The Abstract painter Pat Steir has died in Manhattan. She was 87 and was making new paintings until the end. Her death was confirmed by her husband, Joost Elffers, her niece, Lily Sukoneck-Cohen, and Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth, which had represented her since 2022. “She emerged out of minimalism and conceptualism,” Payot said, “but Pat created a visual language wholly her own, a new kind of abstraction that encompasses poetry and philosophy.”
Born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in 1938 in Newark, New Jersey, into a family of immigrants, Russian Jews on her father’s side, her maternal grandfather was a Sephardic Jew from Egypt who had come via London. Her father wanted to be an artist but never managed to become one. He ran a window display business. He bought his daughter a paint set when she was young, but as she grew up, he worried that she wouldn’t be able to make a living. He was thankfully wrong to worry.
She described herself as a poet and an artist from the age of five. The art classes at her school weren’t serious enough, so she skipped them and went instead to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she would sit on the floor with her books, eating apples, until eventually the guards stopped chasing her away. A scholarship to Smith College’s English department was redirected; she wanted to study art, not literature, and through her high school principal, she secured a late interview at the Pratt Institute, arriving in time for the 1956–57 academic year. Pratt had no painting department, so she enrolled in graphic arts and illustration, studying under Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston and Richard Lindner. She stayed two years before money ran out. “This decision caused a big break with my family.”
She married her high school best friend in 1958, “not a sweetheart,” as she later confirmed, and moved to Boston, where she studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts before transferring to Boston University, where she met Brice Marden. Back in New York, she finished her BFA at Pratt in 1961, settled into an apartment on Mulberry Street in Lower Manhattan that she would keep for decades, and began the slow, difficult business of building a practice.
Her first solo show came in 1964 at Terry Dintenfass Gallery; she walked in with her slides, the way you did then. The breakthrough came in 1972, when curator Marcia Tucker included her in the Whitney Annual. She quit her day job as an art director at a publishing house. By the mid-seventies, she was heading toward abstraction, showing paintings of crossed-out roses, and becoming immersed in the feminist art movement. She co-founded Heresies, the feminist artist collective, alongside Lucy Lippard, Joan Snyder, Miriam Schapiro and Harmony Hammond. But she pushed back against the movement’s demand that her paintings carry explicitly feminist content. “I became an artist against all odds, and nobody was going to tell me what imagery is good for me.” That stubbornness — principled, clear-eyed, occasionally costly runs through everything she did.
By the mid-eighties, she was spending half each year in Amsterdam, drawn by Rembrandt and Van Gogh. A train journey back from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, during which she began cutting up a poster of a Jan Brueghel the Elder still life, led to The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style). This 64-panel grid drew on art history, with panels responding to Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Rothko, Kandinsky, and Basquiat. The work sits at the intersection of homage and analysis. “I feel there’s very little difference between the stylistic modes of art-historical periods.”
Then came the Waterfalls, and everything changed.
In the late 1980s, nearly three decades into her career, Steir climbed a ladder and poured oil paint of varying viscosities onto an upright canvas. She let gravity do the work. The first series began with white paint, but the interaction of colours as they settled, mixing in the eye rather than on the palette, was the revelation. “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 colour through another.” She would go on to use cherry pickers rather than ladders as the work grew. She put down her paintbrush and didn’t pick it up again for forty years.
The Waterfalls brought her fame, though, in 2019, she noted with characteristic dryness that she had been “forgotten and rediscovered many times” over the course of her career. A 2020 documentary by Veronica Gonzalez Peña, Pat Steir: Artist, introduced her to a new generation. Hauser & Wirth took her on in 2022. The institutional recognition was late. It was also genuine.
She was a prolific teacher at Pratt and CalArts, and her students included David Salle, Ross Bleckner and Amy Sillman. That’s a lineage worth noting. The influence extended well beyond the walls she covered.
“The big influence on my life has been my life,” she said in 1985. “The subject of my work is the point of view, our way of seeing. I try to see through the eyes of many others.”
She is survived by her husband, Joost Elffers, and her niece, Lily Sukoneck-Cohen. The studio team who worked alongside her for decades Liam van Loenen, Alexis Myre and Shaun Acton are recognised in the gallery’s statement with the kind of specificity that feels right. Making work at that scale, over that many years, is never a solitary act.
Her Gallery Hauser & Wirth stated:
It is with great sadness that Iwan and Manuela Wirth, together with Marc Payot, Co-Presidents of the gallery, announce the passing of New York-based artist Pat Steir, shortly before her 88th birthday. Steir is survived by her husband, Joost Elffers, and her niece, Lily Sukoneck-Cohen. Along with Andrea Glimcher, who has served as the artist’s longtime advisor, we extend our deepest condolences to Pat’s family and her extraordinary network of friends and colleagues at home and internationally. We would also like to recognise the extraordinary dedication of her studio team—Liam van Loenen, Alexis Myre, and Shaun Acton—who worked alongside Pat for decades with remarkable care, loyalty, and commitment.