Visual art has aspired, at least for the past century, to go beyond itself, to leap down from its two-dimensional plane and break free of the stasis of carved and molded form, in order to achieve the sort of experiential immediacy that has always been the province of music, literature, and architecture. In recent years, installations, moving sculpture, and performance art have been only a few of the chosen means of expressing this dissatisfaction with the traditional limits of art.

But the fact remains that a truly inspired abstract painting can achieve something every bit as rich and encompassing as music, through the sheer perfection of its art. Pat Steir achieves that perfection when she is at her best, as is often the case in her new exhibition at Cheim & Read. The show contains eight paintings, all executed in 2007.

It helps, of course, that her paintings are very big, as big as the “Water Lilies” of Monet or the so-called action paintings of Jackson Pollock. They take up most of a gallery wall, and as such, they easily extend beyond the farthest reaches of peripheral vision to overwhelm completely the viewers’ visual field.

But there have been many abstract paintings over the past half century that have been big and also bad, that were dead on arrival, through a flatness of paint texture or a fake exuberance in the use of impasto. Others works that are more competently achieved have been branded with what, for the moment, is the art world’s most damning put-down — classification as “eye candy.”

But the works of Ms. Steir, despite their ravishing loveliness, are never merely beautiful. Invariably, they offer the powerful intimation of something that emerges from the paint itself, but that also transcends it.

It is almost a cliché to invoke Chinese landscapes and what the press release calls “Taoist philosophy’s concern for a connection between man, nature and the elemental world” when discussing the canvases of Ms. Steir. Yet the fact remains that those concerns really are present in her work, but not in any flimsy or confected way. Instead there is an inexhaustible richness to their transcendence. The charge, the charm of her best works survives the closest and most prolonged inspection. Look as closely as you want at the frail tendrils that stream down the length of these canvases and see if they are ever reduced to mere pigment. Though Ms. Steir was born in Newark, N.J., in 1940, she was well into her 40s when she made the first of her waterfall paintings, which continue to influence what she does today. But that age seems to be auspicious for abstract artists. Kandinsky and de Kooning were also in their mid- to late 40s when they first hit upon the style with which we associate them today.

Even if most of her works since the 1980s are the result of dripping and saturation from the top of the canvas to the bottom, they are meant to be read horizontally, from left to right, their various hushed hues oscillating across the canvas. Such is entirely the case with the three best paintings in the show, “Pink,” “Sunspots II,” and “The Dark.”

In some of her other works on view, however, Ms. Steir departs from her traditional formula by dividing her canvases into geometrically fastidious compartments, usually two halves as precisely divided as in any of the hard edged works of Barnett Newman, but with a distinct sense of the human touch that you find in the stacked zones of Mark Rothko. One of these paintings, “About the Dark,” is divided into two zones of black and off-white. This is an uncharacteristically calamitous work for Ms. Steir. There is none of the transcendent calm of her more traditional work. The critical point of contact between the black and white zones is negotiated by a passage of spark-like markings that resemble flames leaping up from a steel saw. The quality of the paint handling in this transitional passage is so skillful that I can overlook the simplistic bifurcation of the work, which might otherwise seem simply dull. In other works, such as “Black and White,” the artist does indeed tip over into banality, despite the expertly textured skin of her works.

So it is in her waterfall paintings — and in her more recent variations on them at Cheim & Read — rather than in her more geometric works, that Ms. Steir exhibits her true genius. There is something in the deep beauty and controlled competence of these paintings that fully deserves to be called classic. What they achieve is almost unparalleled in the art of our time: painting in the grand manner.

Until December 22 (547 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-242-7727).