Pat Steir, the New York-based printmaker and painter famed for her iconic “Waterfall” canvases, has died at age 87. Steir’s husband, Joost Elffers, and her niece Lily Sukoneck-Cohen confirmed that the artist died of natural causes in Manhattan on the morning of March 25.
Steir was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1938 to cash-strapped parents who’d tried and failed to become artists—yet encouraged her pursuits. She embarked on her BFA from Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute in 1956, studying under the socially engaged painter Philip Guston and his genre-blending cohort Richard Lindner. After a stint in Boston during her brief marriage to Merle Steir, the artist finished at Pratt in 1962. She featured in group shows at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and New York’s MoMA over the next two years.
Pat Steir, Sixteen Waterfalls of Dreams, Memories, and Sentiment (1990). © Pat Steir, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Steir started illustrating for publishing houses Doubleday and Harper & Row to sustain her creative ambitions. Around 1964, her boss at the latter firm left—and offered Steir her job. When Steir departed at the end of the decade to teach illustration at Parsons the New School for Design, then painting at the California Institute of the Arts, she gave her publishing job to her sister. “We looked similar,” Steir said in 2008. “Nobody actually noticed the difference.”
In 1975, she quit teaching and returned to New York after traveling to Paris with the minimalist Sol LeWitt. They helped co-found the nonprofit art bookstore Printed Matter in 1976. Steir’s literary connections deepened the following year, when she joined 18 other artists in forming the feminist art journal Heresies. In 1977, Steir also started working at the renowned fine art printmaker Crown Point Press, whose founder Kathan Brown she’d met with LeWitt.
Pat Steir, photographed by James Stiles. © Pat Steir, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Steir’s paintings continued deepening all the while. Around the time of her debut museum show at Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1973, Steir started creating he first body of work to achieve true acclaim—paintings of crossed out roses referencing Getrude Stein’s response to Shakespeare’s famous quote about roses, wherein the novelist remarked “a rose is a rose is a rose.”
“With the rose I wasn’t referencing any one meaning; it was simply a generic symbol,” Steir said in 2011. “I crossed out that symbol to make a painting without an image.”
Pat Steir, Word Unheard (1974). © Pat Steir, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
She continued probing her medium, presenting her monumental, 64-panel painting The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style) (1982–84) at the Brooklyn Museum shortly after finishing it. Drawing from Marcel Duchamp’s penchant for “quoting” famous artworks, Steir recreated each panel of Brueghel’s floral still life in the distinctive styles of western art history’s greatest names.
The year 1982 brought another crucial moment: Steir became the first artist that Crown Point Press sent to Japan for its printmaking program in Kyoto, where she studied under artisans trained in traditional Japanese woodblock printing and gained a deeper appreciation for Chinese literati landscapes.
Pat Steir, Yellow and Blue One-Stroke Waterfall (1992) © Pat Steir, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Those travels naturally fed into the development of Steir’s theatrical, meditative, and semi-abstract “Waterfall” paintings, for which she remains best-known. Here, Steir traded her paintbrush for the ephemeral tools of gravity and time, pouring paint over upright canvases. “I stood on a ladder and made a wave gesture and threw the paint at the canvas,” Steir said in 2019, before venturing a dig at Jackson Pollock, whose work her Waterfalls periodically evoke. “I never dripped paint,” she said. “I poured or threw it. Dripping is not macho enough for me.”
Steir never let up. She staged at least one exhibition at an esteemed museum or gallery around the world every year between 1990 and 2025. But, her market did fluctuate over the decades—receiving a notable boost once Steir left her longtime gallery Cheim & Read for Lévy Gorvy Dayan (then Lévy Gorvy) in 2016. Steir outdid her existing auction record three times over in 2017. Her current auction high watermark was set in 2018, when Phillips sold her bright Elective Affinity Waterfall (1992) for $2.2 million.
Installation view, Color Wheel at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2019–21) Photo by Lee Stalsworth © Pat Steir, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Steir never stopped evolving as an artist, either. Her Split series grew out of the Waterfalls in the aughts. In 2019, Steir unveiled her largest-ever installation, at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.. She took cues from younger artists like Mickalene Thomas and Rita Ackermann too, as Steir noted after debuting her new California-inspired Waterfall works at Hauser & Wirth in 2023, one year after joining the mega gallery—which still represents Steir alongside Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, and Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin.
“She emerged out of minimalism and conceptualism, but Pat created a visual language wholly her own—a new kind of abstraction that encompasses poetry and philosophy,” Hauser and Wirth president Marc Payot said in a statement regarding Steir’s death. “That Pat worked until the very last of her days is testament to the power of her vision and the fierceness of will that really defines great artists.” Steir’s spirit will shine on in her survey show, opening at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill next May.