Pat Steir, the Artist Who Let Gravity Paint, Dies at 87
Pat Steir, the American painter celebrated for monumental abstractions made by pouring oil paint down upright canvases from a ladder and, later, a cherry picker, died Wednesday in Manhattan of natural causes. She was 87.
Her husband, Joost Elffers, her niece Lily Sukoneck-Cohen, and Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth, confirmed her death. Hauser & Wirth began representing Steir in 2022.
Steir’s name became synonymous with a method she developed in the late 1980s, nearly three decades into her career. In what became her signature “Waterfalls” series, she established a set of parameters — selecting colors, mapping simple divisions across the canvas, and adjusting paint viscosity — then allowed gravity to complete the image. “It’s chance within limitations,” she said in 2012. “I decide the colors and make simple divisions to the canvas, and then basically the pouring of the paint paints the painting.”
The earliest “Waterfalls” began with white paint, but Steir emphasized that the works’ optical complexity depended on how layers of color settled and interacted. In a 2017 interview, she described the way overlapping hues could produce unexpected effects in the viewer’s eye: “White over pink over green makes orange,” she said. “The green makes it pink, because what you see is being mixed in your eye, not on the palette. You see one color through another.”
The decision to abandon the brush proved enduring. Steir returned to pouring for the next four decades, often describing the shift as both a formal liberation and a pointed response to the period’s skepticism toward abstraction. In a 2008 oral history for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, she framed her thinking in terms of “anti-modernism,” a term she preferred to “post-modernism,” even as she acknowledged the paintings’ visual proximity to modernist and minimalist languages.
Steir was born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in 1938 in Newark, New Jersey. She later adopted the name Pat, saying she felt self-conscious about “Iris,” according to a 1985 profile. Her family moved around New Jersey as her father took work connected to commercial display and signage — silkscreening, window displays, and neon for highways. In the 2008 oral history, she recalled his thwarted ambition to be an artist, and she later connected those memories to her emotional response to Pop art. Seeing the work of Dan Flavin and Claes Oldenburg in the 1960s, she said in 1985, “This looks familiar… I’m one of the few people who look at Pop art and cry. It makes me think of my father.”
Steir studied at Pratt Institute (admitted 1956–57), the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Boston University, and received her BFA from Pratt in 1961. Her first solo exhibition opened in 1964 at Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York.
In a statement, Payot described Steir as an artist who “emerged out of minimalism and conceptualism” yet forged “a visual language wholly her own,” adding that her practice encompassed “poetry and philosophy” and extended into “writing, performance, and mentoring.”
Steir’s poured paintings, at once systematic and surrendered to chance, helped expand the terms of late 20th-century abstraction — insisting that control and contingency could share the same surface, and that a single downward flow of paint could carry an entire philosophy of looking.
