Pat Steir and Francesco Clemente have lived across from one another in the MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens historic district for thirty years. They took portraits of the other this summer. | Portraits by Pat Steir and Francesco Clemente, courtesy Lévy Gorvy

Painters Pat Steir and Francesco Clemente spent the pandemic painting and chatting with one another across their back yard. Painters Pat Steir, 80, and Francesco Clemente, 68, have been neighbors for three decades and friends for even longer. They?re from a generation of artists who came into their own during the 1970s and 1980s and settled in then-raffish parts of town which have since become almost unbearably polished. Steir, who once wryly told the New York Times that she?d been ?forgotten and rediscovered many times,? has a new documentary about her life and work. Clemente has had a steady and successful career. They live across from one another at the MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens, a courtyard in Greenwich Village that you can only access from the townhouses surrounding it. Inside, you?ll find a stone path looping around a lawn and very tall trees. ?When we moved in there in 1990, I sort of elbowed my way into controlling the garden,? Steir says. ?So I planted, with the help of two other neighbors, shrubs and grass and we made it what we thought was beautiful.?
It?s one of those old New York spaces that seem like they should?ve disappeared years ago, and in some ways it already has. Condos are now adjacent to the hi...