Merce Cunningham, the endlessly inquisitive choreographer who revolutionized modern dance and helped change the course of modern art, died Sunday night at his Manhattan apartment. He was 90. A spokeswoman for the Cunningham Dance Foundation said Cunningham died in his sleep of natural causes.

In his 60-year career, Cunningham's status changed from reviled radical to revered artistic genius. Although in recent years he used a wheelchair because of arthritis, Cunningham remained creative until the end of his life, perpetually curious about what he might discover, always eager to challenge himself and others. His most recent dance, Nearly 90, premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in April.

When arthritis forced him to create dances on a computer, Cunningham found new inspiration by intentionally making the choreography nearly impossible for his dancers to do. In the process ``all of us find out something that we don't know about,'' he told The Miami Herald in 2007. ``Something that no one had been able to see or feel or sense before.''

``He did not allow convention to lead him, but was a true artist,'' said Trevor Carlson, executive director of the Cunningham Dance Foundation. ``His approach to art and life opened so many paths for others -- not to follow, but to discover.''

Born in 1919, Cunningham grew up in the small town of Centralia, Wash., where he studied with a former vaudeville dancer. In college at the Cornish School in Seattle, he met the composer John Cage, who would become his lifelong creative and personal partner. Soon after, during summer classes at Mills College in Oakland, Cunningham met Martha Graham, the godmother of modern dance, and moved to New York in 1939 to perform with her company.

He left Graham in 1944, starting his own troupe in 1953. He and Cage broke with Graham and modern dance's principle that dance must be generated by emotion or tell a story, and followed a new aesthetic philosophy. Movement was sufficient unto itself, something Cunningham called ``a spiritual exercise in physical form . . . a visible action of life.''

They used chance procedures such as tossing coins to set sequences of steps or sounds, freeing themselves from their own habits and inspirations and opening themselves up to larger creative forces. Dance, music and decor were made separately, and only brought together for the performance.

``The way we work, where each of the elements, the composer and visual artist are free, I think brings up ideas that no one of us would have thought of alone,'' Cunningham said in 2007. ``I find that incomparably, impossibly exciting.''

Cunningham, Cage and their tiny company struggled with rejection and poverty until 1964, when a successful European tour paved the way for acceptance at home. Cunningham and Cage's ideas were part of a larger cultural shift to post-modernism, and attracted groundbreaking visual artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.

Although Cunningham was heaped with acclaim and honors at the end of his life -- including Kennedy Center Honors in 1985 and the National Medal of Arts in 1990 -- for many he remained a confounding, even incomprehensible, artist.

Since Cage passed away in 1992, Cunningham remained productive and adventurous, incorporating new technology, using three-dimensional animation for his dance Biped, and attracting rock artists such as Radiohead and Sonic Youth to compose for him.

He and his company visited Miami for the first and only time in 2007, for a 10-day residency at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts that included an exhibit at MOCA and commissioning Miami artist Daniel Arsham to create a set for the premiere of a new piece, eyeSpace.

Alberto Ibargüen, president of the Knight Foundation and a former Cunningham board member, made the visit possible with a $250,000 grant. ``I thought it made sense that a place that was still inventing itself match itself with a dance company that was always reinventing itself,'' Ibargüen said Monday. ``In a time of extraordinary change, he changed himself and his dance and stayed a step or two ahead.''

If Cunningham was always moving ahead in his art, he also took steps to safeguard his past. In June, officials of the Cunningham Foundation announced the formation of the Merce Cunningham Trust, which will oversee the licensing of his dances and related archives and materials. Plans are for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to embark on a two-year world tour.

Even as he anticipated his dances continuing without him, Cunningham acknowledged that change was inevitable. ``These dancers are different, so you can't expect [the dances] to look how they did in the beginning,'' he said. ``It's rather a thing of acceptance.''

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