Pat Steir valuation

Pat Steir (1938–2026) was born in Newark, New Jersey. She studied at Pratt Institute under Richard Lindner and Philip Guston, then at Boston University's College of Fine Arts, and returned to Pratt for her BFA in 1962. Her work of the 1970s, built on signs and symbols, was close to minimal and conceptual art, and she was a founding board member of Printed Matter and a member of the Heresies Collective, which produced the feminist journal Heresies. Crown Point Press began publishing her prints in 1977, and from 1989 she made her Waterfall paintings by pouring and splashing thinned oil paint down upright canvases from a ladder, letting gravity and chance shape the image. Exhibitions included The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style), organised by the Brooklyn Museum in 1984, Documenta IX in 1992, and in 2019 Silent Secret Waterfalls at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and Color Wheel at the Hirshhorn Museum. Her work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Guggenheim and Tate. She lived in Greenwich Village and had a studio in Chelsea, New York.

Her work includes unique paintings on canvas, works on paper and prints in aquatint, drypoint and other techniques. For a print, check the edition number, the signature, the paper and the publisher or printer, often Crown Point Press. Works on paper should be looked at for fading, staining and handling marks, and a gallery invoice and the date of the work should go with any piece.