Merce Cunningham died on Sunday night. He was 90. His curiosity about life and art was ageless.

Dance critic Alistair Macauley, in Cunningham’s New York Times obit, writes:

Mr. Cunningham ranks with Isadora Duncan, Serge Diaghilev, Martha Graham and George Balanchine in making people rethink the essence of dance and choreography, posing a series of "But" and "What if?" questions over a career of nearly seven decades.

The short, short version of those amazing decades: A gay kid from Centralia, Washington (he sensed something different about himself at age 2, Macauley notes) grows up taking tap and ballroom dance, studies for a brief period in Washington, D.C. then returns to Washington State in the late 1930s when, at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts, he soaks up not just dance but theater, Abstract Expressionism, anthropology, and avant garde composition—the latter of which particularly informs his life and art after he meets John Cage, the iconoclast who’d become his lover and frequent collaborator until Cage’s death in 1992. A move to New York brings work with Martha Graham, the New York City Ballet, his own company and a remarkably inspired career as a dancer and choreographer.

Though that career first soared after he clicked with Cage’s musical experimentation, Cunningham possessed an inquisitive daring that took in everything around him for the rest of his life—art, literature, religion (he and Cage were Zen Buddhists), nature, pop culture, technology.

Let’s keep it simple: Cunningham never stopped challenging himself. That he also challenged the rest of us is our enduring good fortune.