Pat Steir, the indomitable American painter who spent half a century exploring the fraught, exhilarating threshold between control and surrender, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 87.
Her death was confirmed by her family, noting she passed of natural causes.
Ms. Steir was one of the few women of her generation to force her way into the macho, male-dominated arena of monumental abstraction and successfully rewrite its rules. She is best known for her sumptuous, large-scale “Waterfall” paintings, a series she began in the late 1980s that effectively removed the brush from the canvas. Instead of applying pigment with a traditional stroke, she let gravity, time, and chance do the heavy lifting. The results were breathtaking: soaring, visceral veils of thinned oil paint that cascaded down the canvas in shimmering streams of silver, white, and electric blue, evoking both the natural world and the very act of their own making.
She possessed a relentless intellectual curiosity that guided her through a wildly varied early career. Born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in 1938 in Newark, she graduated from the Pratt Institute in 1962. In the vibrant, messy art world of 1970s New York, she found herself at the nexus of several overlapping circles. She was a founding board member of the feminist journal Heresies and the Printed Matter bookshop, and she engaged in deep dialogues with Minimalist and Conceptual heavyweights like Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, and Lawrence Weiner.
But Ms. Steir was never one to be easily categorized. She chafed against the rigid dogmas of Minimalism. Instead, she looked further afield, studying Chinese landscape painting, Taoist philosophy, and the meditative compositions of John Cage. This global, omnivorous approach allowed her to forge a visual language that was wholly her own. Her canvases became arenas not for macho angst, but for a kind of disciplined letting go.
“I stood on a ladder and made a wave gesture and threw the paint at the canvas,” Ms. Steir observed in 2019, describing her physically demanding studio process. “I never dripped paint. I poured or threw it. Dripping is not macho enough for me.”
That single, wry observation captures the essence of her project. She was taking the visual vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism—the drips of Jackson Pollock, the expansive color fields of Mark Rothko—and subverting it with a knowing, feminist wink. Where Pollock’s drips were about pure ego and action, Ms. Steir’s pours were about collaboration with the natural forces of the universe.
Over the decades, she remained remarkably prolific, showing regularly at elite institutions and constantly reinventing her practice. After a long tenure at Cheim & Read, she was represented in her later years by Lévy Gorvy and, most recently, the mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth. Even in her eighties, she was executing ambitious, site-specific installations, including a sweeping 2019 exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden that proved her command of color and scale had only grown sharper with age.
Pat Steir didn’t just paint water; she painted the passage of time, the weight of the world, and the quiet thrill of letting go. In doing so, she permanently altered the landscape of contemporary painting, leaving behind a legacy that is as boundless and enduring as the cascading infinities she so brilliantly captured.