CAA News Today

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 Pop art dealer Ivan Karp, the film scholar Andrew Sarris, and the feminist art historian Paula Hays Harper.

• Carl F. Barnes Jr., a former president of the International Center of Medieval Art, died on May 25, 2012, at the age of 77. Barnes was a professor emeritus of art history at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, where he had taught from 1971 to 2001. A specialist in European medieval art, he wrote extensively on the thirteenth-century French artist Villard de Honnecourt
• Barton Lidice Benes, a sculptor and collector, died on May 30, 2012, at the age of 69. Benes made art from the raw materials of everyday life, drawing support and controversy for using medical equipment associated with AIDS/HIV treatment and the cremated remains of friends who perished from the disease. His object and art-filled apartment is now being meticulously re-created as an installation at the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks
• Willard Bond, an artist known for his vibrant paintings of yachts and seascapes, died on May 19, 2012. He was 85 years old. Bond was a versatile artist, influenced in equal parts by the teaching of Buckminster Fuller and by his own experience as a pier master at New York’s South Street Seaport. Admirers claim that his paintings embody the ineffable experience of being on a boat at sea
• Frederick J. Brown, a figurative painter deeply inspired by jazz music and the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, passed away on May 5, 2012. He was 67 years old. Brown created colorful, highly expressionistic portraits of people whom he admired, such as the avant-garde composer Anthony Braxton and the painter Willem de Kooning. His artworks were exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, and the New Orleans Museum of Art
• Paula Hays Harper, an art historian who challenged the discipline with her feminist perspective, died on June 3, 2012, at the age of 81. In the 1970s, Harper was instrumental in establishing the feminist art program at California Institute of the Arts and for three decades was a professor at the University of Miami in Florida. She also coauthored a biography of the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro
• Paul Jenkins, an American abstract painter known for his poured-paint technique, died on June 9, 2012, at the age of 88. In the 1950s Jenkins spent extensive time working and showing in Europe, a factor that made him less visible in the New York art scene than his aesthetic peers, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, and Morris Louis. Jenkins’s art, though, was wildly popular, and the artist had many prominent patrons and museum exhibitions throughout the United States, France, and Great Britain. On a side note to his career arc, Jenkins’s paintings were featured in the 1978 film, An Unmarried Woman
• Gerhard Kallmann, an architect known for his controversial modernist design for Boston City Hall, died on June 19, 2012, at the age of 97. Built in 1968, the Brutalist building was criticized and praised, sometimes at the same time. Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic for the New York Times, wrote that Boston now had “one of the handsomest buildings around, and thus far, one of the least understood”
• Ivan Karp, an art dealer and gallery owner who championed Pop art in its early days, passed away on June 28, 2012. He was 86 years old. Karp served as codirector of the Leo Castelli Gallery and in 1969 opened his own space, OK Harris, in SoHo, which established the fledgling artist neighborhood as the new gallery mecca in Manhattan. Artists whom Karp promoted include Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg
• Jeff Keen, a British experimental filmmaker, visual artist, and poet, passed away on June 21, 2012. He was 88 years old. In his late 30s Keen hit his stride as an artist with a series of short, surrealistic films that combined collage techniques and innovative sound tracks. Keen was a founding member of the London Film-Makers Co-op in 1966 and actively participated in the counterculture movement
• Mary Katharine MacGregor, a former curator of prints and drawings at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, died on May 16, 2012, at the age of 89. MacGregor was affiliated with several New York art museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, before she returned to her native Iowa to pursue a curatorial position at the Print and Drawing Study Room at the University of Iowa’s Museum of Art
• Georges Mathieu, a French abstract painter, passed away on June 10, 2012. He was 91 years old. In the 1940s and 1950s Mathieu worked in the mode of Lyrical Abstraction, a French counterpart to Abstract Expressionism in the United States. He often performed his paintings in front of a live audience as a demonstration of his dramatic, freeform technique
• LeRoy Neiman, an artist and illustrator of the good life, died on June 20, 2012, at the age of 91. Like a contemporary Norman Rockwell, Neiman worked in a space between the fine-art and magazine worlds. He painted illustrations of sporting events for Playboy in the 1950s and taught for many years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• Justine Price, a professor of art history at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, died on October 24, 2011, at the age of 42. A faculty member of Canisius College since 2005, she had recently received tenure and been named the director of the college’s art-history program. Her scholarly interests extended from American Pop art to contemporary Polish photography
• Michael Rabe, a scholar of South Asian art and a professor at Xavier University in Chicago, died in late March 2012. Rabe’s colleague Andrew Cohen has written a special obituary for CAA
• Andrew Sarris, a film critic and scholar who wrote for the Village Voice for many years, passed away on June 20, 2012, at the age of 83. A champion of auteur theory, Sarris wrote a seminal book on the subject, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (1968). He had taught at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and was an inspirational figure to several generations of film critics and historians
• A. Richard Turner, an expert on Italian Renaissance art, particularly the legacy of Leonardo da Vinci, died on September 9, 2011. He was 79 years old. Turner was the author of Inventing Leonardo (1993), a book that analyzed five centuries of critical dialogue on the artist. Turner had a long teaching career that included stints at the University of Michigan, Princeton University, and Middlebury College before he became the director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 1979
• Jeff West, a champion of the arts in Dallas, Texas, died on May 22, 2012, at the age of 54. The executive director of the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas, West had helped bring film culture to the city with the AFI Dallas International Film Festival. He also worked for eleven years as executive director of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, an institution that preserves the memory of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the August list.

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 avant-garde film historian and exhibitor Amos Vogel and the Swiss artist David Weiss.

• Anne Burkhardt, a professor of philosophy at Bennington College in Vermont and a long-time associate of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Darwin Correspondence Project, passed away on March 11, 2012. She was 96 years old. Burkhardt was married to Frederick Burkhardt, ACLS president emeritus, who first established the Darwin project in 1974 as a means to collect all letters by and to Charles Darwin
• Royal Cloyd, the founding director of the Boston Center for the Arts, passed away on February 23, 2012, at the age of 86. In the 1960s Cloyd saw immense potential in the industrial neighborhood of Boston’s South End, defying popular opinion that the area was unsafe by persuading the city to purchase and renovate a series of buildings, including the landmark Cyclorama
• David Hillman Curtis, a pioneer of web design, a filmmaker, and a former rock-and-roll musician, died on April 18, 2012, at age 51. In the mid-1990s in San Francisco, Curtis mastered the new Flash technology, which enabled websites to display high-quality animation. He became a technology guru for many and wrote a best-selling book on media design. Curtis’s latest project was a feature-length documentary film on the musician David Byrne, called Ride, Rise, Roar
• Judy Egerton, an Australian-born scholar and curator of eighteenth-century British art, died on March 21, 2012, at the age of 83. In 1974 Egerton became the assistant keeper in the Historic British Department at Tate Gallery in London, where she organized the exhibition George Stubbs: Anatomist and Animal Painter (1976). She put together many popular shows at her museum, wrote catalogue essays, and completed a new edition of the catalogue for the National Gallery in London
• Denise Gray, a photographer who captured the people and events of Atlanta, Georgia, died on April 22, 2012. She was 54 years old. Gray was a high-spirited individual who worked hard to make her passion for photography into a career. She didn’t have a permanent studio, instead preferring to work on location
• Al Hurwitz, chair and graduate director of art education at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, passed away on March 24, 2012, at the age of 91. Hurwitz had also served as president of the National Art Education Association and frequently lectured on art education across the United States and abroad
• Jean Laplanche, a French psychoanalyst, theorist, and translator of works by Sigmund Freud, died on May 6, 2012, at the age of 87. Laplanche studied under Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the École Normale Supérieure and later cofounded the Psychoanalytic Association of France in 1964. His best-known work, a revision of Freud’s seduction theory, was published in 1987
• Louis le Brocquy, an Irish painter and tapestry designer who created his own place within the modernist idiom of Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti, died on April 25, 2012, at the age of 95. Le Brocquy painted portraits of Irish literati such as Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett. The artist described his working process as: “I try to paint the head image from the ‘inside out’ as it were, working in layers or planes, implying a certain flickering transparency“
• Herbert C. Lee, a prominent Boston arts patron and philanthropist, died on April 4, 2012. He was 97 years old. Lee and his wife Micki were long-time supporters of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Harvard Art Museums, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Margaret Cassidy Manship, a sculptor, art teacher, and archivist passed away on February 13, 2012, at age 91. The free-spirited daughter of an artist mother, Manship won a scholarship to Italy that led to an apprenticeship working for the master sculptor Antonio Berti in the Vatican. Manship and her husband, the artist John Manship, had lived and worked in Maine, Vermont, and New York
• Jackie McAllister, a Scottish curator, artist, and writer living in New York, died on April 28, 2012. He was 49 years old. In the early 1990s McAllister was vice president of the cutting-edge SoHo gallery American Fine Arts, which put him at the forefront of the city’s art scene. In 2011 McAllister created an artwork comprising Lego pieces for the exhibition An Exchange with Sol LeWitt at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
• Norman Richard “Rick“ Pope, a ceramist and professor of art for thirty years in the School of Art at Montana State University, died on March 19, 2012. He was 70 years old. Born in Oklahoma, Pope has seen his work collected by the Archie Bray Foundation and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow
• Robert Raymond, a photographer and videographer who worked as a television broadcast engineer, passed away on February 27, 2012, at age 59. Raymond was an assistant director for the Boston Film/Video Foundation and worked with his wife in the Mobius Artists Group
• Amos Vogel, the last “lion of cinema” according to Werner Herzog, passed away on April 24, 2012, at the age of 91. A Viennese refugee, Vogel came to New York in 1938 and established an avant-garde film society, Cinema 16, with his wife Marcia. Based on the European model of a ciné-club, Cinema 16 debuted the work of Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage. Vogel also helped found the New York Film Festival and wrote Film as Subversive Art (1974)
• David Weiss, a Swiss artist and half of the Fischli and Weiss partnership, passed away on April 27, 2012, at the age of 66. Weiss was living a nomadic, free-spirited life in Europe before meeting the artist Peter Fischli in the late 1970s. The duo captured the imagination of the art world and beyond with the film The Way Things Go (1987), an ode to the joy of art production, and with Visible World (1987–2001), a table display of images of the sacred, profane, and everything in between

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the June list.

In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, designers, architects, photographers, curators, dealers, 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 sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, the divisive art critic Hilton Kramer, the scholar and curator John Golding, and the art dealer Donald Young.

• Cris Alexander, a portrait photographer and actor who landed a starring role in the 1944 Broadway musical On the Town, died on March 7, 2012, at the age of 92. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Alexander arrived in New York in the late 1930s with dreams of stardom. He photographed Martha Graham, collaborated on satirical novels about Hollywood, and worked for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine
• Rex Babin, an editorial cartoonist for the northern Californian newspaper the Sacramento Bee since 1999, died on March 30, 2012, age 49. Babin was known for cartoons that tackled current events with whimsy, humor, and pathos
• Toni Beauchamp, a Texan patron of the arts, passed away on March 9, 2012, at the age of 66. Beauchamp was an assistant director of Houston’s Blaffer Gallery in the 1970s and 1980s and was a proponent of the burgeoning art scene around Houston and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. A collection of essays about Marfa’s cultural community will be released posthumously
• Eliy Belyutin, a Russian art historian and art teacher, died on February 29, 2012, at the age of 87. Belyutin attended the Moscow Art Institute, and in 1954 he founded a painting school called the New Reality that encouraged an individualistic approach to art-making
• Eleanor Callahan, a striking muse for her photographer husband, Harry Callahan, died on February 28, 2012. She was 95 years old. Eleanor Callahan was photographed throughout her sixty-three years of marriage, an arc that traced the couple’s early courtship to their family life with their daughter, Barbara. The stark, black-and-white portraits drew comparisons to Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe
• Elizabeth Catlett, a figurative sculptor whose art practice was rooted in social reality, passed away on April 12, 2012, at the age of 96. Catlett drew from her own experience as an African American woman and expressed a desire to make art that would empower the lives of other African Americans and appeal to a broad sweep of humanity. She moved to Mexico in the late 1940s, where she was the first woman to head the art department at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City
• John S. Chase, a prominent modern architect and the first African American to serve on the United States Commission of Fine Art in 1980, died on March 29, 2012. He was 87 years old. Chase’s notable projects include the United States embassy in Tunis, Tunisia. During his tenure on the commission, he oversaw the creation of the Vietnam War Memorial
• Sid Couchey, a comic-book artist who was a principle illustrator for the 1950s Harvey Comics characters of Richie Rich, Little Lotta, and Little Dot, died on March 11, 2012, at the age of 92. Couchey also created cartoon mascots for national drug-prevention campaigns and for the 1980 Winter Olympics on Lake Placid
• David Lee Craven, distinguished professor of art history at the University of New Mexico, died on February 11, 2012, at the age of 60. He was an expert in twentieth-century Latin American art, postwar American art, and the methodology of art history and visual culture
• Bruno Giacometti, a Swiss architect and the younger brother of the artist Alberto Giacometti, died at the age of 104 on March 21, 2012. The youngest of four children, Bruno Giacometti remembered posing as a child for his older brother’s first attempts at sculpture. In 1930 he joined the Zurich architectural firm of Karl Egender, but it was after World War II that he completed his most important works as a freelance architect, including the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1952
• Jean Giraud, the French comic-book artist known as Moebius, died on March 10, 2012, at age 73. Giraud was something of a national treasure in France, beloved by artists and the general public alike. An early success was the Wild West–themed comic book, Les Adventures de Blueberry (1963). Giraud’s fantasy visions led to work in cinema: he contributed drawings to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unfinished film Dune and to Ridley Scott’s Alien
• John Golding, a British art historian of twentieth-century art with a focus on Cubism, died on April 9, 2012, at the age of 82. Golding taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, from which he also graduated, and was the head of the painting school at the Royal College of Art. He curated two seminal exhibitions for Tate Modern, Picasso: Sculptor/Painter (1994) and Matisse/Picasso (2002), and in his later years focused on his own abstract painting
• John Griffiths, a British illustrator who designed a series of covers for Penguin paperbacks in the 1950s and 1960s, passed away on March 13, 2012. He was 85 years old. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Griffiths applied his technique to darkly outlined, hand-drawn covers that were beloved by readers as a companion to the text inside
• Bernard Otto Gruenke, a stained-glass artist who created one of the first faceted glass windows in America, passed away on March 21, 2012. He was 99. Gruenke attended the Corcoran Art School in Washington, DC, and created stained-glass windows for churches, synagogues, and theaters throughout the country. For many years he served as the vice president of the Stained Glass Association of America
• Albert Hadley, an interior decorator for high society on the East Coast, died on March 30, 2012, at the age of 91. Hadley and the socialite-decorator Sister Parish founded their company, Parish-Hadley, in 1962. Important commissions for the pair included the library at Brooke Astor’s Park Avenue home and the breakfast room of the Kennedy White House
• Francis Hewlett, a British sculptor and painter who was head of painting at the Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall, died on March 19, 2012. He was 81 years old. Hewlett studied at the Slade School of Art in London and in the 1960s was inspired by Pop art to make large-scale ceramic sculptures of hands and other body parts
• Robert Hoozee, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, and a scholar of nineteenth-century British art, died on February 21, 2012, at the age of 62. Hoozee’s last exhibition at the museum was the critically acclaimed British Vision (2007), which offered a radical take on the history of British art, with an emphasis on underrepresented artists such as Stanley Spencer
• Thomas Kinkade, a populist artist and the self-proclaimed “painter of light,” died on April 6, 2012, at age 54. His early influences were Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney. Kinkade believed that his artistic ambition was one that he shared with Disney: to inspire happiness through the dissemination of rosy-toned images of a bucolic American past
• Hilton Kramer, the controversial art critic who championed his particular definition of modernism, died on March 27, 2012. He was 84 years old. Kramer’s career was kick-started by his impassioned rebuttal to Harold Rosenberg’s psychoanalytic theory of Abstract Expressionism. Kramer began writing regularly for Arts Digest (later renamed Arts) and was chief art critic for the New York Times before founding the decidedly more conservative New Criterion in 1982
• Sergio Larrain, a Chilean photographer and member of the Magnum Photos agency, passed away on February 7, 2012, at the age of 80. Larrain often captured his subjects in a “state of grace”: children playing in the street, a portrait of poet Pablo Neruda’s house, and a series of accidental photographs of a couple outside the Notre Dame Cathedral that became the inspiration for Julio Cortozar’s short story “Blow-Up”
• Mauricio Lasansky, an Argentine printmaker and draftsman remembered for his series The Nazi Drawings, died on April 2, 2012, at the age of 97. Lasansky established the printmaking department at the University of Iowa and bolstered the school’s reputation as a center for graphic arts. His attention to simple art materials (pencil, paper, water washes) and weighty subject matter singled him out as an innovator in his field
• Simon Marsden, a British photographer noted for his Romantic subject matter and an attraction to the spectral dimensions of architecture and landscapes, died on January 22, 2012, at the age of 63., A keen critic of consumer culture and other ills of modernity, Marsden published twelve books of photography and inspired album-cover art by the rock band U2
• Ralph McQuarrie, a conceptual designer who worked on the Star Wars trilogy as a primary illustrator and set designer, died on March 3, 2012, at the age of 82. McQuarrie’s rich sense of science fiction and fantasy aided him in subsequent work on the Battlestar Galactica television series and on the films E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Cocoon, for which he won an Academy Award
• Brett Miller, the general counsel for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, died on April 14, 2012, aged 47. After joining the Barnes in 2009, Miller played a key role in the foundation’s move from Merion, Pennsylvania, to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. His background as a curator made him a strong candidate for the high-profile position at the foundation
• Jackson L. Narcomey, a Native American painter and printmaker and a member of the Muskogee Creek tribe, passed away on March 22, 2012, at the age of 70. Born in Oklahoma, Narcomey came to prominence in his community during the late 1960s for his oil paintings of tribal legends
• Christopher Powell, a British architectural historian noted for his work on the architecture of Wales, passed away on March 9, 2012, at age 70. In addition to his work as a professor at the Welsh School of Architecture, Powell established the Construction History Society and served as editor of the society’s academic journal
• Kenneth Price, an artist who helped bridge the gap between ceramics and sculpture with his shockingly vibrant clay vessels, died at his home in Taos, New Mexico, on February 24, 2012. He was 77 years old. A native of Los Angeles, Price had several high profile shows in the 1960s at the Ferus Gallery, famed for its stable of Pop artists. A retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is scheduled to open in fall 2012
• Leonard Rosoman, a British painter, graphic artist, and longtime professor at the Royal College of Art in London, died on February 21, 2012, at the age of 98. During World War II he was appointed official war artist, an assignment that dispatched him to dangerous scenes of conflict to record what he saw. Rosoman’s work as a visual artist extended to exhibition design, most notably working on the Sergei Diaghilev exhibition in London in 1954
• Al Ross, a cartoonist at the New Yorker for over sixty years, passed away on March 25, 2012. He was 100 years old. Born in Romania, Ross began his career in the 1930s working alongside his four brothers at the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s before joining the New Yorker in 1937. His arch sensibility and educated silliness were illustrated by sketchy line drawings of arguing couples, animals, therapists, and other denizens of the magazine’s cartoon universe.
• Paul Rudall, a British artist, teacher, and illustrator, died on February 10, 2012, at the age of 91. Rudall served as the head art teacher at Chiswick Grammar School and Dudley Grammar School, where he influenced several generations of students. Since retiring from teaching in 1980, he lived in Bath, England and exhibited his oil paintings across the United Kingdom and in Germany
• Charlie Stagg, an eccentric Texan artist, died on February 20, 2012, at the age of 72. Stagg attended Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia but chose to live and work as an outsider artist in the A. V. Stagg Art Studio and Wildlife Preserve, a “folk-art style, glass bottle and cement home,” where visitors were always welcome
• Anita Steckel, a painter and feminist activist who worked under the radar for many decades, died on March 16, 2012, at the age of 82. Steckel was a self-proclaimed enemy of “good taste in art” who fought for the rights of women artists. She faced criticism and censorship for a series of erotic paintings that she exhibited in 1973
• Eduard Steinberg, a Paris-based, Russian avant-garde painter who created mystical, geometric abstractions, died on March 28, 2012, at the age of 75. His childhood home in Tarus, a town near Moscow, was a meeting ground for artists and poets who were persecuted during Stalin’s regime. Steinberg saw his work as a synthesis of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism, Russian icon painting, and personal religious belief
• Barry Walker, a former curator of prints and drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, died on April 18, 2012, at the age of 67. Walker joined the museum in 1991 and was instrumental in establishing the print and drawing department and boosting the museum’s modern and contemporary art collection. Popular shows he organized at the museum include Alice Neel: Painted Truths (2010) and Singular Multiples: The Peter Blum Edition Archive, 1980–1994 (2006)
• Eric Watson, a British rock-and-roll photographer with an artful eye, noted for his work with the Pet Shop Boys, died on March 18, 2012, at the age of 56. In the 1970s and 1980s Watson’s images were published in the magazine Smash Hits, and he also directed music videos influenced by art photography, such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s. Watson’s work, transcending its original pop origins, is now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, both in London
• Isabel Brown Wilson, a Texan philanthropist who was a prominent figure in Houston’s art scene, died on March 27, 2012, at the age of 80. Wilson was a life trustee and chairman of the board of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Through her family’s charitable trust, the Brown Foundation, she helped to raise the museum’s endowment, to enlarge the collection, and to ensure the institution’s future stability
• Donald Young, a noted Chicagoan art dealer, passed away on April 16, 2012, at the age of 69. Born in England, Young lived in Paris and New York before opening the Young-Hoffman Gallery, with Rhona Hoffman, in Chicago in 1976. Their gallery championed Conceptual and Minimal art; when it was later renamed the Donald Young Gallery, he showed video art by Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola, and Rodney Graham

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the May listing.

In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, designers, architects, photographers, dealers, 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 three major artists: Mike Kelley, Dorothea Tanning, and Antoni Tàpies.

• Leopold (Lee) Adler II, former president of the Historic Savannah Foundation, died on January 29, 2012. He was 88 years old. Born into a wealthy Savannah family, Adler worked all his life to preserve the city’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century homes, gaining a reputation as a committed preservationist
• Theo Angelopoulos, a celebrated Greek filmmaker whose work placed him in a critical pantheon of auteur directors, among them Michelangelo Antonioni, died on January 24, 2012. He was 76. Angelopoulos’s best-known films include Eternity and a Day (1998), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. At the time of his death, Angelopoulos was working on The Other Sea, the last film in a trilogy about Greek history
• Carolyn Autry, an artist, printmaker, and educator who taught at the University of Toledo in Ohio for thirty-six years, died on December 12, 2011, at the age of 71. Autry exhibited her work nationally and internationally and was an avid world traveler in her final years
• Lillian Bassman, a fashion and fine-art photographer, died on February 13, 2012, age 94. Bassman first came to prominence in the 1940s as an art director for Junior Bazaar, a youth-orientated version of Harper’s Bazaar. She also showed her pictures in galleries around the world, influencing several generations of fashion photographers
• Emmanuel Cooper, a ceramicist, died on January 21, 2012, at the age of 73. Cooper was primarily known as potter but also established himself as an art critic, educator, and gay-rights activist. His work is in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Mary Louise Coulouris, a vibrant painter, printmaker, and muralist, died on December 20, 2011, at the age of 72.  Born in New York to Greek parents, Coulouris moved to London to attend school, eventually settling in Scotland. Well known for her public artworks in railway stations and hospitals across the United Kingdom, she also showed in galleries in Paris and London and is included in the collections of the New York Public Library, the Bibliothèque National in Paris, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England
• Peter de Francia, a celebrated artist, intellectual, and professor of painting at the Royal College of Art in London, passed away on January 19, 2012, at the age of 90. De Francia, born in France to an English mother and an Italian father, was multilingual from an early age. He served in World War II and was a lifelong socialist and an active member of the British art scene since the 1950s
• Malcolm Fowler, a fine artist and illustrator who brought artful creativity and humor into the world of advertising, died on January 18, 2012, at age 68. Fowler founded the pioneering illustration and model-making Shirt Sleeve Studio in London with his wife, Nancy Fouts, in the late 1960s. The couple crafted seminal ad campaigns for Tate Gallery, and their work has been collected by the Victoria and Albert Museum
• John Gage, a beloved, freethinking art historian known for his scholarship on J. M. W. Turner, died on February 13, 2012, age 73. Gage taught art history at the University of Cambridge from 1970 to 1996 and was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1995
• Robert E. Hecht Jr., a controversial American dealer in ancient antiquities died, on February 8, 2012, at the age of 92. Just three weeks prior to his death, Hecht was on trial in Rome for charges of antiquity tomb looting and black-market dealing. A lifelong passion for collecting and selling ancient art began when he was a student at the American Academy in Rome
• John House, an art historian known for his scholarship on Impressionism, specifically Claude Monet, passed away on February 7, 2012. He was 66. House began teaching at the University of East Anglia and University College of London before going to the Courtauld Institute of Art. He often took a radical approach to his subject, challenging previous scholarship with his books and with the popular exhibitions he organized
• Mike Kelley, a groundbreaking artist who put Los Angeles on the map as a contemporary art mecca, committed suicide at the age of 57 on February 1, 2012. Kelley worked in video, installation, painting, and performance, often combining genres to spectacular and grotesque effect. A traveling retrospective of Kelly’s work, originating at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, will come to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2014
• Ricardo Legorreta, the Mexican-born architect known for his design of vibrant, modernist buildings throughout the southwestern United States and internationally, died on December 30, 2011. He was 80
• Steven Leiber, a San Franciscan art collector and rare-book dealer, died on January 28, 2012. He was 54 years old. Leiber operated a website devoted to his collection and knowledge of art ephemera and helped appraise several important archives, including those of Avalanche magazine, Allan Kaprow, and Claus Oldenberg
• John Madin, an architect and planner who transformed the look of postwar England, passed away on January 8, 2012. He was 87. Madin is known for his monolithic designs for commercial buildings in cities throughout the North of England, the West Midlands, and Leeds
• Isi Metzstein, an esteemed Scotish architect and teacher, died on January 10, 2012, at age 83. Metzstein founded the architectural practice Gillespie Kidd and Coia, which designed churches in Scotland, including the Le Corbusier–influenced St. Peter’s Seminary (now falling into ruin), and created buildings for Robinson College and Cambridge University
• Amy Page, a writer and former editor-in-chief of Art + Auction magazine passed away on January 19, 2012, at age 72. A native New Yorker, Page was as comfortable in the rough and tumble world of art journalism as she was with socializing with collectors, gallery directors, and traveling the world to attend art fairs
• Gianfranco Pardi, an Italian artist who created minimalist paintings, died on February 2, 2012, at age 78. Pardi lived and worked in Milan, where he showed at the Gio Marconi Gallery. In 1986 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and his 1970s series Architettura combines hard-edge abstraction, drawing, cable wires and aluminum
• Vita Petersen, an artist, teacher, and legendary fixture at the New York Studio School, passed away on October 22, 2011, age 96. Born in Berlin to an aristocratic, art-loving family, Petersen moved to New York in 1938 and became involved in the heady art scene of the 1940s and 1950s. She showed her colorful abstractions at the Betty Parsons Gallery in the 1960s and was known to paint every day of her life
• Jessie Poesch, an art professor at Tulane University’s Newcomb College in New Orleans, died on April 23, 2011, at the age of 88. Poesch was a specialist in decorative arts, pottery, and Louisiana architecture. She taught at Newcomb College from 1963 to 1992 and wrote books and articles that established her as an expert in her field
• Julie Carter Preston, a Liverpool-born ceramicist whose clients included members of the British Royal Family, died on January 6, 2012. She was 85 years old. Preston is best known for her use of sgraffitto, an ancient scratching technique that creates a rich-looking surface texture. She taught for many years at the Liverpool College of Art, and her work is represented by the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool
• Peter Saunders, a British painter whose favorite subject was the city of London and its people, passed away on November 19, 2011, age 70. Saunders attended Camberwell School of Art, where he studied under Euan Uglow. He later taught at schools throughout London and was a member of the Soho crowd of artists who gathered at the Colony Room in the 1960s and 1970s
• Ian Simpson, an artist and art instructor who was a presenter on the BBC program Eyeline (1968–69), died on December 15, 2011, at the age of 78. Simpson taught at Hornsey College of Art in London and at St Martins School of Art from 1972 to 1988. He was a great believer in demystifying the world of art-making, and that technical skills could be taught to anyone with the dedication to learn them
• Norma Merrick Sklarek, the first African American woman to become a licensed architect, died on February 6, 2012, aged 85. Born in Harlem, Sklarek was one of only two women to graduate from Columbia University with a degree in architecture. She moved to Los Angeles to join Gruen Associates in 1960, where she worked as the project director for Terminal 1 at Los Angeles International Airport and later was a founding partner of Siegel-Sklarek-Diamon, an all-woman architectural firm
• Kazimierz Smolen, the former director and cofounder of the State Museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau and a survivor of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Mauthausen, died on January 27, 2012, at the age of 91. In addition to founding the State Museum at Auschwitz, he appeared as a witness in many war criminal trials, including the Nuremberg Trials in 1945–46
• Tobi Lim Sonstroem, a graphic-design alumnus of the Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania, took his own life on February 2, 2012. He was 25 years old. Sonstroem was remembered by friends and teachers as a passionate young man who was dedicated to his burgeoning art and graphic-design career
• Dorothea Tanning, a painter, sculptor, and muse to the Surrealists, died on January 31, 2012. She was 101 years old. Tanning was married for thirty years to Max Ernst and lived with him in New York, Arizona, and France. In addition to an esteemed career as a painter, she published several books of verse and in 1994 established the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award at the Academy of American Poets
• Antoni Tàpies, the Catalan painter known for large-scale works that often mix oil painting with sand, chalk, and household objects, died on February 6, 2012. He was 88. The critic Roland Penrose described Tàpies as “a painter who was to create mysteries in matter itself.” The Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, Spain, was created in 1984 as a museum and research center dedicated to the artist’s work and to other international modern artists
• Eugene Weston III, an architect who revolutionized the look of Los Angeles homes in the 1950s, died on January 31, 2012, at the age of 87. Weston’s designs emphasized space, glass windows, and natural light, bringing an elegant, modern sensibility to middle-class family homes. Later commissions include the Scripps College Research Center and the San Diego Zoo
• Erica Wilson, a craftswoman who popularize embroidery and needlework through numerous television appearances, books, and magazine articles, died on December 13, 2011. She was 83. The British-born Wilson moved to New York in 1954, where she taught at Cooper Union and gave private lessons in her apartment. Wilson later opened boutique shops on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and on Long Island, as well as in Palm Beach, Florida, and in Nantucket, Massachusetts
• Althea Wynne, a British sculptor known for her equestrian statues in bronze and ceramic, died on January 24, 2012, at the age of 75. Inspired by Etruscan art and a childhood love of horseback riding, Wynne created sculptures recognized as powerful and graceful monuments. Her best-known commission is the three bronze horses that stand sentinel at Minister Court in the City of London

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the April listing.

In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, designers, architects, photographers, dealers, filmmakers, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. Included this month are the major twentieth-century artists John Chamberlain and Helen Frankenthaler, who both died in December 2011.

• Eve Arnold, a photojournalist and writer who was the first woman to join the Magnum Photo agency, died on January 4, 2012, at age 99. Beginning her career in the late 1940s, Arnold photographed celebrities, documented the McCarthy hearings and the civil rights movement, and did extensive work in Britain, China, and Russia.
• John Buchanan, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco who brought in a string of successive hit shows, including Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs and a survey of masterpieces by Pablo Picasso from the Musée National in Paris, died on December 30, 2011. He was 58 years old
• John Chamberlain, a sculptor of found metal whose work bridged Pop art, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, passed away on December 21, 2011, at the age of 84. Chamberlain first used car parts and then pieces of raw galvanized steel to create his sculptures, whose form and colors offered a dystopian take on the automobile as American Dream
• Niles Ford, a New York–based dancer and choreographer whose work combined elements of ballet, jazz, and modern dance while embedding themes of political and social activism, died on January 14, 2012. He was 52.
• Helen Frankenthaler, an abstract painter whose stain technique led to the development of the Color Field movement, passed away on December 27, 2011, at age 83. Once married to Robert Motherwell, Frankenthaler was an active member of the downtown New York art community in the 1950s and 1960s and had major solo exhibitions at the Jewish Museum (1960), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1969), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1998)
• Andrew Geller, a postwar architect of prefabricated homes who designed the room in which Nikita Kruschev and Richard Nixon had their famous Kitchen Debate, died on December 25, 2011. He was 87
• Iris Gill, a painter inspired by nature who was a member of the San Diego branch of the Women’s Caucus for Art, died on January 2, 2012. She was 41 years old
• Jan Groover, an American photographer who had lived in France since 1991 and who produced painterly still lifes with formalist concerns, died on January 1, 2012, at age 68. In 1987, Groover became one of the first women to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
• John McWhinnie, a dealer and collector of rare twentieth-century books and ephemera and the director of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in New York, died on January 6, 2012. He was 43
• Robert Nelson, an avant-garde filmmaker active in the San Francisco art scene of the 1950s and 1960s, died on January 9, 2012, at the age of 81. Known for the wit and playful energy he brought to the world of underground filmmaking, Nelson was the creator of Plastic Haircut (1963), Oh Dem Watermelons (1965), and Grateful Dead (1967–68)
• Bill Radawec, an eclectic multimedia artist based in Los Angeles and Cleveland whose recent work consisted of colorful paintings inspired by manufacturer house paint chips and the work of Ellsworth Kelly and Brice Marden, died on July 5, 2011, at age 59. Well-loved for his generosity and support of other artists, Radawec organized art shows in major museums and artist-run galleries
• James Rizzi, a New York–based Pop artist known for his three-dimensional graphic constructions, died on December 26, 2011, at age 61. Playful, colorful, and full of childlike energy, Rizzi’s work included designs for tourist guides and German postage stamps, as well as the cover artwork for Tom Tom Club’s first album in 1980 and two music videos for the band
• Garrison Roots, a public artist, sculptor, and chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he had taught since 1982, died on December 21, 2011. He was 59 years old
• Anne Tyng, a pioneering female architect and architectural theorist who had a professional and personal relationship with Louis Kahn, died on December 27, 2011, at age 91. Born in Jiangxi, China, Tyng was one of the first women to graduate from Harvard’s architecture school, in 1944
• Haydee Venegas, an art critic and educator who served as vice president of the International Association of Art Critics, died on December 31, 2011. She was 61
• John C. Wessel, a New York–based art dealer who championed gay artists in the 1980s and 1990s, passed away on December 9, 2011. Born in 1941, Wessel also served as regional representative for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1977 to 1984
• Eva Zeisel, a renowned ceramic tableware artist and designer, died on December 30, 2011, at the age of 105. After emigrated to the United States from Vienna in 1938, Zeisel began a celebrated teaching career at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, 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 to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the February/March listing.

In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, curators, collectors, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. Of special note is a text on Nancy Shelby Schuller, a curator of visual resources, published on the CAA website.

• Jerry W. Bates, a photographer who managed the Graphics Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University for thirty years, passed away on September 9, 2011. He was 63
• Adrian Berg, a British landscape painter and member of the Royal Academy who was inspired by Claude Monet, died on October 22, 2011, at the age of 82. The Serpentine Gallery in London hosted a survey of his work in 1986
• Peter Campbell, a writer, editor, illustrator, and book designer who served as the resident art critic and designer for the London Review of Books for more than thirty years, died on October 25, 2011. He was 74 years old
• Manon Cleary, a realist painter and influential professor of art based in Washington, DC, known primarily for her frankly autobiographical subject matter, passed away on November 26, 2011, at age 69. The Washington Arts Museum hosted a retrospective of her work in 2006
• Benjamin “Ben” Day, who taught graphic design and visual communications at Louisiana Tech University, Missouri State University, Boston University, and Virginia Commonwealth University, died on July 14, 2011. He was 68
• Vittorio de Seta, an Italian filmmaker and screenwriter whose work was celebrated in a 2006 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, died on November 29, 2011. He was 88
• Norton T. Dodge, a professor of Soviet economics at the University of Maryland and St. Mary’s College of Maryland and the owner of the world’s largest collection of Soviet dissident art, now housed at Rutgers University, died on November 5, 2011. He was 84
• Alan Haydon, an arts administrator who served on Arts Council England and the London Arts Board, died on October 9, 2011, at age 61. He also directed the De La Warr Pavillion, a contemporary art center in East Sussex, from 1999 to 2011
• Mary Hunt Kahlenberg, an authority on antique and ethnographic textiles and a former curator and head of the Department of Costume and Textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, died on October 27, 2011. She was 71 years old
• Keo Kinal, a Cambodian archaeologist at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, died on November 13, 2011. Born in 1973, he had taught the history of art and architecture after finishing a master’s degree at the Tokyo National University of the Arts
• Gerald Laing, an English Pop artist active in New York who depicted current events and celebrities such as Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse in large-scale painting and sculpture, passed away on November 23, 2011. He was 75
• Jon Lovelace, a financier, philanthropist, and a founding board member of the California Institute of the Arts, died on November 16, 2011. He was 84 years old
• Cargill MacMillan Jr., an heir to the Cargill family’s agricultural business and a benefactor who gifted many works to the Palm Springs Arts Museum in California, died on November 14, 2011, at the age of 84
• William McKeown, an Irish painter of ethereal abstractions who represented Northern Ireland in the 2005 Venice Biennale, died on October 25, 2011. He was 49
• Pat Passlof, an artist of the New York School, the wife of the painter Milton Resnick, and a longtime faculty member of the College of Staten Island, died on November 13, 2011. She was 83
• Nancy Shelby Schuller, who spent thirty-four years as curator of the Visual Resources Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, died on November 8, 2011, at age 71. CAA has published a special text on her
• Dugald Stermer, an illustrator, designer, and teacher who served as art director for the left-wing magazine Ramparts in the 1960s and later as chairman of the Department of Illustration at California College of the Arts, died on December 2, 2011. He was 74
• Bruno Weber, a Swiss architect and sculptor known for his multimedia sculpture park in Dietikon, Switzerland, died on October 24, 2011. He was 80 years old
• George Whitman, the New Jersey–born founder and owner of Shakespeare & Company, a celebrated bookstore in Paris, died on December 14, 2011, at the age of 98

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the January listing.

In its semimonthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, curators, collectors, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. Of special note is a text from Patricia Mainardi on Filiz Burhan for CAA.

• Julie Apap, a ceramicist who lived, worked, and taught art in Malta, died on March 16, 2011. She was 62 years old
• Martha Brincklow, the founder of the International Studies Program at Saint Petersburg College in Florida who led students on tours of the Louvre, the Sistine Chapel, and Tate Gallery, died on January 14, 2011. She was 95
• Filiz Burhan, a long-time professor of art history at the American University in Paris whose work opened new directions in the study of Symbolism, died on May 23, 2011, at 60 years of age. Patricia Mainardi has written a special text on her for CAA
• Robert Fluhr, an artist who taught for thirty years in the Philadelphian high schools and led sculpture classes for the blind and visually impaired at the Allens Lane Art Center, died on June 20, 2011. He was 84
• Hoda Garnett, an Egyptian-born news photographer who began her career in the US Navy in the 1950s and whose work appeared in Life magazine, died on October 13, 2011. She was 84 years old
• Beatrice Gersh, an arts patron in Los Angeles who was instrumental in founding the Museum of Contemporary Art in her city, died on October 9, 2011, at age 87
• Frank B. Gettings, who spent thirty years as a curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, died on August 4, 2011. He was 80 years old
• Shifra Goldman, a political activist and a pioneering scholar of Latin American and Chicano art who taught for twenty years in southern Californian institutions, died on September 11, 2011. She was 85
• Addie James, a folk artist based in North Carolina who created colorful paintings of family life in the South, died on July 17, 2011. She was 67
• Szeto Keung, a Chinese American artist based in New York who showed his mixed-media work extensively in Taiwan and Hong Kong, died on September 5, 2011. He was 62
• Friedrich Kittler, a German media theorist who taught internationally, most recently at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, died on October 18, 2011, at age 68
• Mathieu Lefèvre, a Canadian artist who lived and worked in Brooklyn, died on October 18, 2011. He was 30
• Robert Loughlin, an artist and scavenger who advised collectors in modern design and furniture, including Andy Warhol, died on September 27, 2011. He was 62 years old
• Ruth Mellinkoff, a historian of medieval art and an author of cookbooks, died on Febuary 26, 2011. She was 86 years old
• James More, a Scottish design-studio manager and an emeritus professor of design at Northumbria University in England, died on September 27, 2011, at age 65
• William Mostyn-Owen, an artist historian who specialized in the Italian Renaissance and served as Bernard Berenson’s bibliographer, died on May 2, 2011. He was 81 years old
• Sadamasa Motonaga, a Japanese painter who began his career in the Gutai movement, died on October 3, 2011. He was 88
• Werner Muensterberger, a psychoanalyst, art historian, and collector of African art, died on March 6, 2011. He had reached the age of 98
• John Neuhart, an American designer who taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, and who, with his wife Marilyn, was a colleague of Ray and Charles Eames, died on September 19, 2011. He was 82
• Malcolm H. Preston, an art critic and historian who taught for many years at Hofstra University, died on July 10, 2011, at age 91. He was also a figurative and landscape painter
• Richard Randell, a sculptor and filmmaker who taught art at Stanford University, died on May 25, 2011, at the age of 81. He also helped found the World of Languages, which preserved and studied disappearing Kenyan and Tanzanian song, poetry, and dance
• Jehangir Sabavala, a pioneering artist in postcolonial India whose work was always at odds with popular contemporaneous styles, died on September 2, 2011. He was 89
• Pamela Hemenway Simpson, a historian of art and architecture at Washington and Lee University who served as president of the Southeastern College Art Conference, died on October 4, 2011, at the age of 65
• Bernard Smith, a renowned Australian intellectual and author whose academic leadership helped form the discipline of art history in his country, died on September 2, 2011. He was 94 years old
• Ronald Thomason, a Texan sculptor, designer, and teacher, died on August 4, 2011, on his 80th birthday
• Jacques Vilain, a French curator at the Musée Rodin in Paris who later became its director, died on September 23, 2011
• Richard DeLos Wells, a professor of art, art history, and American studies at Brigham Young University in Hawai‘i, died on July 26, 2011, at the age of 63

Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the December listing.