By the end of the decade, however, Ms. Weber and art’s mainstream had moved on. She returned to painting, re-creating photographs she had taken of fruit stands and garbage on New York City streets — the commercial products that Pop once celebrated now left to rot.

She continued to show in galleries and museums, some of which acquired her art, among them the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She taught at New York University for more than a decade and then at Harvard.

As Ms. Weber traveled abroad in the 1980s and ’90s, her subject matter and style shifted toward nature — gardens, grass, landscapes — while her brush strokes loosened. She began assembling, in 2000, an installation of more than 500 paintings, drawings, watercolors and prints of heads that she had made over the past half century. Titled “Head Room” and exhibited in 2004 by the Nassau County Museum of Art on Long Island, it was unlike anything she had done before.

If there was one through line to Ms. Weber’s long and varied career, it was her close observation of the details of the world around her — what Ms. Chaffee called “the critical gaze of the real.” It’s present in her scenes of corporate life and in her swirling paintings of the horizon, which look like the work of different people. She spent her life exploring that impulse in many forms.

“Art historians, art critics and dealers sometimes make it sound like an artist’s development is like a single thread,” Ms. Weber once observed. “More often it’s like a rope with several strands intertwined and revolving around one another.” She added, “This certainly has been the case for me.”