvas with the wet paint, generating a thick impasto that, when dry, captured the fusion of different pigments and the resulting third hue. Pace recalls the simplicity of his intention and yet the exhilaration while painting abstractly: "I didn't have any idea of what I wanted to do, except make a painting I wanted to look at...I was very tense when I was doing it, like gambling rolling dice with a lot riding on the throw."