CAA News Today
Udo Kultermann: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — March 19, 2013
The following obituary was prepared by the family of the deceased and edited by CAA.
![Udo Kultermann](http://www.collegeart.org/images/obituaries/UdoKultermann.jpg)
Udo Kultermann
Udo Kultermann, an internationally recognized scholar and Ruth and Norman Moore Professor Emeritus of Architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in Saint Louis, died on February 9, 2013, in New York. He was 85 years old.
Born in Germany in 1927, Kultermann received his PhD from the University of Münster and served as the director of the City Art Museum in Leverkusen. He came to the United States in 1967, where he taught at Washington University for over thirty years. Kultermann wrote more than thirty-five books on a wide range of subjects—many of which have been translated into various languages—and published numerous articles in scholarly journals worldwide. His book The History of Art History (1993) is among his most original and cited works.
Kultermann’s specialty was twentieth-century architecture, with a groundbreaking focus on Africa and the Middle East. His interests also included European art and architecture as well as contemporary American art. Recognizing the importance of female performance artists, Kultermann was one of the first art historians to write about them. After retiring from Washington University, he and his wife, Judith Kultermann, moved to New York, where she still resides.
Read more about Kultermann in the Washington University Newsroom.
Carl N. Schmalz Jr.: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — March 19, 2013
The following obituary was submitted by the brother of the deceased, Robert F. Schmalz, and edited by CAA.
![Carl N. Schmalz Jr.](http://www.collegeart.org/images/obituaries/CarlSchmalz.jpg)
Carl N. Schmalz Jr.
Carl N. Schmalz Jr., an artist and art historian who taught for many decades at Bowdoin College and Amherst College and a CAA member since 1951, died February 22, 2013. He was 86 years old.
Born in 1926 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Schmalz was the son of the late Carl N. Schmalz and Esther (Fowler) Schmalz of Belmont, Massachusetts. he earned AB, AM, and PhD degrees in fine arts from Harvard University and was later awarded an honorary degree by Amherst College. He studied watercolor painting with Eliot O’Hara in 1943–44 and began a long teaching career while instructing at the O’Hara School at Goose Rocks Beach in 1946–47. As assistant professor at Bowdoin College from 1952 to 1962, he taught both the history and practice of art, while serving simultaneously as curator and ultimately as associate director of the Walker Art Museum (now the Bowdoin College Museum of Art). He moved to Amherst in 1962 and was made full professor seven years later.
In 1969 Schmalz inaugurated the popular summer Watercolor Workshops in Kennebunkport, Maine, which he ran for twenty years. He retired from Amherst at the end of 1994 but enjoyed teaching watercolor painting at Rock Gardens Inn in Sebasco Estates, Maine, since the early 1990s. He also taught at the Heartwood College of Art in Kennebunk until his recent hospitalization.
Schmalz was the author of several books on watercolor painting and of articles in professional journals. He taught classes, juried many exhibitions, and lectured on the subject of watercolor throughout the United States, as well as in Canada and Bermuda. His work won him election as a charter member of the Watercolor USA Honor Society and national and regional prizes. His artwork was handled by galleries in Maine, Florida, Bermuda, and Boston, and his paintings hang in numerous public collections and in hundreds of private homes. He painted landscapes in Britain and Europe—and loved Italy especially. Apart from the Indian subcontinent, he painted on every continent on the globe. In recent years his particular focus was still life.
Schmalz held a wide range of public-service positions in the communities in which he lived: vice president of the board of directors of the Portland Museum of Art; member of the executive board of Interfaith Housing Corporation in Amherst; president of the board of trustees of Amherst Day School; art consultant for the O’Hara Picture Trust; chairman of the board of assessors in Pelham, Massachusetts; member of the Pelham Arts Lottery Council; and consultant on undergraduate science education for the National Academy of Sciences.
Schmalz leaves his wife Dolores T. Schmalz; his son Mathew N. Schmalz and his wife Kristin; and his daughter Julia I. Schmalz and her partner Janice. He is also survived by two grandchildren, Anna Teresa and Katherine Dolores Schmalz; and two brothers, Robert F. Schmalz of State College, Pennsylvania, and David H. Schmalz of Amsterdam, Holland. His first son, Stephen Theodore Schmalz, predeceased him.
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — December 19, 2012
In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, architects, photographers, and others whose work has significantly influenced the visual arts. The end of 2012 was marked by the loss of the painter Will Barnet, the architect Oscar Niemeyer, and the museum director Gudmund Vigtel.
- Evelyn Ackerman, a Californian artist and designer who worked in mosaics, tapestries, and wood carving, died on November 28, 2012, at age 88. She often collaborated with her husband, the artist Jerome Ackerman; their work was recognized in a retrospective exhibition, Masters of Mid-Century California Modernism, at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego
- Gae Aulenti, the Italian architect and designer who transformed a Paris train station into the Musée d’Orsay, died on October 31, 2012. She was 84. Aulenti also worked on renovations to museums in Barcelona, Istanbul, San Francisco, and Venice
- Takashi Azumaya, an independent Japanese curator, died on October 16, 2012, at the age of 44. After working at the Setagaya Art Museum and the Mori Art Museum, he became the first non-Korean director of the Busan Biennale, which he organized in 2010
- Will Barnet, a painter and printmaker who lived and worked in New York for many decades, passed away on November 13, 2012. He was 101 years old. Barnet, who won CAA’s 2007 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, had taught at the Art Students League and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, among other schools
- Marshall J. Bouldin III, a portraitist based in Mississippi who painted Richard Nixon’s daughters, died on November 12, 2012. He was 89 years old
- David C. Copley, the former owner and publisher of the San Diego Union-Tribune and a philanthropist of the arts, died on November 20, 2012, at age 60. Copley was a member of board of directors for the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
- Johanna Liesbeth de Kooning, the only daughter of the artist Willem de Kooning and the cofounder of his estate and trust, passed away on November 23, 2012. She was 56 years old
- Robert W. Duemling, the former director of the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, and a board member of the Society of Architectural Historians, died on July 13, 2012, at age 83. Duemling had spent four years in naval intelligence and thirty years in the US Foreign Service after earning his master’s degree in the history of art and architecture from Yale University in 1953
- Jacques Dupin, a French poet and art critic, died on October 27, 2012, at the age of 85. A longtime director of Galerie Maeght in Paris, Dupin wrote the official biography of Joan Miró as well as ten monographs on the artist’s work
- Georgia Fee, the cofounder, chief executive officer, and editor-in-chief of Art Slant, died on December 8, 2012. Born in 1951, Fee developed Art Slant from a Los Angeles–based events calendar and online art magazine into a website with an international scope
- Gray Foy, a New York artist and socialite, passed away on November 23, 2012, at the age of 90. Foy received acclaim for his drawing and illustrations in the mid-twentieth century but became better known as a tastemaker and salonnier, hosting parties and events that boasted attendees as diverse as Leonard Bernstein, Cary Grant, and Susan Sontag
- Krisanne Frost, an artist based in San Antonio, Texas, and gallery liaison for the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, died on December 6, 2012. She was 61 years old
- Wendell Garrett, a historian and an appraiser on the television show Antiques Roadshow, died on November 14, 2012. He was 83. Among Garrett’s books are Victorian America: Classical Romanticism to Gilded Opulence (1993) and American Colonial: Puritan Simplicity to Georgian Grace (1995)
- Richard Gordon, a photographer and a maker of handmade books, died on October 6, 2012, at age 67. Gordon’s most recent collection of images are American Surveillance (2009) and Notes from the Field (2012)
- Rosalie B. Green, director of the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University from 1951 to 1981, passed away on February 24, 2012. She was 94 years old
- Evelyn B. Harrison, a historian of Greek and Roman art and a professor in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University from 1974 to 2006, died on November 3, 2012, at the age of 92. She had previously taught at the University of Cincinnati, Columbia University, and Princeton University
- Alfred Kumalo, a South African photographer who document life under apartheid and the rise of Nelson Mandela, died on October 21, 2012. He was 82 years old
- Glenys Lloyd-Morgan, a Canadian-born archaeologist of ancient Rome, passed away on September 21, 2012, at the age of 67. Raised and educated in England, she worked at the Grosvenor Museum in Chester and as a finds consultant
- Arnaud Maggs, a Canadian photographer who shot portraits of Anne Murray and Leonard Cohen, died on November 17, 2012. He was 86 years old. Magg’s honors include a 2006 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and a 2012 Scotiabank Photography Award
- Margaret M. Martin, a watercolorist based in Allentown, New York, died on November 29, 2012, at the age of 72. Her love of gardening inspired many of her still lifes of flowers
- Menno Meewis, director of the Middelheimmuseum in Antwerp, Belgium, died on October 17, 2012, at age 58. He is credited with rejuvenating the museum and overseeing its expansion
- Patricia Meilman, a scholar of Venetian Renaissance art, died on October 13, 2012. She was 65 years old. Her books include Titian and the Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice and The Cambridge Companion to Titian
- Oscar Niemeyer, the renowned Brazilian architect, died on December 5, 2012, at the age of 104. He is best known for designing the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum and many government, commercial, and residential buildings for Brasília, his country’s new capital
- Catherine Burchfield Parker, an artist who spent thirty years of her career in Buffalo, New York, died on November 6, 2012, at age 85. She was the daughter of the painter Charles Burchfield
- Spain Rodriguez, an influential underground cartoonist based in San Francisco, California, died on November 28, 2012, at age 72. Rodriguez’s work was published by Zap Comics and in the East Village Other
- William Turnbull, a modernist sculptor from Scotland, died on November 15, 2012. He was 90. Turnbull’s career, which spanned seven decades, included forays in figurative, organic semiabstract, and hard-edged geometric styles, as well as painting
- Gudmund Vigtel, director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1963 to 1991, died on October 20, 2012. He was 87. Under his leadership the museum’s collection tripled in size and moved into a Richard Meier–designed building
- Albert Wadle, an art dealer and philanthropist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, died on November 12, 2012. He was 84 years old
- Shizuko Watari, the founder and director of Watari-um, the Watati Museum of Contemporary Art, in Japan, died on December 1, 2012, at age 80. She was also a curator and the director of Galerie Watari in Tokyo
- Larry Welden, an artist and educator based in Sacramento, California, died on October 25, 2012, at age 90. He taught art at Sacramento City College from 1960 to 1985, and his watercolors focused on the landscapes of Northern California
- Evelyn Williams, an English artist whose reliefs, drawings, and paintings were hard to categorize, died on November 14, 2012. She was 83 years old
- Lebbeus Woods, an unconventional architect who built only one permanent structure, died on October 30, 2012. He was 72 years old. Woods was a professor at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York.
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the January list.
Jeffrey R. Hayes: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — October 24, 2012
Tanya J. Tiffany is associate professor of art history in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
![Jeffrey Hayes](http://www.collegeart.org/images/obituaries/JeffreyHayes.jpg)
Jeffrey R. Hayes
Jeffrey R. Hayes, professor of art history and director of the master’s degree program in liberal studies at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, died on June 18, 2012. Hayes was an exceptional scholar, teacher, and colleague, and a pioneering figure in the field of outsider art in the United States.
Hayes received his BA in history from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1967. Following his service as captain in the US Army during the Vietnam War (from which he received an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector), Hayes returned to his native Maryland. In 1972 he earned an MLA in the history of ideas at Johns Hopkins University; the multidisciplinary scope of that program introduced him to art history. A decade later he completed his PhD in art history at the University of Maryland, where he worked under the guidance of Elizabeth Johns, who became a lifelong mentor and friend.
Hayes’s expertise in American art was far reaching. Building on his dissertation research, his first major scholarly works included an exhibition and catalogue as well as two groundbreaking monographs on the modernist painter Oscar Bluemner: Oscar Bluemner: Landscapes of Sorrow and Joy (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1988) and Oscar Bluemner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Hayes then turned his attention to curating exhibitions and writing catalogues on major collections and figures in outsider art, including Common Ground/Uncommon Vision: The Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art, which was coauthored with Russell Bowman and Lucy Lippard and published by the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1993; The Art of Carl McKenzie (Milwaukee: UWM Art Museum, 1994); and Signs of Inspiration: The Art of Prophet William J. Blackmon (Milwaukee: Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 1999).
![Jeffrey Hayes OscarBluemner](http://www.collegeart.org/images/obituaries/OscarBluemner.jpg)
In recent years Hayes returned to his research on Bluemner’s art with the volume Bluemner on Paper (New York: Barbara Mathes Gallery, 2005), and at the time of his death he was writing about the Wisconsin sculptors Mona Webb and Thomas Owen Every, known as Dr. Evermor. In addition to his many influential publications, Hayes also received prestigious awards and fellowships from institutions including the Smithsonian, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society.
From 1982 until his death, Hayes taught in the Department of Art History at University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where he also served as department chair from 1989 until 1996. In 2000, he founded the master’s degree program in liberal studies, the only degree of its kind in the state school system; he remained the program’s director until his death.
Hayes was extraordinarily generous as a colleague and as a mentor to his many graduate students; his boundless energy, kindness, and humor will be greatly missed. In addition to his scholarship, Hayes was a strong political activist as well as an avid tennis player, fisherman, and swimmer.
Jeffrey Hayes is survived by his wife, Leslie; his three children, Eli, Zachary, and Ursula; and by his grandchildren.
Read another obituary on Hayes in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — October 24, 2012
In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, architects, photographers, and others whose work has significantly influenced the visual arts. This month was marked by the loss of the conceptual artist Michael Asher, the Belgian abstract painter Raoul De Keyser, the sculptor and activist An Dekker, and the English gallery director Michael Stanley. CAA has published a special obituary of Jeffrey R. Hayes, a professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
- Michael Asher, the trailblazing Los Angeles conceptual artist and beloved CalArts professor, passed away on October 15, 2012. He was 69 years old. Active since the early 1970s, Asher was one of the first artists to engage in institutional critique by altering the norms that define galleries, museums, and schools. His contribution to the 2010 Whitney Biennial, which requested that the museum be free and open for twenty-four-hours, earned him the prestigious Bucksbaum Award
- Bruno Bobak, a Polish-born Canadian “war artist” during the Second World War, passed away on September 24, 2012, at the age of 88. Bobak enlisted in the Canadian Army at the age of 18, making him the youngest soldier to create artwork during the war. His watercolors and drawings were evocative and disturbing, showing the bare reality of life on the front lines
- Melvin Charney, a Montreal-based architect and teacher, died on September 17, 2012. He was 75 years old. Charney created bold public works that blurred the lines between art and architecture, such as the garden for the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the world’s first human-rights monument in Ottawa, Canada. He was also instrumental in establishing the architecture program at the University of Montreal
- Raoul De Keyser, a Belgian abstract painter, died on October 5, 2012. He was 82 years old. In an ever-expanding art world that prizes the brashest statement, De Keyser’s compositions stood out as examples of forceful gentleness, muted and lyrical. Long admired as a “painter’s painter,” he came to greater prominence during the 2000s with a series of major exhibitions in Germany, France, and England. He is represented by David Zwirner in New York
- An Dekker, a socially conscious sculptor of biomorphic forms, died on September 14, 2012, at the age of 80. Dekker was born in the Netherlands and traveled extensively throughout Europe and Africa. Residing in London the 1970s and 1980s, she was a cofounder of the Hackney Flashers’ photography workshop (with her fellow artist Jo Spence, also recently deceased) and the Women’s Graphic Workshop
- Préfète Duffaut, a Haitian muralist and painter, passed away on October 6, 2012, at the age of 89. Duffaut created brilliantly colored murals of imaginary cities for hospitals and churches. His imagery was inspired by the Haitian religion of voodoo and a personal mysticism
- Gilbert Warren Einstein, an art dealer who founded G. W. Einstein Company in New York, passed away on September 21, 2012, at the age of 70. Einstein’s gallery specialized in twentieth-century works on paper, and he was a member of the International Fine Print Dealers Association of America
- Robin Fior, a British graphic designer at the forefront of the 1960s print revolution, died on September 19, 2012. He was 77 years old. Fior made a name for himself as a designer for radical newspapers, such as Black Dwarf and Peace News. He was political to the bone, active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and in later years served as the art director at the left-wing Pluto Press
- Ulrich Franzen, a polarizing German-born architect whose projects exemplified the modernist architecture ethos of “form follows function,” passed away on October 6, 2012. He was 91. Franzen’s most visible project was the skywalks at Hunter College in New York, an enclosed pedestrian walkway connecting the school’s buildings; other prominent commissions included Houston’s Alley Theater in 1968
- Richard Gordon, a photographer and writer based in Berkeley, California, died on October 6, 2012. He was 67 years old. Gordon’s black-and-white street photography followed the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, and Robert Frank. An exhibition devoted to his 1970s photographs of American cities is on view at Gitterman Gallery in New York until November 7, 2012
- Pedro E. Guerrero, a photographer who gained recognition for his dynamic images of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, died on September 13, 2012, at the age of 95. Guerrero’s working relationship with Wright, which began in the late 1930s, led to magazine assignments and book projects. In the 1960s and 1970s he embarked on a new photography series documenting the work and personality of the artists Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson
- Jeffrey R. Hayes, a professor of art history and director of the master’s degree program in liberal studies at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, passed away on June 18, 2012. He was 65 years old. A specialist in outsider art, Hayes wrote several books on the artist Oscar Bluemner. CAA has published a special obituary of Hayes
- Mick Jones, a British illustrator, teacher, and dedicated socialist, died in August 2012 at the age of 68. Jones took part in the Prague Spring of 1968, an experience that revealed to him how art can be a force for social change. Back in England he shared his devotion to politics through community murals and trade-union banners. He spearheaded the Camden Mural Project (1978), which instructed young people in the art of mural painting in public spaces and housing projects
- Jeremy Le Grice, an English painter inspired by the landscape of his native Cornwall, died on August 9, 2012. He was 75. As a young man he studied with the Cornish painter Peter Lanyon and took classes at the Slade School of Art in London. Le Grice’s paintings, a cross between abstraction and representation, have a rough-hewn quality, fitting for an artist who lived for most of his life in close proximity to the sea
- Howard R. Moody, a reverend with a love for radical art and social justice, passed away on September 12, 2012, at the age of 92. For over thirty years Moody was the minister of Judson Memorial Church in New York’s Greenwich Village. No ordinary congregation, the church became famous as an alternative space for experimentation in visual art, theater, and dance; likewise establishing itself as a safe haven for the marginalized poor and drug-addicted inhabitants of the neighborhood
- Harris Savides, a cinematographer who worked closely with young directors, died on October 9, 2012. He was 55 years old. Independent filmmakers depended on Savides’s exacting vision and technical skill to achieve the perfect look for their films. Notable films include Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere (2010) and Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding (2007), both of which benefited from Savides’s moody and poetic atmosphere
- Serge Spitzer, a Romanian-born installation artist whose work addresses the passing of time and collective memory, died on September 9, 2012, at the age of 61. The artist participated in Documenta and the Venice Biennale. One of his best-remembered works was a 2010 installation at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, a labyrinthine network of plastic tubing that evoked earlier forms of communication in the city
- Michael Stanley, the director of Modern Art Oxford, a contemporary art gallery in England, passed away on September 22, 2012. He was 37 years old. As the director of both Modern Art Oxford and the Milton Keynes Gallery, Stanley championed young artists, including Jenny Saville, Phil Collins, and Pawel Althamer. This year he served as a judge for the prestigious Turner Prize
- John Steiger, a Chicago-based illustrator and artist known for his educational drawings, died on September 5, 2012, at the age of 89. A veteran of World War II, Steiger contributed work to Encyclopaedia Britannica Films and the children’s magazine Highlights; he also maintained a separate studio practice as a realist painter
- Albin Trowski, a Polish-born artist and illustrator who made his home in Manchester, England, following World War II, passed away on September 12, 2012. He was 93 years old. A gifted draftsman, Trowski realized charming city scenes and landscapes in watercolor and oil paint
- Rodney Uren, an Australian architect known for his large-scale urban projects, passed away on September 9, 2012, at the age of 63. He was a principal designer at the international design firm Hassell Practice; notable projects include the Olympic Park Station, a majestic, environmentally friendly structure that was built for the Sydney Olympics in 2000
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the November list.
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — September 17, 2012
In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, curators, designers, photographers, filmmakers, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. This month was marked by the loss of the art historian Natalie Boymel Kampen, Magnum photographer Martine Franck, and the young Egyptian artist Amal Kenawy. CAA has published a special obituary for Kampen.
- Lee Wick Dennison, a long-time financial officer for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), passed away on August 31, 2012. She was 60 years old. Dennison joined the NEA in 1975 and campaigned for funding for arts organizations across the country through her various roles as grants officer, assistant director of the challenge and advancement programs, and director of organizational capacity. She received the Distinguished Service Award from the NEA twice, in 1988 and 1999
- Martine Franck, a versatile documentary photographer in the humanist tradition who was among the first women accepted into the elite Magnum photography agency, died on August 16, 2012, at the age of 74. Franck’s images ranged from formal portraits of artists, such as Balthus, to intimate street scenes. She was married to the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson
- Hans Josephsohn, a Swiss figurative sculptor, passed away on August 21, 2012, at the age of 92. His primitive-looking sculptures of reclining figures, heads, and busts on plinths suggest a marriage of classical art and expressionist fervor. He worked primarily in plaster, a material that for him was “a cross between modeling and working with stone”
- Natalie Boymel Kampen, a pioneering feminist scholar and professor of Roman art history and gender studies, died on August 12, 2012. She was 68 years old. Kampen was the author of Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia and Family Fictions in Roman Art and served as chair of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board from 2009 to 2010. CAA has published a special obituary for Kampen
- Amal Kenawy, an Egyptian artist who showed her video, performance, and installation work in Cairo galleries and in many international biennials, died on August 19, 2012. She was 38. Her diverse artworks dealt with the subject of communication and translation, often to controversial and awe-inspiring effect. The performance Silence of the Sheep, staged at the Cairo Biennial in 2011, featured the artist as a shepherd leading a flock of artists and workers on their hands and knees through the city’s streets
- Joe Kubert, a Polish-born comic-book artist, died on August 12, 2012, at the age of 85. Kubert created many memorable cartoon heroes for DC Comics in the 1940s and 50s, including Sgt. Rock, Hawkman, and Tor, the first 3D comic book. He passed on his passion for drawing and invention at the Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey, founded in 1976 and still going strong today
- Helen Scott Lidgett, a lively British publicist, passed away on July 31, 2012, at the age of 63. Lidgett wore many hats during her varied career: she ran a popular vintage-clothing stall in Camden Town, wrote art criticism for London’s Time Out, and was the famously flamboyant head of publicity for the art-book publishers Thames and Hudson. In later years Lidgett was a champion for arts funding and served as a cultural advisor to Prime Minister Gordon Brown
- William Moggridge, a British designer and educator, died on September 8, 2012, at the age of 69. Moggridge’s invention of the clamshell design of the first laptop computer in 1979 was a revolutionary step for digital technology. He cofounded the product-design firm IDEO and worked on a range of products, from heart defibrillators to Palm Pilots. In 2010 he was named the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York
- Dmitri Plavinsky, a Russian artist associated with the Nonconformist Art movement, passed away on September 1, 2012, at the age of 76. His paintings and etchings explored imagery that flew in the face of officially sanctioned Soviet Realism. Plavinsky was one of a select group of artists to be shown in museums in the United States and in Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Jan Sawka, a Polish-born artist, illustrator, and sculptor known to many outside the art world for his luminous stage sets for Grateful Dead concerts, died on August 9, 2012, at the age of 65. Sawka began his art career working as an underground graphic artist in Krakow, Poland. He has shown his work in museums throughout the United States and in Europe
- Lee Sherry, a New York–based abstract artist, passed away in August 2012 at the age of 65. Sherry attended Reed College with her fellow painter David Reed in the 1960s; she was also close to many writers in the Language school of poetry. Sherry designed the typography for several covers of the experimental poetry journal Roof and showed her work at Susan Caldwell Gallery in New York in the 1970s
- Michael Seward Snow, a British abstract painter who was associated with the St Ives artist colony in the 1950s, passed away on July 15, 2012, at the age of 82. His compatriot artists were Ben Nicholson, Terry Frost, and the poet W. S. Graham. Snow was a professor of art from 1965 to 1985 at Exeter College of Art in Devon, England
- Steve M. Street, a champion for the rights of adjunct faculty members, died on August 17, 2012, at the age of 56. Street had been a non-tenure-track professor of writing at the State University of New York at Buffalo since 1980. He was a frequent contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education on the subject of adjunct benefits and most recently wrote about his own struggle with cancer in light of his adjunct position
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the September list.
Natalie Boymel Kampen: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — September 17, 2012
Natalie (Tally) Boymel Kampen, a pioneering feminist scholar and professor of Roman art history and gender studies, died on August 12, 2012, at her home in Wakefield, Rhode Island. She was 68 years old. Kampen taught graduate courses on the ancient world at Columbia University and undergraduate courses in feminist theory and gender studies at Barnard College, where she was the first faculty member to hold the endowed Barbara Novak chair in Art History and Women’s Studies, and became professor emerita in 2010. She was most recently a visiting professor of Roman art and architecture at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University and helped to administrate a Getty Foundation grant sponsoring international study of the art and architecture of the Roman provinces. She was one of the world’s most notable experts on the history of the Roman provinces.
An internationally recognized teacher and scholar, Kampen was a research fellow at Oxford University in 2000, received the 2004 Felix Neubergh Medal at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and was a visiting professor of art history at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, in 2010. As a senior scholar she was interested not only in promoting the careers of her Columbia students but also mentored graduate students from Eastern Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East. Kampen’s books include Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia (Berlin: Mann, 1981) and Family Fictions in Roman Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). She was the editor of Sexuality in Ancient Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and the author of numerous articles and chapters in scholarly journals, encyclopedias, and books, including Art Journal, American Journal of Archaeology, The Art Bulletin, and The Art of Citizens, Soldiers, and Freedmen in the Roman World (Oxford: British Archeological Reports, 2006), edited by Guy P. R. Métraux and Eve D’Ambra. Kampen served as chair of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board from 2009 to 2010. To mark the occasion of CAA’s Centennial in 2011, she helped compile the anthology of essays published in the journal from 1913 to the present; her informative introductory essay traces the inclusion of writers who were women and people of color as the century progressed.
Kampen was born on February 1, 1944, in Philadelphia, the daughter of Jules and Pauline (Friedman) Boymel. She was an enthusiastic supporter of left-wing causes from the 1950s to the present and played a key role in the struggle for women’s rights, in academia and beyond. As a dedicated scholar and pioneer in the field of women’s studies she raised several generations of women’s consciousness. Kampen received her BA and MA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 and 1967 and her PhD from Brown University in 1976. She taught art history at the University of Rhode Island from 1969 to 1988, where she helped to found one of the first women’s studies programs in New England and became a lifelong patron of the Hera Gallery, a feminist artists’ collective in Wakefield, Rhode Island.
Kampen was an avid horseback rider and a lifelong owner of Labrador dogs. She was married to Michael Kampen from 1965 to 1969 and to John Dunnigan from 1978 to 1989. In all her pursuits, scholarly and otherwise, her generosity was extraordinary. She was famous as a beloved friend and colleague who nurtured lifelong friendships, forged groups of strangers into friends, and could change a person’s perspective on life after only an hour’s acquaintance in an airport. Even after the onset of her final illness, Kampen led a group of younger scholars to Greece, determined to work with them while she was still able to.
Natalie Boymel Kampen is survived by her sister, Susan Boymel Udin; her brother-in-law David; and her niece and nephew, Rachel and Michael Udin. Contributions can be made in Kampen’s name to Rhode Island Community Food Bank, 200 Niantic Avenue, Providence, RI 02907.
Eugene F. Farrell: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — August 14, 2012
Francesca G. Bewer is research curator at the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Harvard Art Museums.
![Eugene F. Farrell](http://www.collegeart.org/images/obituaries/EugeneFarrell.jpg)
Eugene Farrell, ca. late 1970s, in the analytical laboratory at the Center for Conservation and Technical Studies (photograph provided by the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Harvard Art Museums)
It is with sadness that I inform you of the death of Eugene F. Farrell, former senior conservation scientist at the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. Gene passed away in his sleep on March 19, 2012, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 78 years old. Farrell will be remembered by generations of conservators as a generous colleague and a dedicated teacher. He was knowledgeable, calm, and open minded—qualities for which he was greatly appreciated, especially during discussions and at meetings.
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1933, Farrell came to the conservation field with a background in geology. He received a BA cum laude and an MA in geology from Boston University, which he supplemented with courses in X-radiography, physics, mathematics, geochemistry, and petrology. In 1956, the same year he married Lynne Breda, he became a member of the Scientific Research Society, Sigma Xi, which “honors excellence in scientific investigation and encourages a sense of companionship and cooperation among researchers in all fields of science and engineering.” Farrell was a teaching fellow the following year at Boston University and spent the summer of 1958 studying ice cores in Thule, Greenland, as a crystallographer for Permafrost Ice Studies at the Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Research Establishment (then based in Wilmette, Illinois, and now in Hanover, New Hampshire). That led to a job as a research staff member in the Crystal Physics Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1960–77), during which time he published numerous papers in the American Mineralogist, Materials Research Bulletin, and American Ceramics Society Bulletin,among others. He also collaborated on a patent for a “Cathode Ray Tube Whose Image Screen Is Both Cathodochromic and Fluorescent and the Material for the Screen.”
Farrell began his museum career in 1977 after he answered a small “help wanted” ad in the Boston Globe for analytical work at Harvard University’s Fogg Museum in the Center for Conservation and Technical Studies (CCTS). Like Rutherford John Gettens, the museum’s illustrious first staff chemist from 1928 to 1950, Farrell had no prior museum experience but quickly learned to apply his skills and knowledge to the materials of art. He started as assistant conservation scientist under the museum’s science associate, Leon Studolski, and helped to integrate petrography, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and X-ray diffraction (XRD) in the laboratory work. He was soon promoted to conservation scientist. Shortly thereafter, in 1980, he became the senior conservation scientist of the CCTS, which is now called the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. It was a position he held until his retirement in 2004.
Farrell greatly enjoyed the collaboration among scientists, curators, conservators, and students. His quiet demeanor belied his great productivity; the quality and quantity of analyses he carried out is attested by the cabinets filled with report files and by his numerous publications. Among the broad range of topics and materials he investigated were: the painting materials of Vincent van Gogh and Winslow Homer; the composition of pigments from ancient Persia and from sixteenth- to eighteenth-century house paint; and pasteprints. His research on illuminated Renaissance manuscripts found in the Historical Library of the University of Valencia in Spain, while he was a visiting professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in 1990 culminated in the bilingual book he coauthored with Salvador Muñoz Viñas, published in 1999. The materials of stone in Indian and Gothic art and in Chinese scholar’s rocks fascinated Farrell, as did the substance of Chinese ceramics and Baroque terracotta sculpture. He contributed to an eighteen-month project on the analysis of Gothic stone sculpture from New England collections, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He also trained his analytical skills on the origins of turbidity in acrylic paints and on the metal composition of Renaissance bronze medals.
Farrell was a lecturer in history of art and architecture at Harvard University from 1984 onward, teaching courses on the “Technical Examination of Works of Art” and “The Materials of Art” and in the Harvard freshmen seminar program. His many students will remember him for his patience and courteousness: regardless of their level of scientific knowledge, they knew that they could depend on him for any help they needed. He also genuinely took pleasure in helping the Straus Center’s graduate conservation interns and fellows with their research projects and worked with them enthusiastically. Some of the projects that he oversaw were of great interest to the museum community at large. For instance, in 1984–85, under the guidance of Farrell and the center’s director Arthur Beale, Pamela Hatchfield and Jane Carpenter undertook the first major investigation of the potential effects of formaldehyde and formic acid on museum collections.
Farrell, along with Beale and a fellow conservation scientist, Richard Newman, publicized the effects of acid rain on outdoor cultural properties. He was also involved in the important two-day seminar on “The Role of Conservation and Technical Examination in the Art Museum” that was hosted in 1985 by the CCTS in conjunction with the New England Museum Association; more than a hundred participants attended the seminar. Also, in collaboration with colleagues at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, Farrell developed ways of applying atomic absorption spectroscopy instrumentation to the analysis of cultural artifacts.
At the beginning of the 1990s he oversaw the major upgrading of the Straus Center’s analytical facilities and, together with his colleagues, began creating libraries of FTIR and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectra using the Forbes Pigment Collection and the Gettens Collection of Binding Media and Varnishes. He also oversaw a new internship in conservation science and, more recently, the first Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in conservation science at the center—a program initiated in 2002.
After a brief break from museum work following his retirement, Farrell worked on a part-time basis on a range of analytical projects at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, collaborating anew with his former colleague Newman, who is now head of the MFA’s Scientific Research Department.
Farrell always had a dual interest in science and art. Throughout much of his adult life he took courses in art history, languages, and history. He played the guitar and studied instrument making at the Museum of Fine Art’s antique instruments collection, building several guitars and a lute. Farrell also obtained a certificate in the art of hand-wrought ironwork, of which he was very proud. His interests ranged beyond science and art—particularly to all matters Gaelic. The Farrell ancestors had come from the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland before they settled in what is now West Virginia. He took numerous trips back to the old homeland starting in 1968, both with his family and with study groups, and he also studied Gaelic assiduously at the Harvard Extension School. It is in Ireland that he and his family made the acquaintance of—and fell in love with—Irish wolfhounds. They adopted their first one from a shelter in 1982. Farrell was an indefatigable student to the end: in addition to other courses, he was giving himself a self-tutorial on quantum physics in the period before he died.
Gene Farrell is survived by his wife Lynne Breda Farrell, his son Eugene Thoralf, and his dog Owen (Gaelic for Eugene)—the latest in a long line of rescued Irish hounds. Gene will be greatly missed and remembered by all who had the very good fortune to spend time with him.
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — August 14, 2012
In its monthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, curators, designers, photographers, filmmakers, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. This month was marked by the loss of the larger-than-life art critic Robert Hughes, the French filmmaker Chris Marker, the beloved collector Herbert Vogel, the New York painter and professor Denyse Thomasos, and the Austrian sculptor Franz West.
- Jane Barbour, a British researcher of African artifacts and textiles, died on June 14, 2012, at the age of 89. Barbour and her husband, a geographer, lived in different parts of Africa from the 1950s to the 1980s. She edited the volumes Adire Cloth in Nigeria (1971) and Kenyan Pots and Potters (1989)
- Karl Benjamin, a prominent member of the West Coast art scene in the 1950s and 1960s, died on July 26, 2012. He was 86 years old. Benjamin painted in an ordered geometric pattern, dubbed Abstract Classicism by his painting cohort as a response to New York’s Abstract Expressionism. His methodology was informed by many decades as an elementary school art teacher in southern California
- Bram Bogart, a Dutch-born artist who lived in France and Belgium and was known for his heavily layered pigment-and-cement paintings, died on May 2, 2012. He was 90 years old. Associated with the CoBrA art movement in Europe, Bogart exhibited with Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Pierre Soulages, and Karel Appel
- Horacio Coppola, an Argentine photographer active in the avant-garde art scene of Buenos Aires, died on June 18, 2012, at the age of 105. Coppola worked in two modes of black-and-white photography: Surrealist-tinged nocturnal shots of city streets, and stark abstract portraits of objects reminiscent of Bauhaus experiments with the medium
- Stephen Dwoskin, an experimental filmmaker and teacher originally from New York and based in London for over forty years, passed away on June 28, 2012, at age 73. In 1966 he cofounded the London Film-Makers’ Co-op with his fellow filmmaker Jeff Keen (who died in June) and the poet Bob Cobbing. Dwoskin’s films include Chinese Checkers (1964) and Trixi (1969); retrospectives of his work have been held at the British Film Institute in 2009 and at the Arsenal in Berlin in 2010
- Eugene F. Farrell, formerly senior conservation scientist at the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, passed away on March 19, 2012. He was 78 years old. Farrell’s colleague Francesca G. Bewer has written a special obituary for CAA
- Mary Fedden, a British painter of modernist-inflected still lifes, passed away on June 22, 2012, at the age of 96. Her subject matter was domestic life, but her work also made reference to the choices of Cubist painters and Henri Matisse: flattened tabletops, vases, bottles, and flowers. Fedden was the first woman to teach at the Royal College of Art in London, a position she held from 1956 to 1964
- Chris Honey, a British architect and humanitarian, died on June 20, 2012, at the age of 52. Honey’s most significant assignment was the design of the Sanctuary Lakes Resort in Melbourne, Australia. He and his wife Rebecca were supporters of the Oxford-based charity Lifelines that works to abolish the death penalty in the United States
- Marilyn Houlberg, an artist and a scholar of the arts of Haiti and Western Africa, died on June 30, 2012. She was 72 years old. Houlberg was a professor emeritus of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She cocurated the traveling exhibition Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995) and contributed essays to the publications Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World (2005) and Vodou: Visions and Voices of Haiti (1998)
- Robert Hughes, the Australian-born art critic, died on August 6, 2012, at the age of 74. Hughes began writing for Time in 1970, and in 1980 his book and BBC television series The Shock of the New brought his theory of modern art and culture to a wider audience. Hughes was known for his elegant yet fiery critical voice that rattled the genteel art worlds of New York and London
- Georgina Hunt, a British artist known for her luminous, gradient-color paintings, passed away on April 16, 2012. She was 89. Hunt was transformed by her time spent in New York in the early 1970s, where she furthered developed her minimalist approach to painting. Another early influence on her technique was Carl Jung’s theory of the integrated personality
- Sunil Janah, a photojournalist who captured India as it fought against colonial rule to become an independent state in 1947, died on June 21, 2012. He was 96 years old. Working with a rudimentary camera—a Kodak Box Brownie—he photographed Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, as well as moments of ordinary life and mass demonstrations
- Wael Issa Kaston, a Syrian sculptor who worked in wood and mud, has reportedly been killed in Homs under torture by the Syrian government. He was 46 years old, and the news of his death was first announced on July 24, 2012. Kaston’s figurative work dealt with the “freedom of women,” and he described his choice of materials as connected to the elemental life force of the human body
- Bill Komodore, a painter and professor of art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, died on August 3, 2012, at the age of 80. Born in Athens, Greece, Komodore made expressive, lyrical work that engaged the subjects of myth, war, and love. His 2010 exhibition Arcadia: The Recent Paintings was held at the Decorazon Gallery in Dallas
- Chris Marker, the renowned French filmmaker who invented the essay-film and took the medium to new heights of poetry and political force, passed away on July 30, 2012. He was 91. Marker’s best-known films, La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1982), deal with memory, time travel, and human longing. He also worked in photography, video installations, and new media: his last exhibition was a portrait series of anonymous Paris métro riders, called Passengers (2011) at Peter Blum in New York
- Helen Messenger, one half of a flamboyantly bohemian artist couple (her husband was the artist Tony Messenger), died on April 11, 2012, at the age of 77. The Messengers met as students at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London and established an informal salon for new ideas in fashion, art, and lifestyle, in their Notting Hill home in London. Helen was later involved in costume design in the 1960s and 1970s, working for Ossie Clark, Laura Ashley, and, most famously, David Bowie
- Dewey Mosby, a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French art and director emeritus of the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, died on August 1, 2012, at the age of 70. Mosby was the first African American to receive a PhD in art history from Harvard University and also the first African American curator of European art at a major art museum (Detroit Institute of Arts)
- Alvin Nickel, a fabric artist and professor emeritus of art and art history at the University of Texas at Austin, died on August 27, 2011. He was 85 years old. Prior to joining the university in 1960, he worked as a craft director for the United States government in Germany. Nickel created large-scale painterly wall hangings using the dyeing process of batik
- Walter Pichler, a visionary Austrian architect and artist, passed away on July 16, 2012, at the age of 75. Pichler called his architectural plans “dream drawings” and was invested in the narrative possibilities of architecture and design. In later years he moved even further in the direction of fine art with a series of drawings and installations based on his farm in rural Austria
- Jacinto Quirarte, professor emeritus and former dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Texas at San Antonio, died on July 20, 2012. He was 81 years old. Quirarte specialized in Precolumbian art, Latin American art, and Latino art history. From 1982 to 1987 he chaired the National Task Force on Hispanic Art of the National Endowment for the Arts. His books include The Art and Architecture of the Texas Missions (2002), Izapan-Style Art: A Study of Its Form and Meaning, and Mexican American Artists (both 1973)
- Mary Louise Milligan Rasmuson, a patron of the arts in Alaska, died on July 30, 2012, at the age of 101. She was married to Elmer Rasmuson, chairman of the National Bank of Alaska, and through the Rasmuson Foundation the couple helped to found Alaska’s Anchorage Museum of History and Art in 1968. During World War II and after, she was an ardent campaigner for women’s rights in the military and was named fifth commandment of the Women’s Army Corp in 1957 by President Dwight Eisenhower
- Denise René, a Parisian gallery director and an art collector whose stable of abstract artists included Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, and Piet Mondrian, passed away on July 9, 2012. She was 99. A 1938 meeting with the artist Victor Vasarely in the Café de Flore in Paris ignited her career in dealing art. In 2001 the Pompidou Center in Paris held an exhibition in homage to her cultural impact as a gallerist
- Wayne Roberts, a Bronx-based graffiti artist known by the street moniker Stay High 149, died on June 11, 2012, at the age of 61. Roberts’s heyday was in the 1970s; his work was featured in Norman Mailer’s book The Faith of Graffiti (1973), and he was respected by graffiti aficionados for his easily identifiably tag of a joint-smoking haloed stick figure
- Martin E. Segal, a patron of the arts and a long-time supporter of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, passed away on August 5, 2012. He was 96 years old. Segal was instrumental in setting up the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where he served as chief executive from 1968 to 1978. In his last years he remained a spritely figure in the philanthropic world, always wearing a rose in his lapel at social functions around the city
- Roy Shaw, formerly secretary-general of the Arts Council of Great Britain, died on May 15, 2012, at the age of 93. During his tenure, Shaw sought to make the arts more accessible to the public without consenting to vulgarization and commercialism. He was knighted in 1979 and authored the volume The Arts and the People (1987)
- Jack Simcock, a British painter, died on May 13, 2012, at the age of 82. Simcock’s signature paintings were rich, dark-toned images of the village of Mow Cop in North West England, where he lived and worked from 1958 until his death. He exhibited his work at the Piccadilly Gallery in London and also published an autobiography and a collection of poems
- Jonathan Speirs, an architect who specialized in creatively lighting monumental buildings around the world, passed away on June 18, 2012, at the age of 54. In 1993 Speirs founded the architectural lighting firm Speirs + Major, with Mark Major, and the projects the team worked on include Terminal 5 at the Madrid Barajas International Airport, the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building
- Denyse Thomasos, a painter who created large-scale expressionistic work that referenced urban space, maps, and travel, died on July 19, 2012, at the age of 47. Thomasos was a beloved professor to many art students at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where she taught from 1995 to the present day. Her work is represented by Lennon Weinberg in New York and Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto
- Herbert Vogel, one half of a legendary contemporary art collecting couple, died on July 22, 2012, at the age of 89. Vogel worked as a postal clerk in New York for decades and, with his wife Dorothy, came to collecting from a genuine love of art. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC—the institution that first ignited the couple’s fascination with modern art during a 1962 honeymoon visit—was bequeathed a significant portion of their collection. CAA plans to publish a tribute to Herbert Vogel
- Franz West, the Austrian sculptor of ebullient abstract forms, passed away on July 25, 2012, at the age of 65. West was invested in the functionality of an artwork, bridging the darker currents of the European avant-garde with the lightness and accessibility of Pop art. Recent installations include an outdoor sculpture in New York’s Central Park, called The Ego and the Id (2009)
- George Wyllie, a Scottish sculptor who called himself a “scul?tor” to emphasize the social aspect of his practice, died on May 15, 2012, at the age of 90. Wyllie specialized in outdoor artwork that commented on the decline of industry in his native Glasgow. His best-known pieces are two temporary works, Straw Locomotive, a full-scale reproduction of a train made from straw and chicken wire, and Paper Boat, a vessel that caused a stir when it docked at the harbor of New York’s World Financial Center in 1990
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the September list.
Jens T. Wollesen: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — July 23, 2012
The following obituary was submitted by Jill Caskey, associate professor in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, and PhD coordinator for the school’s Centre for Medieval Studies.
Jens T. Wollesen, a professor and a specialist in the art of medieval Italy and Cyprus, died in Toronto on April 22, 2013. He received his BA from the University of Hamburg, his PhD from the University of Heidelberg, and his Habilitation from the University of Munich before traversing the Atlantic to join the Department of Art at the University of Toronto in 1985. For the rest of his life Wollesen remained firmly anchored to Toronto, where his contributions to the pedagogical and scholarly missions of the university took many forms. At various times he directed the undergraduate and graduate programs in art and also served on the Art Committee of the University of Toronto’s Victoria University, where he was a fellow.
Wollesen’s work probed several salient issues in medieval art, from the devotional function of panel paintings to images of everyday life. Among his many articles and books are the influential Die Fresken von San Piero a Grado bei Pisa (Bad Oeynhausen, Germany: Theine, 1977), Pictures and Reality: Monumental Frescoes and Mosaics in Rome around 1300 (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), and Patrons and Painters on Cyprus: The Frescoes in the Royal Chapel at Pyrga (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2010). He had recently completed a second book on Cyprus, entitled Acre or Cyprus: A New Approach to Crusader Painting around 1300.
Wollesen could discourse equally on Asian painting, contemporary art, and the medieval artists and patrons who commanded most of his scholarly attention. His intellectual range and curiosity served him well in the classroom. Literally thousands of undergraduates first encountered the discipline of art history in his legendary Intro lectures at Toronto. He garnered legions of fans in such adventurous courses as “The Body: An Exercise,” “The Practice of Art History,” and “Is There Crusader Art?” Wollesen flourished outside the classroom and study as well as within: he was an accomplished painter and photographer, and a passionate sailor who commanded the waves of Lake Ontario at the first sign of spring.
He is survived by his wife, Elena Lemeneva, and his children, Leon Wollesen, Hanna Wollesen, Christina Wollesen, Victor Wollesen, and Kate Wollesen.