Pat Steir, who made a name for herself via wall-size abstractions that she achieved by pouring paint from a ladder, died on Wednesday in Manhattan of natural causes. She was 87.Her death was confirmed by her husband Joost Elffers, her niece Lily Sukoneck-Cohen, and Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth, which had represented Steir since 2022.“Working so closely with Pat Steir—spending so much time with her, immersed in her work together and enjoying such a close friendship—counts among the great privileges of my career,” Payot said in a statement. “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, in a practice that also involved writing, performance, and mentoring.”Nearly three decades into her career, in the late 1980s, Steir devised a process that would bring her widespread fame. From a ladder, and later from a cherry picker, she poured oil paint in varying levels of viscosity down upright canvases, allowing gravity to be her collaborator.“It’s chance within limitations. I decide the colors and make simple divisions to the canvas, and then basically the pouring of the paint paints the painting,” she told ARTnews for a 2012 article title “Pat Steir Paints a Painting.”The first “Waterfalls” began with white paint, but the interplay of color as it settled on the canvas would be key to the appreciation of these abstractions. “White over pink over green makes orange,” she said in a 2017 interview. “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 would be liberating for her, moving her to eschew paintbrushes for the next four decades. She’d recall the choice fondly in numerous interviews she gave over the years.Pat Steir, Sixteen Waterfalls of Dreams, Memories and Sentiment, 1990.©Pat Steir/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth/The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkSteir said the choice was related to the concerns of the contemporary art world and its contempt, at the time, for abstract painting. “I was thinking more about antimodernism,” she told the Smithsonian Archives of American Art for an oral history in 2008. When pressed if she meant “post-modernism,” Steir said she preferred the term “anti-modernism.”She continued, “Though these look like modernist paintings, you know, and minimalist paintings. But I was thinking about antimodernism. Yes, you could call it postmodernism. I was thinking, is there postmodernism? Is there such a thing? And now, with the art that’s being done now, it’s hard to say there is.”Steir was born Iris Patricia Sukoneck in 1938 in Newark, New Jersey. Her father’s side were Russian Jews who immigrated to the US ahead of World War I, and her mother’s father was a Sephardic Jew from Egypt who came to the US via London. Early on, Steir decided to go by Pat, finding the name Iris made her self-conscious, according to a 1985 profile of her in ARTnews. She moved around New Jersey in her childhood, with the family following her father as he took jobs at businesses specializing in silkscreening, window displays, and neon signs produced for highways. “He was sad. He wanted to be an artist,” she recalled of her father in the 2008 oral history, adding that feeding his family kept him from those dreams. But the window display business required he carry a van full of plaster ice cream sodas or three-quarter cut-outs of the president. “When I saw the work of Dan Flavin and Claes Oldenburg in the ’60s, I thought, This looks familiar,” she told ARTnews in 1985. “I’m one of the few people who look at Pop art and cry. It makes me think of my father.”Pat Steir, Moon Beam, 2005.©Pat Steir/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth/Princeton University Art MuseumHer father was initially encouraging, buying her a paint set when she was younger, though as she grew up, he worried she wouldn’t be able to make a living as an artist. “I was the class poet when I was five years old. I always knew I wanted to be an artist, or I always felt I was a poet and an artist,” she said. The art classes at Steir’s class weren’t as serious as she might have hoped for an aspiring artist, so instead, she would cut class and go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she could be found “sitting on the floor, spreading my books out on the floor, looking at the artwork, eating apples, that after a while the guards didn’t even chase me away.”Steir received a scholarship to attend Smith College’s English department, but she was bent on studying art, which she couldn’t do at the school. She spoke to her high school principal, who helped her get an interview at the Pratt Institute. Since it was already June, she was immediately admitted for the 1956–57 academic year. At the time, Pratt didn’t have a painting department, so she enrolled in graphic arts and illustration, studying with painters Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, and Richard Lindner. Having trouble making ends meet despite her partial scholarships, Steir stayed at Pratt for only two years. “This decision caused a big break with my family,” she said in the 1985 interview.In 1958, she married her high school best friend, Merle Steir—“not a sweetheart,” she confirmed in the oral history—who was going to Harvard University, and she moved to Boston. (That marriage was short lived.) She first enrolled in School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, then she soon transferred to Boston University, where she met Brice Marden. She returned to New York and continued studying at Pratt, receiving a BFA in 1961.Around this time, she settled into an apartment on Mulberry Street in Lower Manhattan that she would maintain for decades. She had her first solo show in 1964 at Terry Dintenfass Gallery in New York, which she achieved after walking into the gallery with her slides.Pat Steir, Looking for the Mountain, 1971.©Pat Steir/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth/Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.Her next New York solo came in 1971 at Graham Gallery, and her breakthrough would come the following year when curator Marcia Tucker included her in the 1972 Whitney Annual. She soon became immersed in the New York art world, quitting her day job as an art director at a publishing house. By the mid-’70s, she was heading toward abstraction, showing paintings of crossed-out roses.That decade would also see her become immersed in the feminist art movement, during which time she was a cofounder, alongside the likes of Lucy Lippard, Joan Synder, Miriam Schapiro, and Harmony Hammond, of the feminist artist collective Heresies. But she bristled at the movement’s orthodoxy that her paintings should have a feminist bent to them. “I became an artist against all odds and nobody was going to tell me what imagery is good for me,” she told the New York Times in 2019.In addition to her art practice, Steir was also a prolific teacher, holding appointments at Pratt and the California Institute of the Arts. Her students include some of the next generation’s most celebrated painters, like David Salle, Ross Bleckner, and Amy Sillman.Pat Steir, The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style), 1982–84.©Pat Steir/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth/Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, SwitzerlandBy the mid-1980s, she had been living half of each year in Amsterdam, having been drawn to the city by its art history, Rembrandt and van Gogh, specifically. A train ride back from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, during which she began to cut up a poster of a Jan Brueghel the Elder still life, would ultimately inspire her 64-panel work The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style), in which squares of different floral still lifes—from across art history, with the likes of Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Rothko, Kandinsky, and Basquiat all getting panels—juxtaposed together in a massive grid.“I feel there’s very little difference between the stylistic modes of art-historical periods” she said of her approach in the 1985 ARTnews profile. “All art making is research, selection, a combination of thinking and intuition, a connection between history and humanity.”Her “Waterfalls” series would come next, and her rise to art world fame would steadily continue for the rest of her career, though she wryly told the Times in 2019 that she had been “forgotten and rediscovered many times.” In 2020, she would be the subject of a documentary by Veronica Gonzalez Peña titled Pat Steir: Artist.1982-1984©Pat Steir/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth/Long Museum, Shanghai, ChinaSteir was making new paintings up until her final days. “The big influence on my life has been my life,” she told ARTnews in the 1985 profile. “As children we’re instilled with certain beliefs of what ‘life’ should be. But in order to find any comfort we have to let go of those ideas; we can’t allow ourselves to be locked into one point of view. The subject of my work is point of view, our way of seeing. I try to see through the eyes of many others.”