Pat Steir’s Path to the “Waterfall” Paintings Runs Through Publishing, Feminist Print Culture, and a 64-Panel Vanitas
Pat Steir’s best-known paintings look as if they were made by gravity as much as by hand: veils of pigment poured and thrown down upright canvases, accumulating into theatrical cascades. But the New York-based artist’s route to those “Waterfall” works was anything but linear, shaped by early museum exposure, years in publishing, and deep involvement in the print and feminist art worlds.
Steir was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1938 to parents who had hoped to become artists themselves. The family was cash-strapped, yet her parents encouraged her ambitions. In 1956, she began a BFA at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, where she studied under the socially engaged painter Philip Guston and the genre-bending artist Richard Lindner. After a period in Boston during her brief marriage to Merle Steir, she completed her degree at Pratt in 1962.
Recognition arrived early. Over the next two years, Steir appeared in group exhibitions at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York — a notable run for an artist just out of school.
Like many artists of her generation, Steir built a parallel career to keep her studio practice afloat. She took illustration work for major publishing houses including Doubleday and Harper & Row. Around 1964, a supervisor at Harper & Row left the company and offered Steir the job. She accepted, then later departed at the end of the 1960s to teach illustration at Parsons the New School for Design and, subsequently, painting at the California Institute of the Arts. When she left publishing, she passed the position to her sister. “We looked similar,” Steir recalled in 2008. “Nobody actually noticed the difference.”
By the mid-1970s, Steir’s life in art expanded beyond the studio. In 1975, she stopped teaching and returned to New York after traveling to Paris with the minimalist artist Sol LeWitt. The following year, they helped establish Printed Matter, the nonprofit bookstore that became a cornerstone for artists’ books and independent publishing. In 1977, Steir joined 18 other artists in founding Heresies, the influential feminist art journal that helped define a generation’s debates around gender, politics, and representation.
That same year, Steir began working with Crown Point Press, the celebrated fine art print workshop. She had met its founder, Kathan Brown, through LeWitt, and the relationship would become pivotal. In 1982, Crown Point Press sent Steir to Japan as the first artist in its Kyoto printmaking program. There, she studied with artisans trained in traditional Japanese woodblock methods and developed a deeper appreciation for Chinese literati landscapes — a visual language that would later echo through her own work.
Even as her professional world widened, Steir’s painting practice sharpened. Around the time of her first museum solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1973, she began the body of work that brought her early acclaim: paintings of roses that she deliberately crossed out. The gesture nodded to Gertrude Stein’s famous line “a rose is a rose is a rose,” but Steir framed the motif less as a symbol than as a problem to be dismantled. “With the rose I wasn’t referencing any one meaning; it was simply a generic symbol,” she said in 2011. “I crossed out that symbol to make a painting without an image.”
Her interrogation of style and authorship intensified in the early 1980s. Shortly after completing it, Steir presented her monumental 64-panel painting “The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style)” (1982–84) at the Brooklyn Museum. Drawing on Marcel Duchamp’s strategy of quotation, she remade a Brueghel floral still life again and again, filtering it through the signatures of major figures in Western art history — a sweeping, analytic performance of influence.
From there, the “Waterfall” paintings emerged as both a technical and philosophical pivot. In these semi-abstract works, Steir set aside the brush in favor of time, gravity, and the physical behavior of paint. She described the process in 2019 as a bodily act: climbing a ladder, making a wave-like motion, and throwing paint at the canvas so it could pour downward. The results sometimes invite comparisons to Jackson Pollock, but Steir has been pointed about the distinction. “I never dripped paint,” she said. “I poured or threw it. Dripping is not macho enough for me.”
Steir’s pace has remained relentless. Between 1990 and 2025, she staged at least one exhibition each year at a prominent museum or gallery somewhere in the world. Over the decades, her market has risen and fallen, even as her influence — spanning painting, printmaking, and the infrastructures of feminist and independent publishing — has continued to deepen.
Taken together, Steir’s career reads as a sustained argument for painting as both image and idea: a medium that can quote, negate, and finally surrender to the elegant inevitability of gravity.
