{"id":1848543,"date":"2026-03-25T20:50:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T17:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1848543"},"modified":"2026-03-25T20:50:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T17:50:13","slug":"pat-steir-dead-waterfalls-painter-dies-at-87","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1848543","title":{"rendered":"Pat Steir Dead: ‘Waterfalls’ Painter Dies at 87"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tPat Steir, who made a name for herself via wall-size abstractions that she achieved by pouring paint from a ladder, died on Wednesday in Manhattan of natural causes. She was 87.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer death was confirmed by her husband Joost Elffers, her niece Lily Sukoneck-Cohen, and Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth, which had represented Steir since 2022.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWorking so closely with\u00a0Pat\u00a0Steir\u2014spending so much time with her, immersed in her work together and enjoying such a close friendship\u2014counts among the great privileges of my career,\u201d Payot said in a statement.\u00a0\u201cShe emerged out of minimalism and conceptualism, but\u00a0Pat\u00a0created a visual language wholly her own\u2014a new kind of abstraction that encompasses poetry and philosophy, in a practice that also involved writing, performance, and mentoring.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNearly three decades into her career, in the late 1980s, Steir devised a process that would bring her widespread fame. From a ladder, and later from a cherry picker, she poured oil paint in varying levels of viscosity down upright canvases, allowing gravity to be her collaborator.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s chance within limitations. I decide the colors and make simple divisions to the canvas, and then basically the pouring of the paint paints the painting,\u201d she told ARTnews<\/em> for a 2012 article title \u201cPat Steir Paints a Painting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first \u201cWaterfalls\u201d began with white paint, but the interplay of color as it settled on the canvas would be key to the appreciation of these abstractions. \u201cWhite over pink over green makes orange,\u201d she said in a 2017 interview. \u201cThe green makes it pink, because what you see is being mixed in your eye, not on the palette. You see one color through another.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Pat Steir, Sixteen Waterfalls of Dreams, Memories and Sentiment<\/em>, 1990.<\/span>\u00a9Pat Steir\/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth\/The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThe decision would be liberating for her, moving her to eschew paintbrushes for the next four decades. She\u2019d recall the choice fondly in numerous interviews she gave over the years.<\/p>\n

\n\tSteir said the choice was related to the concerns of the contemporary art world and its contempt, at the time, for abstract painting. \u201cI was thinking more about antimodernism,\u201d she told the Smithsonian Archives of American Art for an oral history in 2008. When pressed if she meant \u201cpost-modernism,\u201d Steir said she preferred the term \u201canti-modernism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe continued, \u201cThough these look like modernist paintings, you know, and minimalist paintings. But I was thinking about antimodernism. Yes, you could call it postmodernism. I was thinking, is there postmodernism? Is there such a thing? And now, with the art that\u2019s being done now, it\u2019s hard to say there is.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Pat Steir, Red and Red<\/em>, 2014. <\/span>Pat Steir\/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth\/Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tSteir was born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in 1938 in Newark, New Jersey.\u00a0Her father\u2019s side were Russian Jews who immigrated to the US ahead of World War I.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tEarly on, Steir decided to go by Pat, finding the name Iris made her self-conscious, according to a 1985 profile of her in ARTnews<\/em>. She moved around New Jersey in her childhood, with the family following her father as he took jobs at businesses specializing in silkscreening, window displays, and neon signs produced for highways.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe was sad. He wanted to be an artist,\u201d she recalled of her father in the 2008 oral history, adding that feeding his family kept him from those dreams. But the window display business required he carry a van full of plaster ice cream sodas or three-quarter cut-outs of the president. \u201cWhen I saw the work of Dan Flavin and Claes Oldenburg in the \u201960s, I thought, This looks familiar,\u201d she told ARTnews<\/em> in 1985. \u201cI\u2019m one of the few people who look at Pop art and cry. It makes me think of my father.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Pat Steir, Moon Beam<\/em>, 2005.<\/span>\u00a9Pat Steir\/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth\/Princeton University Art Museum<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tHer father was initially encouraging, buying her a paint set when she was younger, though as she grew up, he worried she wouldn\u2019t be able to make a living as an artist. \u201cI was the class poet when I was five years old. I always knew I wanted to be an artist, or I always felt I was a poet and an artist,\u201d she said. The art classes at Steir\u2019s class weren\u2019t as serious as she might have hoped for an aspiring artist, so instead, she would cut class and go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she could be found \u201csitting on the floor, spreading my books out on the floor, looking at the artwork, eating apples, that after a while the guards didn\u2019t even chase me away.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSteir received a scholarship to attend Smith College\u2019s English department, but she was bent on studying art, which she couldn\u2019t do at the school. She spoke to her high school principal, who helped her get an interview at the Pratt Institute. Since it was already June, she was immediately admitted for the 1956\u201357 academic year. At the time, Pratt didn\u2019t have a painting department, so she enrolled in graphic arts and illustration, studying with painters Philip Guston and Richard Lindner. Having trouble making ends meet despite her partial scholarships, Steir stayed at Pratt for only two years. \u201cThis decision caused a big break with my family,\u201d she said in the 1985 interview.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1958, she married her high school best friend, Merle Steir\u2014\u201cnot a sweetheart,\u201d she confirmed in the oral history\u2014who was going to Harvard University, and she moved to Boston. (That marriage was short lived.) She first enrolled in School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, then she soon transferred to Boston University, where she met Brice Marden. She returned to New York and continued studying at Pratt, receiving a BFA in 1961.<\/p>\n

\n\tAround this time, she settled into an apartment on Mulberry Street in Lower Manhattan that she would maintain for decades. She had her first solo show in 1964 at Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York, which she achieved after walking into the gallery with her slides.<\/p>\n

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Pat Steir, Looking for the Mountain<\/em>, 1971.<\/span>\u00a9Pat Steir\/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth\/Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tHer next New York solo came in 1971 at Graham Gallery, and her breakthrough would come the following year when curator Marcia Tucker included her in the 1972 Whitney Annual. She soon became immersed in the New York art world, quitting her day job as an art director at a publishing house. By the mid-\u201970s, she was heading toward abstraction, showing paintings of crossed-out roses.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat decade would also see her become immersed in the feminist art movement, during which time she was a cofounder, alongside the likes of Lucy Lippard, Joan Synder, Miriam Schapiro, and Harmony Hammond, of the feminist artist collective Heresies<\/em>. But she bristled at the movement\u2019s orthodoxy that her paintings should have a feminist bent to them. \u201cI became an artist against all odds and nobody was going to tell me what imagery is good for me,\u201d she told the New York Times<\/em> in 2019.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn addition to her art practice, Steir was also a prolific teacher, holding appointments at Pratt and the California Institute of the Arts. Her students include some of the next generation\u2019s most celebrated painters, like David Salle, Ross Bleckner, and Amy Sillman.<\/p>\n

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Pat Steir, The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style)<\/em>, 1982\u201384.<\/span>\u00a9Pat Steir\/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth\/Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, Switzerland<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tBy the mid-1980s, she had been living half of each year in Amsterdam, having been drawn to the city by its art history, Rembrandt and van Gogh, specifically. A train ride back from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, during which she began to cut up a poster of a Jan Brueghel the Elder still life, would ultimately inspire her 64-panel work The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style)<\/em>, in which squares of different floral still lifes\u2014from across art history, with the likes of Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Rothko, Kandinsky, and Basquiat all getting panels\u2014juxtaposed together in a massive grid.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI feel there\u2019s very little difference between the stylistic modes of art-historical periods\u201d she said of her approach in the 1985 ARTnews<\/em> profile. \u201cAll art making is research, selection, a combination of thinking and intuition, a connection between history and humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHer \u201cWaterfalls\u201d series would come next, and her rise to art world fame would steadily continue for the rest of her career, though she wryly told the Times <\/em>in 2019 that she had been \u201cforgotten and rediscovered many times.\u201d In 2020, she would be the subject of a documentary by Veronica Gonzalez Pe\u00f1a titled Pat Steir: Artist<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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1982-1984<\/span>\u00a9Pat Steir\/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth\/Long Museum, Shanghai, China<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tSteir was making new paintings up until her final days. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe big influence on my life has been my life<\/em>,\u201d she told ARTnews<\/em> in the 1985 profile. \u201cAs children we\u2019re instilled with certain beliefs of what \u2018life\u2019 should be. But in order to find any comfort we have to let go of those ideas; we can\u2019t allow ourselves to be locked into one point of view. The subject of my work is<\/em> point of view, our way of seeing. I try to see through the eyes of many others.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Roselli_PatSteirHiRes-1.jpg?w=1024″] Pat Steir, who made a name for herself via wall-size abstractions that she achieved by pouring paint from a ladder, died on Wednesday in Manhattan of natural causes. She was 87. Her death was confirmed by her husband Joost Elffers, her niece Lily Sukoneck-Cohen, and Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1848543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1848543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1848543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1848543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1848543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1848543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1848543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}