CAA News Today
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — October 04, 2011
In its semimonthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, filmmakers, curators, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. Of special note are two texts written for CAA: Amalia Nelson-Croner writes about her mother, Karin Christine Nelson; and Janis Bergman-Carton pays tribute to Karl Kilinski II, her colleague at Southern Methodist University.
- Jordan Belson, a Californian experimental filmmaker who created groundbreaking work in nonobjective cinema, died on September 6, 2011. He was 85
- Bernhard Blume, a German artist who worked in photography with his wife Anna, passed away on September 1, 2011. He was 73
- Nicolas Djandji, an artist born in Egypt who graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art and worked for the Dia Foundation in New York, died on September 2, 2011. He was 24 years old
- John Dobbs, an award-winning New York–based painter who taught at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the New School for Social Research, and John Jay College, passed away on August 9, 2011. He was 80
- Paul Gardère, a Haitian artist who emigrated to the United States in 1959, died on September 2, 2011. Born in 1944, the artist had been showing at Skoto Gallery in New York
- Hugh Gumpel, a New York artist who taught for many years at the National Academy School and at Purchase College, State University of New York, passed away on May 2, 2011, at the age of 85
- Richard Hamilton, an influential British artist who inspired Pop art and whose diverse oeuvre comprises works in painting, found objects, collage, printmaking, graphic design, typography, and digital images, died on September 13, 2011. He was 89
- Michael Hart, a computer engineer who founded Project Gutenberg, which has digitized more than 36,000 books in 60 languages, died on September 6, 2011. He was 64 years old
- Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, a prominent Iraqi sculptor who emerged in the 1960s and who was instrumental in the recovery of looted artworks from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, died on September 12, 2011. He was 82
- John Hoover, an Alaskan artist who drew on indigenous traditions, died on September 3, 2011, at the age of 91. The Anchorage Museum held a retrospective of his work in 2002
- Budd Hopkins, an Abstract Expressionist painter and sculptor who became obsessed with unidentified flying objects and alien abductions, left this earth for a higher plane on August 21, 2011. He was 80 years old
- Jeanette Ingberman, a curator who cofounded and led Exit Art, an important nonprofit art space in New York, died on August 24, 2011. She was 59 years old
- Harry Jackson, an artist who traded his Abstract Expressionist style for realist depictions of the American West, passed away on April 25, 2011. He was 87
- Beverly Whitney Kean, a Hollywood film star who wrote several books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian art and art patrons, died on July 9, 2011. She was 89 years old
- Karl Kilinski II, a specialist in Greek vase painting and a longtime professor of art history at Southern Methodist University, died on January 6, 2011, at age 64. His colleague Janis Bergman-Carton has written a special text on him
- Wlodzimierz Ksiazek, a Polish artist who lived, worked, and showed his work in the northeastern United States for thirty years, died under mysterious circumstances in May 2011. He was 59
- George Kuchar, an experimental filmmaker who had taught at the San Francisco Art Institute since 1971, died on September 6, 2011, at the age of 69. Among his best-known films are Sins of the Fleshapoids, Hold Me While I’m Naked, and Thundercrack!
- Stephen Mueller, a New York–based Color Field painter whose mystical work drew on the art of India, Persia, and Mexico, died on September 16, 2011, at the age of 63
- Vann Nath, a Cambodian painter who survived the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge in Security Prison 21, known as S21, died on September 5, 2011. He was 65 years old
- Karin Christine Nelson, a Bay Area author, administrator, and curator who specialized in textiles, passed away on June 22, 2011, at the age of 64. Her daughter Amalia Nelson-Croner has contributed an obituary that is published in the CAA website
- Anne Odom, a curator and historian of imperial Russian art who worked for more than thirty years at Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens in Washington, DC, died on August 25, 2011. She was 75 years old
- Margaret Olley, an Australian painter and a generous patron of the arts, died on July 26, 2011. She was 88 years old
- Efrén Ordoñez, a Mexican artist who worked in painting, sculpture, and stained glass, passed away on August 21, 2011. He was 84
- Damian Priour, a Texan sculptor who created public monuments, died on September 14, 2011, at the age of 61. He was also known for his community involvement in Austin
- Phillip Renaud, a Chicagoan artist and teacher who illustrated articles for Playboy in the 1960s, died on June 27, 2011. He was 77 years old
- Susan Shatter, a painter who specialized in watercolor and a regular colonist at Yaddo, died in July 2011. Born in 1953, she had served as secretary and president of the National Academy in New York
- Keith W. Tantlinger, an engineer who invented the modern cargo container, an object that has become increasingly popular with artists and designers, died on August 27, 2011. He was 92
- June Wayne, an accomplished artist who founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, which drew artists from around the world, passed away on August 23, 2011. She was 93 years old
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 November listing.
Karl Kilinski II: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — October 04, 2011
anis Bergman-Carton is associate professor and chair of art history in the School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
![Karl Kilinski II](http://www.collegeart.org/images/obituaries/KarlKilinski.jpg)
Karl Kilinski II
Karl Kilinski II, University Distinguished Teaching Professor of Art History at Southern Methodist University (SMU), died on January 6, 2011, after a long and courageous battle with cancer. He was 64 years old.
Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Kilinski came to SMU in 1976 after completing a PhD in classical art and archaeology at the University of Missouri. He taught classes on the visual culture of Egypt and Greece, informed by his experiences as a land and underwater archaeologist, as a research fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and as board member of the Society for the Preservation of Greek Heritage. His dynamic lectures attracted students from almost every department at SMU, as well as dozens of lifelong learners from the Dallas and Fort Worth communities.
A specialist in Greek vase painting, Kilinski published widely in scholarly journals and authored several books, including The Flight of Icarus through Western Art (2002) and Boetian Black Figure Vase Painting of the Archaic Period (1990). Cambridge University Press had recently accepted The Presence of the Past: Greek Myth in Western Art, the culmination of decade-long research and a teaching project that engaged several generations of MA students in art history, for publication.
Kilinski also served as guest curator for several exhibitions at the Kimbell Art Museum and SMU’s Meadows Museum. He held visiting appointments at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad (DIS) in Copenhagen and at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan. He was also the recipient of summer grants from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Ford Foundation.
Karin Christine Nelson: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — October 04, 2011
Amalia Nelson-Croner is the daughter of the deceased.
![Karl Kilinski II](http://www.collegeart.org/images/obituaries/KarinNelson.jpg)
Karin Christine Nelson
Karin Christine Nelson, a Salt Lake City native and a thirty-seven-year resident of the Bay Area, passed away peacefully on June 22, 2011, at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. Nelson worked an independent curator, author, editor, and registrar for several San Francisco museums; was a respected and beloved career counselor for City College of San Francisco; and served on the Alameda County Arts Commission for many years. She was also a brave world traveler with a passion for art, as well as a selfless mother, sister, daughter, and friend.
After graduating with a double major in art history and sociology from Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1969, Nelson opted to explore the globe, traveling widely through India, Indonesia, and several countries in Europe. She lived in Japan for three years, teaching English and learning Japanese. During her time in Asia, she studied and documented traditional weaving and dyeing and amassed a stunning photographic portfolio of traditional textiles, which was later exhibited in the United States. She published articles on Okinawan textiles and was invited to speak at many textile exhibitions.
Upon moving to the Bay Area, Nelson did graduate coursework in museum studies at John F. Kennedy University in Pleasant Hill, California, and later earned her master’s degree in career development at the same institution. In 1983 she began working for the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco, an organization with which she was associated for the rest of her life. While there she curated the exhibition Craft Traditions of Okinawa and authored the accompanying essay, “On the Brink: Okinawan Textiles in the 21st Century,” which appeared in the museum’s scholarly journal, A Report, in the fall of 1996. It was also at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art that she and her friend, Delphine Hirasuna, first produced The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942–1946. Due to their continued efforts, the hugely successful show has toured four museums since 2006, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. It will continue traveling across the United States and will also appear in Japan.
Besides working for the Museum of Performance and Design in recent years, Nelson had been a career counselor for City College of San Francisco since 1992. She took pride in helping credit and noncredit students, alumni, and community members and was amazingly successful in assisting them in job placement. A member of the community in Albany, California, for two decades, Nelson served on the Albany Arts Committee, the Albany Waterfront Committee, and the Alameda County Public Art Advisory Committee. She was instrumental in creating the exhibition program at the Albany Community Center and volunteered at Albany public schools to help students experience all sorts of artistic expression. While her children attended Albany High School, she also worked to organize the school’s annual Job Shadow Day.
Nelson was a tireless supporter of several organizations relating to the arts, education, and the environment. She was a generous friend and colleague; a dedicated mother and daughter; and an extremely capable, intelligent, and passionate individual. She will be missed by all who knew her.
A memorial service was held on August 7, 2011, at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley. Karin Christine Nelson is survived by her mother, Ingeborg Nelson; her brother, Kenneth Nelson Jr.; and two daughters, Katarina and Amalia Nelson-Croner.
Karin Nelson Legacy Scholarship
In honor of Nelson’s commitment to students at City College of San Francisco, the Career Development Counseling Department is accepting donations for the Karin Nelson Legacy Scholarship, which can be mailed to: Karin Nelson Legacy Scholarship, Scholarship Office, MUB 130B, City College of San Francisco, 50 Phelan Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94112.
Karin C. Nelson Memorial Fund
In honor of Nelson’s contributions to the Bay Area arts community, the Alameda County Arts Commission and the Foundation for the Arts in Alameda County have created the Karin C. Nelson Memorial Fund, which will support special projects for arts education and community art programs that were important to her. You can make an online donation or mail one to: Karin C. Nelson Memorial Fund, Foundation for the Arts in Alameda County, PO Box 29004, Oakland, CA 94604-9004.
George Thomas Noszlopy: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — August 31, 2011
Adrian Hicken, a professor at Bath Spa University in England, is the author of Apollinaire, Cubism, and Orphism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002).
![George Thomas Noszlopy](http://www.collegeart.org/images/obituaries/GeorgeNoszlopy.jpg)
George Thomas Noszlopy
The sudden death of George Thomas Noszlopy on June 5, 2011, age 78, removes a singular and memorable personality from the ranks of British art historians. A longtime member of CAA and a foundation member of the Association of Art Historians, he made notable contributions to the teaching and dissemination of art history in England for almost fifty years.
For more than a decade at Birmingham Polytechnic, Noszlopy served as course director of an ambitious and challenging master’s degree program of which he had been a principal instigator and architect in the early 1970s. At its height and under his aegis, this department was, perhaps, the largest and one of the most successful for postgraduate study of history of art and design in the country. To this achievement may be added his years of service as a regional convenor and tutor for the Open University and his supervision of many doctoral research candidates, an activity he continued as emeritus professor at Birmingham City University.
Born and educated in Budapest, Noszlopy belonged to a generation formed under two successive regimes: first the right-wing, pseudoparliamentarianism of Admiral Miklós Horthy and then the postwar Stalinism of Mátyás Rákosi and the tragic Imre Nagy. During these years black humor became the language of criticism, if not a technique of survival. Noszlopy was not alone in developing a somewhat wry, sardonic attitude. This was to become mollified later in life with an appreciative embrace of the ironic.
Noszlopy published some poetry while still attending gymnasium, but recognizing these efforts to be too derivative, he turned increasingly to the writing of art criticism and the study of art history. His early work matured in direct contact with major figures such as George Lukács and Robert Berény. Noszlopy shared their desire to search for radical alternatives to the then-dominant Stalinist orthodoxy, an attitude epitomized by his slightly older contemporary at university, the writer, poet, and activist István Eörsi, with whom Noszlopy served in the army.
Noszlopy took his first degree in museology (art history and subsidiary subjects) from Eötvös Lóránd University in 1956. His earliest academic experiences were blighted by his family’s “class alien” designation and the constant investigation of his alleged Trotskyist views. The decision to debar him from all universities and colleges in the country was repealed only after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953.
During the revolutionary fervor of October 1956, Noszlopy was elected to the Revolutionary Committee of the Hungarian Artists’ Association but was soon arrested following the second Soviet military intervention later that year. He escaped from custody and left Hungary, thanks to the sympathetic assistance of an influential friend. Adopting the transitory existence of a stateless individual, he first lived in Vienna, then had a short sojourn in Paris. Noszlopy later remembered this relatively short period, when a single suitcase held his few possessions, as the most intense sense of freedom he had ever experienced.
After Paris, where he was introduced to a circle of scholars around André Chastel, Noszlopy settled in London, having accepted a grant from the Courtauld Institute of Art. He joined the expatriate intelligentsia gathered around the Irodalmi Ujság (Literary Gazette), the organ of the Hungarian Writers’ Union in exile, becoming a regular contributor until 1961 when the editorial office moved from London to Paris. Thus for some five years Noszlopy was an active participant in this cultural milieu, presided over by such established figures as the essayist and editor Béla Szász, the poet and essayist László Cs. Szabó, the poet György Faludy, and the novelist Tamás Aczél. When Gyula Illyés, the pioneer of surrealist and expressionistic leftist poetry from the interwar years and the leading socialist spokesman for the oppressed peasant class, visited England, Noszlopy acted as his guide.
By this time Noszlopy was a student at the Courtauld, where the renowned Hungarian scholar Johannes Wilde was then coming to the close of his tenure as deputy director. Three years after graduating in 1960, and with the support of Leopold Ettlinger at the Warburg Institute, Noszlopy secured a full-time teaching post at Coventry College of Art. Shortly afterward, he moved to a similar position at Birmingham College of Art and remained in Birmingham throughout his subsequent career.
As an art historian, Noszlopy was quick to embrace the methods of Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky. Controversially, while still at the Courtauld, he had extended this methodology to the examination of the iconography of Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, to the displeasure of Anthony Blunt. This approach to early-twentieth-century art became evident in Noszlopy’s subsequent studies and seminars on Guillaume Apollinaire and on allegorical imagery in Cubism. The manuscript of a book, “Robert Delaunay’s ‘La Ville de Paris’ and the origins of Orphic Cubism…,” rested in the hands of a publisher for some time but fell victim to an economic downturn. It never appeared. Had a book been published then (1973) it would surely have secured Noszlopy a deserved position among the early, postformalist revisionist historians of Cubism and Orphism.
In 1991 Noszlopy received a DPhil summa cum laude from his alma mater, Eötvös Lóránd University, in recognition of his research on Apollinaire and art in Paris before 1914. This event was emblematic of the scholar’s emotional and physical reconnection with Hungary and his intellectual roots. After years of enforced absence from the country, the thawing of East–West relations offered opportunities for visits, for renewing old friendships, and for reclaiming treasured family possessions. These rediscoveries catalyzed an essay on Tivadar Kosztka Csontváry and two short monographs: the first on an older contemporary, the painter György Gordon, was followed by one devoted to Gordon’s first wife, the caricaturist Edma (Márta Edinger).
While devoting much time to Renaissance and early-twentieth-century European art, Noszlopy was highly responsive to, and enthusiastic about, aspects of British art and crafts hitherto ignored, undervalued, or maligned by local populations and professionals. His study of the painter Bryan Pearce in 1964 was the first monograph devoted to the artist. This was followed by a “Note on West’s ‘Apotheosis of Nelson’” and essays and lectures on the iconography of Britannia. The four volumes in the series Public Sculpture of Britain, surveying the entire West Midlands of England, which Noszlopy had brought to press since 1998, make a fitting memorial to the humanity and humanistic breadth of a scholar who lived and worked in the region for most of his life.
Summer Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — August 31, 2011
In its semimonthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, curators, collectors, museum directors, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. Of special note is Adrian Hicken’s text on the Hungarian-born British art historian George Thomas Noszlopy, written especially for CAA.
- Tadek Beutlich, a teacher, printmaker, and textile artist whose experiments with three-dimensional weaving toured internationally in the 1960s, passed away on April 16, 2011, at 88. Beutlich authored The Technique of Woven Tapestry (1967) and pushed the boundaries of his medium further with “free-warp” tapestries, a technique that created wall hangings and freestanding pieces that resembled living organisms
- Robert Breer, an artist and animator who cofounded the Film-makers’ Cooperative in New York and taught the medium at Cooper Union from 1971 to 2001, passed away on August 13, 2011, at age 84. A major figure in Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), Breer began animating his own abstract paintings, which he referred to as “Form Phases,” in the 1950s, successfully derailing narrative and assaulting the viewer with movement and speed through glitchy imagery
- Charles E. Buckley, director of the Currier Museum of Art (1955–64) and the Saint Louis Art Museum (1964–75) who helped enlarge the collections of both institutions with American and European works, furniture, and wares, died on June 26, 2011, at age 86. He served as president of the American Association of Museums from 1972 to 1974, helping to establish the organization’s important accreditation system
- Duncan Campbell, a London art dealer who championed modern British printmaking and promoted the White Stag group of the 1930s, died on February 14, 2011, at the age of 66
- Edmund Carpenter, an archeologist and anthropologist who with Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto laid the foundation for modern media studies, died on July 1, 2011, at age 88. Carpenter’s work considered the effects of media on human interactions, supported by investigations of tribal peoples in Papua New Guinea in the 1970s and further research at the Museum of Ethnology in Basel in the 1980s. He also edited the journal Explorations and gathered the papers of the art historian Carl Schuster, published in twelve volumes
- Irene Chou (born Zhou Luyun), a prominent artist of the New Ink Painting movement in Hong Kong who reinvigorated the Zen and Tao-derived “one stroke” technique in oil, acrylic, and watercolor, died on July 1, 2011, at the age of 87. She was a founding member of two collectives, the In Tao Art Association (Yuan Dao huahui) and the One Art Group (Yi huahui), which sought new ways to combine Eastern and Western techniques while maintaining the principles of traditional Chinese art
- Roger Davies, the chief book designer for the British Museum from the 1970s through the 1990s whose work won numerous awards, has passed away at the age of 72
- Biren De, an internationally exhibited Indian artist who depicted universal energies through geometry, light, and traditional Hindu or Buddhist symbols, died on March 12, 2011. He was 85 years old
- Fred Dubery, a figurative painter known for his quietly colorful and off-kilter oils and a longtime professor at the Royal Academy Schools, passed away on April 8, 2011, at the age of 84. He was also a lifetime member of the New English Art Club
- T. Lux Feininger, a painter and photographer who documented the daily lives of the German avant-garde and the Bauhaus in particular, died on July 7, 2011, at the age of 101. After emigrating to the United States in 1936, he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- Virginia Fields, a distinguished scholar, educator, and the first curator of Precolumbian art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, died on June 15, 2011, at the age of 58. In her twenty two years at the museum, Fields helped acquire more than three thousand ancient objects for the collection, organized blockbuster shows on Mayan and Olmec art, and allocated new resources for the study of ancient American art
- Gunnar Fischer, Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer who shot twelve of the director’s films between 1948 and 1960, including The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), and The Devil’s Eye (1960), passed away on June 11, 2011. He was 90 years old
- Trevor Frankland, a British painter of abstract scenes who served as president of the Royal Watercolor Society from 2003 to 2006, died on April 17, 2011, at the age of 79
- Lucian Freud, a major twentieth-century artist whose dedication to painting the human figure kept stark realism alive throughout an era of modernist abstraction, died on July 20, 2011. He was 88 years old. He was also the grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud
- Ussman Ghauri, a celebrated Pakastani printmaker known for his investigations of alphabets, symbolic narratives, and societal distress, died on April 9, 2011, at the age of 41. Ghauri was also an associate professor at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture and served as a curator for the IVS Gallery and the Koel Gallery
- Selwyn Goldsmith, an advocate for the functional evolution of architecture in England and the author of Universal Design (2000) and Designing for the Disabled (1963), a pioneering guidebook that suggested adjustments for facilities and buildings to better accommodate handicapped people, died on April 3, 2011. He was 78
- Dov Gottesman, the president of the Israel Museum, a collector of art, and the recipient of the 2005 King Solomon Award for art patronage, died on February 22, 2011, at age 82. Gottesman founded the Artist’s Portfolio Project, a program and workshop that published twenty series of prints by Israeli artists and that turned into the Gottesman Etching Center
- Fred Griffin, an artist based in the Pacific Northwest who taught graphic design at the Art Institute of Seattle and the Burnley School of Professional Art, passed away on April 23, 2011. He was 79 years old
- Nancy Hamon, a passionate philanthropist and cultural advocate in Dallas who served on the board of trustees at the Dallas Museum of Art, passed away on July 31, 2011, at age 92. Hamon helped fund the acquisition of the Nora and John Wise Collection of ancient American artworks and objects, the construction of new exhibition spaces and a library at the museum, and the Jake and Nancy Hamon Art Library at Southern Methodist University
- Melissa Hines, the director of cultural partnerships at the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs since 2004 and a member of the King County Arts Commission (now called 4Culture) from 1996 to 2001, died on April 8, 2011. She was 63 years old
- John Hoyland, an English painter and printmaker who created emotionally charged abstract imagery that favored size, pigment, and form over visual references, passed away on July 21, 2011. He was 76 years old
- Freda Koblick, a prominent San Franciscan sculptor who in the 1960s produced abstract work in cast acrylic, passed away June 18, 2011, at the age of 90. Before using the new medium, she designed functional objects in plastic, often collaborating with architects
- Owen Land, an American teacher and filmmaker associated with the Fluxus movement who was keen on disregarding narrative in exchange for a more essentially visual experience of film, died on June 8, 2011, at the age of 67. Born George Landow, he was the founder of the Experimental Theatre Workshop in the Performance Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Lawrence Lee, a master glass artisan responsible for creating large public stained-glass compositions throughout Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, died on April 25, 2011, at age 101. He was the author of several books, among them Stained Glass (1967), Stained Glass, an Illustrated Guide (1976), and The Appreciation of Stained Glass (1977)
- Jerome Liebling, a member of the Photo League, a collective of photojournalists documenting the social climate in New York, in the 1930s and 1940s and the founder of photography and film programs at the University of Minnesota and Hampshire College, died on July 27, 2011. He was 87
- Gilbert Luján aka Magú, a teacher, painter, sculptor, muralist, and pioneer of the Chicano art movement in California since the 1960s, died on July 24, 2011, at the age of 70. Magu was a founding member of the art collective Los Four, responsible for enhancing the political and aesthetic aims of Chicano art
- Norma “Duffy” Lyon, the official Iowa State Fair butter cow sculptor from 1960 to 2006, died on June 26, 2011, at the age of 81. Lyon also created likenesses of celebrities and presidents, and even produced a life-size reproduction of Leonardo’s The Last Supper from two thousand pounds of butter
- Ján Mančuška, an experimental writer, painter, and video artist who challenged traditional presentations of art within architectural environments and was notorious for his conceptually playful installations, died on July 1, 2011. He was 39 years old
- Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop, a teacher, archaeologist, and president of the British School of Archaeology in the 1990s, died on May 9, 2011, at age 97. A scholar of jewelry, Maxwell-Hyslop wrote extensively on Bronze Age weapons and tools from West Asia
- Eddy G. Nicholson, an industrialist who was an avid collector of early American art and furniture, passed away on June 16, 2011, at the age of 73
- Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, a French Egyptologist who rescued antiquities from southern Nubia in the 1960s and mounted the groundbreaking King Tut exhibition at the Musée du Louvre in 1967, died on June 23, 2011. She was 97 years old
- George Thomas Noszlopy, a Hungarian-born scholar and longtime professor at Birmingham Polytechnic in England who produced novel explorations on early-twentieth-century art, Renaissance art, and British art and crafts, passed away on June 5, 2011, at age 78. Adrian Hicken has written a special text on him for CAA
- Breon O’Casey, a modernist jeweler, weaver, printmaker, painter, and sculptor who was a member of the St. Ives School in England, which included Barbara Hepworth, died on May 22, 2011. He was 83
- Roman Opalka, a Polish painter recognized for his series Opalka 1965/1 — ∞, which numerically annotated his days starting in 1965 with the number one, passed away on August 6, 2011. He was 79 years old
- Ruth Perelman, a cultural patron in Philadelphia who contributed to the expansion of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and funded the Perelman Building, which opened in 2007, died on July 31, 2011. She was 90
- Edward Carlos Plunkett, an Irish abstract painter known as Lord Dunsany who emerged in the 1960s but traded in art for design in the 1980s, died on May 24, 2011, at the age of 71. He helped found de Marsillac Plunkett, for which he created furniture and decorative vessels to complement his wife’s architectural work, yet returned to painting in the 1990s
- Wonil Rhee, a prolific South Korean curator who organized numerous exhibitions and biennials around the world, died on January 11, 2011, at the age of 50. Working at several musuems and independently, Rhee diligently promoted contemporary Asian artists and evoked broader international dialogue via exhibitions such as Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves (2007) at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Germany
- Albert M. Sack, a New York–based antique dealer and the author of Fine Points of American Furniture: Good, Better, Best (1950), an important criterion for aesthetic judgment of furniture for collectors and nonspecialists alike, died on May 29, 2011. He was 96
- Stanley Seeger, a coy patron of art known for a stunning collection of homes in the United Kingdom and an expansive collection of work by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Egon Schiele, and Francis Bacon, died on June 24, 2011. He was 81 years old
- Robert Sklar, a professor of cinema studies at New York University from 1977 to 2009 and the author of several publications exploring how film influences morals, beliefs, and social context, including Movie-Made America: A History of American Movies (1975), died on July 2, 2011, at age 74. An active member of the National Film Preservation Board, Sklar served on the New York Film Festival selection committee during the 1990s
- Geoffrey Squire, a designer and an educator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, both in London, died in June 2011 at the age of 86. Squire was the author of Dress, Art, and Society, 1560–1970 (1974) and The Observer’s Book of European Costumes (1975)
- Alex Steinweiss, an art director at Columbia Records who in 1940 invented the modern album cover when he packaged a Rodgers and Hart 78 RPM record with a grandly lit marquee on the sleeve rather than a flat monochrome packaging, died on July 17, 2011. He was 94
- Zdenek Sykora, a Czech artist whose computer-generated compositions in the 1960s garnered attention for their relentless mathematical method and abstraction within predetermined rules, died on July 12, 2011, at age 91. He was also a professor at Charles University in Prague
- Prince Twins Seven-Seven, a Nigerian painter associated with the Oshogbo School in Ibadan who focused on Yoruban myths through intricate patterns and bright colors, died on June 16, 2011, at the age of 67. His work was shown internationally, including the controversial 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre in Paris
- James Earnest Vivieaere, a New Zealand–based artist whose multimedia and video work demonstrated the multifarious identity of Pacific Islanders outside their enforced exoticism, died on June 3, 2011, at age 63. As a curator, Vivieaere produced the survey exhibitions Bottled Ocean (1994) in his home country and The Great Journey: In Pursuit of the Ancestral Realm (2009) in Taiwan
- Shelagh Wakeley, an installation artist who focused on integrating continuity and sensation into public spaces in Britain while contrasting nature and artifice, died on March 19, 2011, at the age of 78. She met the Brazilian artist Tunga in 1989 and collaborated with him on video projects in the 1990s
- George White, architect of the American Capitol from 1971 to 1995 who was responsible for maintaining the Supreme Court, Library of Congress, and the surrounding grounds, died on June 17, 2011, at the age of 90. White oversaw the complete restoration of the Capitol Building’s rotunda, renovations of the Supreme Court and Senate Chamber, and the revitalization of the electrical and transportation systems in Congressional office buildings
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 September listing.
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — July 14, 2011
In its semimonthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, curators, collectors, museum directors, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts.
- Karen Aqua, a filmmaker and teacher based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose works in animation can be found in her eleven films and in the twenty-two segments she had created for Sesame Street since 1990, died on May 30, 2011. She was 57 years old
- José Argüelles, an eccentric artist and scholar who, after earning a doctorate in art history, taught aesthetics at universities nationally and wrote about the Mayan calendar in his book The Mayan Factor: Path beyond Technology, passed away on March 23, 2011, at age 72. He is known for organizing the Harmonic Convergence event of 1987
- Thomas N. Armstrong III, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York from 1974 to 1990 and who later led the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, died on June 20, 2011, at the age of 78. Armstrong facilitated the museum’s purchase of Frank Stella’s Die Fahne Hoch!, Jasper John’s Three Flags, and Alexander Calder’s Circus; he is also known for his firing of the curator Marcia Tucker, which prompted her to found the New Museum of Contemporary Art
- Ariege Arseguel, an independent art consultant and a former executive director of the Sonoma County Museum in California, died on June 5, 2011, at the age of 49. She had also worked for the San Francisco Art Institute, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- Terry Ball, an artist who drew architectural reconstructions, including historic depictions of the Tower of London and Windsor Castle, among other locations, died on February 23, 2011. He was 79 years old
- Luciano Bellosi, an art historian specializing in Italian artists from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries—notably Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, and Masaccio—died on April 26, 2011, at age 74. He taught medieval art history at the University of Siena from 1979 to 2006
- Ron Bone, a British painter known for his quiet interior scenes that critics compared to Andrew Wyeth and to seventeenth-century Dutch painting, died on February 26, 2011. He was 60 years old
- Claudio Bravo, a Chilean-born, largely self-taught artist who established his reputation in the 1960s by painting portraits of elite society in Spain and the Philippines, passed away on June 4, 2011, at age 74. Influenced by Mark Rothko and Antoni Tàpies, Bravo transitioned into trompe l’oeil paintings of drapery and crumpled paper in his later years
- Thalia Noras Carlos, a philanthropist who contributed millions of dollars worth of Greek and Roman antiquities to the Michael C. Carlos Museum, which bears the name of her late husband, at Emory University in Atlanta, passed away on May 22, 2011. She was 83 years old
- Leonora Carrington, a British-born Surrealist artist and writer and a muse to Max Ernst, died on May 25, 2011, at the age of 94. Though she traveled and exhibited her work internationally, she settled in Mexico City, where she spent time with her female artistic colleagues, Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo, and developed her unique, highly praised painting style
- Ira Cohen, a filmmaker, photographer, poet, publisher, and musician whose greatest work was life itself, died on April 25, 2011, at the age of 76. The New York–based Cohen traveled internationally and had collaborated with William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Paul Bowles
- Stephen De Staebler, a Bay Area–based creator of figurative sculpture in clay and bronze that depicted hauntingly fractured body parts, died on May 13, 2011, at the age of 78. The de Young Museum in San Francisco will host a retrospective of his work, Matter and Spirit, that opens in January 2012
- Bernhard Heisig, a celebrated and criticized East German painter who addressed themes of suffering in war and under fascism, died on June 10, 2011, at the age of 86. After reunification, Heisig’s work was exhibited across the country and presented in a solo show at Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau in 2005
- M. F. Husain, a painter often described as the Picasso of India, died on June 9, 2011, at the age of 95. After starting his career as a Bollywood poster and billboard artist, Husain shifted into a style of painting inspired by Hindu temple art and Cubism, and his controversial depictions of deities and politically charged nude women sent him into self-exile
- Denis Mahon, a historian and collector of art who contributed his significant collection of Italian Baroque paintings to several British institutions, died on April 24, 2011, at age 100. His book Studies in Seicento Art and Theory, published in 1947, is a leading text on the subject; he also wrote extensively about Caravaggio and Nicolas Poussin
- Adolfas Mekas, a filmmaker associated with New American Cinema and the founder, with his brother Jonas, of Film Culture, a journal that advanced avant-garde film, died on May 31, 2011, at age 85. Mekas was also a founding member of the film department at Bard College, directing the program from 1971 to 1994 and teaching there until 2004
- Robert Miller, an art dealer whose eponymous New York gallery represents many blue-chip artists and their estates, including Ai Weiwei, Diane Arbus, Lee Krasner, and Alice Neel, died on June 22, 2011. He was 72 years old
- Andrew Morgan, an artist and a professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami from 1970 to 1987, died on March 18, 2011, at age 88. He was known for paintings and drawings of the Florida landscape and the Everglades
- Mordechai Omer, director and chief curator of the Tel Aviv Museum for the last seventeen years, passed away in June 2011 at the age of 70. He was also a professor at Tel Aviv University and worked to cultivate the Israeli art scene by supporting both young and established artists
- David E. Rust, a curator who worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, for many years until his retirement in 1984, died on April 8, 2011, at the age of 81. A specialist in French painting, Rust also studied Spanish and Italian art
- John S. Slorp, president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 1990 to 2002 and an accreditor for the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, passed away on May 21, 2011, at the age of 74. Previous to his stint in Minnesota, Slorp was president of the Memphis College of Art for eight years
- Jack Smith, one of four artists known as the Beaux Arts quartet—or the Kitchen Sink artists, after an article by the critic David Sylvester—who came to prominence in England in the 1950s with abstract paintings that channeled Social Realism, died on June 11, 2011. He was 82
- Cy Twombly, an influential and revered postwar abstract painter whom the critic Robert Hughes elevated to an artistic pantheon that included Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, died on July 5, 2011. He was 83 years old
- Osamu Ueda, an Osaka-born curator at the Art Institute of Chicago who catalogued the museum’s collection of Japanese woodblock prints in the Claire E. Buckingham Collection, died on January 30, 2011, at age 83. Ueda was the coeditor of an important museum book, The Actor’s Image: Print Makers of the Katsukawa School, published in 1994
- Polly Ullrich, a Chicago-based journalist who wrote for United Press International, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the Chicago Sun Times, and the New York Times before she turned to ceramics, which she created and exhibited across the United States, passed away on July 6, 2011, at age 60. Ullrich also lectured across the Midwest and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned an MA in art history, theory, and criticism in 1994
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 listing.
A Tribute to Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010)
posted by Christopher Howard — June 16, 2011
Amy Ingrid Schlegel is director of galleries and collections for the Aidekman Arts Center at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. She served on the CAA Board of Directors from 2007 to 2011 and was liaison to the Committee on Women in the Arts from 2008 to 2011.
![Sylvia Sleigh](http://www.collegeart.org/images/obituaries/sleigh.jpg)
Sylvia Sleigh (photograph by Judy Schiller)
When I first met Sylvia Sleigh at her Chelsea brownstone in 1993 during the course of my dissertation research, I realized what a treasure trove her home/studio was and how enchanting her amiable, anecdotal manner of recalling the past also was. Until recently, within the last decade, most people knew little about Sleigh’s seventy-year oeuvre other than her best-known painting, The Turkish Bath (1973), often reproduced as one of the very few works by a woman artist in art-history textbooks. Despite the tokenistic way in which many students might know Sleigh’s work, it has long been clear how the women’s movement in New York during the 1970s helped boost her from relative obscurity since arriving in the United States from England in 1961, where she had just one solo exhibition. Now, in 2011, she posthumously received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art, after earning the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association in 2008.
It seems disingenuous not to acknowledge and assess how Sleigh’s remarkable and, in many ways, paradoxical career as a feminist artist was fostered, even born of, her long-term monogamous relationship with the art critic, curator, and writer Lawrence Alloway, whom she married in 1956 (and remained happily married to until his premature death in 1990). Sleigh and Alloway managed a long-term romance and marriage while their roles as “traditional” realist painter and “avant-garde” critic and theorist diverged during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Yet each participated in the other’s private, creative fantasies, and those fantasies were projected in the creative work of both, produced on different floors in that Chelsea brownstone.
![Sylvia Sleigh Turkish Bath](http://www.collegeart.org/images/obituaries/SleighTurkishBath.jpg)
Sylvia Sleigh, The Turkish Bath, 1973, oil on canvas, 76 x 100 in. Collection of the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago (artwork © Estate of Sylvia Sleigh)
Indeed, their relationship was the subtext of a 2001 retrospective exhibition I curated in Philadelphia, “An Unnerving Romanticism”: The Art of Sylvia Sleigh and Lawrence Alloway. Sleigh painted more portraits of Alloway than of anyone else; he also appeared several times in her group ensembles, including The Turkish Bath. Naturally, Alloway’s visage could be identified throughout the exhibition, and drawings he penned in ink within longer letters written to Sleigh during his travels were also part of the display.
The exhibition’s title was lifted from an undated letter Eleanor Antin wrote to Sleigh after seeing Sleigh’s 1971 painting Philip Golub Reclining: “It romanticism is unnerving,” Antin gushed. “The contrast between your fierceness and his lush languourous [sic] beauty is violent.…. Sylvia, dear, you are a magnificent romantic and not a lady.” In the work Golub, then about sixteen years old, gazes dreamily into a large, wall-mounted mirror, while Sleigh’s reflection—she is seated in front of her easel—scrutinizes the sitter’s naked, teenaged body and effeminate face partly obscured by his long, wavy hair. In Golub’s case, as the son of Sleigh and Alloway’s close friends Nancy Spero and Leon Golub, the desire was purely visual—Philip is essentially eye candy—but this certainly was not always the case.
One of Sleigh’s gifts as a painter was her ability to establish an intensely personal and professional dynamic between herself as creative subject and, in the case of her many straight or gay male sitters, the object of her desiring gaze. This intense dynamic also characterized her relationship with Alloway. Already wed and ten years his senior, she married him after a five-year affair. Unlike some creative couples, romantic love and intellectual partnership were not incompatible for Sleigh and Alloway. They were each other’s muses and sounding boards. They were, in many ways, separate but equal partners, autonomous agents yet fondly attached. Despite their career imbalance, particularly during the 1960s, when Alloway was in his heyday, they nurtured one another’s aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities, including their penchant for iconoclasm in their separate challenges to the art world’s prevailing notions of aesthetic quality judged in exclusively formal terms.
![Sylvia Sleigh Max Warsh](http://www.collegeart.org/images/obituaries/SleighMaxWarsh.jpg)
Sylvia Sleigh, Max Warsh Seated Nude, 2006, oil on canvas, 52 x 56 in. (artwork © Estate of Sylvia Sleigh)
During the 1970s some reviewers questioned the quality of Sleigh’s paintings depicting nude men. Ironically, it is those portraits for which Sleigh is now canonized in art history today. Linda Nochlin argued in her 1974 article “Some Women Realists: Painters of the Figure” that quality in Sleigh’s work was a red herring, writing that Sleigh “most pointedly raises the issues involved in the female artist’s representation of the male nude. While not overtly political in intention, [her works representing nude men] are certainly political in effect, if we accept sexuality as one of the major political arenas of our day.”1 While Sleigh did not deliberately distort her figures, she tended to idealize the bodies of her models and to render their faces as highly individualized portraits. This propensity creates a frisson that some critics may have misread as incompetence. Or, as Nochlin asserted, “Similar accusations of formal weakness, technical insufficiency, or even willful distortion were, of course, leveled at Courbet, Manet and even at the young Ingres, at least in part because the underlying politics of their art affronted ‘normal,’ i.e., unconscious of ideological expectations.”2 We recognize in hindsight that sex discrimination hindered Sleigh’s reputation as one of the most important painters of the twentieth century for decades. While Alloway chose not to publish a single review of Sleigh’s solo exhibitions, he certainly understood the forceful challenge her paintings of nude men posed to assumptions about spectatorship as a male domain of pleasure. After all, the same art gallery that he critiqued as a reviewer for the Nation and for many art magazines during the 1970s exhibited her nude and seminude portraits of him.
Sleigh’s paintings are, fundamentally, intimate testaments to the relationships that she maintained and nurtured over her lengthy, prodigious career. As an index of the people she knew at the time, her oeuvre collectively reads like a perpetual, unnerving romance with that rare professional intimacy expected from a realist painter who works from life, a romance that is unnerving for its unexpected capacity to simultaneously charm and alarm.
Endnotes
1. Linda Nochlin, “Some Women Realists: Painters of the Figure” Arts 48, no. 8 (May 1974), 32.
2. Ibid.
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — May 25, 2011
In its semimonthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, teachers, curators, museum and gallery directors, art dealers, auction-house administrators, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts.
- Keith Aoki, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis, who helped create Bound by Law? Tales of the Public Domain, a comic book about copyright law and fair use, died on April 26, 2011. He was 55
- Jackson Burnside, a Bahamian artist, architect, and activist who was a cultural icon in his country, died on May 11, 2011, at the age of 62
- Matthew Carr, a figurative artist who drew portraits of Tom Stoppard and Diana Ross, died on February 23, 2011, at the age of 57
- Nimai Chatterji, a collector of postwar avant-garde art and literature, including artist’s books, posters, and audiovisual material, died on December 25, 2010. He was 77
- Polly K. Evans, an artist, teacher, and graphic designer who worked in the Byzantine studies program at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, died on December 28, 2010. She was 53 years old
- Jack Franses, a specialist in and dealer of textiles, tapestries, and oriental carpets who once led a department of Islamic art at Sotheby’s in London, died on December 10, 2010, at age 83. He also designed and taught classes at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies
- Creighton Gilbert, a historian of Italian Renaissance art who taught for many years at Yale University, died on April 6, 2011, at the age of 90. CAA’s longest standing member, Gilbert was editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin from 1980 to 1985 and shared the Frank Jewett Mather Award with Harold Rosenberg in 1964
- Sam Green, a promoter of Pop art who as director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia gave Andy Warhol his first retrospective in 1965, died on March 4, 2011. He was 70
- Stephen Hahn, a connoisseur, collector, and dealer of modern art who was a past president of the Art Dealers Association of America, died on April 2, 2011. He was 90
- John Hinchcliffe, a weaver, potter, printmaker, and designer who in 1991 had a retrospective at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in Bournemouth, England, died on December 20, 2010. He was 61
- Erlund Hudson, an artist who documented the home front in England in painting and drawing during World War II, died on March 9, 2011. She was 99 years old
- Gwyneth Johnstone, a British painter whose work absorbed the influences of Western art from the Italian Renaissance to modernism, died on December 8, 2010, at the age of 95
- Nancy Kominsky, an artist and the star of the television program Paint Along with Nancy, shown in the United Kingdom from 1974 to 1978 and rebroadcast in the United States in the 1980s, died on March 11, 2011. She was 95
- Suzanne Lang, a potter who expressed her Marxist beliefs on plates, pots, and jugs, died in March 2011. She was 69 years old
- Gordon Lebredt, a Canadian conceptual artist and writer who also fixed and raced motorcycles, died on February 26, 2011, at age 62. A monograph on unrealized projects, Gordon Lebredt: Nonworks 1975–2008, was published earlier this year
- Craig “Pirate” Lucas, a painter, associate professor emeritus at Kent State University, and the winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize’s 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award for Visual Arts, died on April 1, 2011. He was 69 years old
- Ioana Nemes, a Romanian artist who showed across Europe and was on a residency at Art in General in New York, died on April 23, 2011. She was 32
- Christopher Pemberton, an English painter, teacher, and translator of Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, died on December 1, 2010. He was 87 years old
- Jane Phillips, a painter turned curator and director who led the Mission Gallery in Swansea, Wales, died on February 6, 2011. She was 53 years old
- John Pitson, a British typographer who had directed the Australian Government Publishing Service and helped author the influential Style Manual for Authors, Editors, and Printers (1966), died on November 25, 2010. He was 92
- Lancelot Ribeiro, an Indian artist who settled in Great Britain whose abstract and representational work covered a range of styles and subject matter, from figuration to landscape to still life, died on December 25, 2010. He was 77 years old
- Harold Rotenberg, an American artist who worked in an Impressionistic style and taught at the Museum School and School of Practical Arts (now the Art Institute of Boston), died on April 2, 2011. He was 105
- Heather Ann Sackett, an artist based in Syracuse, New York, who worked in sculpture and ceramics, died on March 17, 2011. She was 56 years old
- Tessa Sidey, a curator of modern and contemporary art for the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in England, died on January 1, 2011, at age 55. Among her career highlights is the exhibition Surrealism in Birmingham 1935–1954 and its catalogue
- Julian Thompson, a leading expert in Chinese porcelain who was chairman of the London branch of Sotheby’s from 1982 to 1990, died on January 16, 2011. He was 69
- Robert Vickrey, a Magic Realist painter who appeared in nine Whitney Museum Annuals in the 1950s and 1960s, died on April 17, 2011. He was 84 years old
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA.
Françoise “Francesca” Weinmann: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — April 13, 2011
George A. Wanklyn is associate professor of art history and European and Mediterranean cultures at the American University of Paris in France.
![Franciose Weinmann](http://www.collegeart.org/images/obituaries/FrancioseWeinmann.jpg)
Françoise “Francesca” Weinmann
It is with a real sense of great personal loss that I write about the death of Francesca Weinmann, who passed away at the Institut Curie in Paris in the early morning of March 4, 2011. Francesca—who much preferred the Italian form of her name to the Françoise she was given at birth—was being treated for a few years for a particularly vicious form of breast cancer.
Weinmann taught at the American College in Paris, which subsequently became the American University of Paris, from 1972 to 1999. More than just a professor, she founded the Art History Department after Dean Carol Maddison Kidwell asked her to create the major in art history. In 1982 Weinmann was awarded the first Board of Directors Distinguished Teaching Award. Upon retirement, she became associate professor of art history emerita.
Shortly after I met Francesca, who was department chair when I was hired to teach my first course there in 1982, I asked her about her nationality. “European!” she immediately replied. Born in Switzerland in 1932 to a Swiss Protestant mother and a father who was a British subject of German Jewish origin, Weinmann grew up in the north of Italy, in the village of Loveno on Lake Como. She received her early education in Loveno and Como and then studied in Paris, receiving a licence from the Institut d’art et d’archéologie of the Sorbonne before attending the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University for her graduate studies. English was Francesca’s fourth language, in fact, after French, German, and Italian.
Weinmann developed many courses during her ACP/AUP years, exploring the origins of art and the art of antiquity through the Middle Ages to the Italian and Northern Renaissance. During most of her time as a faculty member, she taught eight courses a year, in addition to her duties as chair. She also developed a course on aesthetics, and her sustained reflection on the nature of beauty in art produced a book, on which she was working in her retirement—right to the very last days of her life. Aperion Books has scheduled The Path towards Beauty for publication in June.
Weinmann had a powerfully strong personality: many of her students, who were also mine, have told me how scared they were, initially, in her presence. But this most demanding teacher developed bonds of the greatest affection and loyalty with a large number of them, who stayed in regular contact with her. After retiring from AUP, she spent more and more time in her beautiful house and garden on Lake Como. When in Paris, she continued to teach a number of young people, relatives of former colleagues and students, who were interested in the history of art. This was something Weinmann assumed as a passionately engaged volunteer, but she put as much energy and conviction into the work as she had invested for decades of semesters in her art-history courses.
During the last phase of her illness, a team of devoted friends—almost without exception former students and faculty colleagues—regularly visited and helped her. While being treated these past few years by her doctors in Paris and Italy, Francesca maintained great optimism and unbounded confidence in their capacity to care for her. She had asked to be buried in Loveno, next to her mother, in the small cemetery she showed me the first time I stayed at her house—something like a quarter of a century ago.
Among the last people to visit Francesca, when she was hospitalized, were Waddick Doyle, who lived near her apartment at Les Gobelins, and me. Doyle has said, “She will be remembered with affection, respect, and love. She made a great contribution to our institution. She will live on in her students and colleagues.” And, I would add, in the forthcoming book that is the fruit of many years of deep reflection and hard work.
Anne L. Schroder: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — April 13, 2011
ulie-Anne Plax is professor of art history in the School of Art at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
![Anne Schroder](http://www.collegeart.org/images/obituaries/AnneSchroder.jpg)
Anne L. Schroder (photograph by Chris Hildreth, Duke Photography, 2006)
Anne L. Schroder, curator and academic program coordinator at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art died on December 23, 2010, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, after a brief, unexpected illness. She will be fondly remembered as a remarkable scholar and curatorial “sleuth” of eighteenth-century French art; a vibrant, generous member of the scholarly community; and a warm, kind, and cheerful friend. In the words of one colleague: “For a serious scholar, Anne Schroder certainly laughed a lot.”
Schroder published widely on Jean-Honoré Fragonard, the subject of her dissertation, and on gender issues, prints and the print market of the eighteenth century, and the debate over theories of copying, originality, and artistic property following the French Revolution. Her astute intellect, fertile imagination, and sheer love of her work are perceptible in all her writings.
Schroder’s keen curatorial eye led to the Nasher’s purchase of a late-eighteenth-century history painting, Clytemnestra Hearing the News of Iphigenia’s Impending Sacrifice (1787), attributed to the studio of Jacques-Louis David. Her painstaking scholarly detective work led to its attribution as an early work by François Gérard. She also curated and oversaw many installations from the permanent collection, including the inaugural exhibition Nature, Gender, Ritual (2005). With a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2009, she increased Duke faculty and student involvement with the museum’s collection.
Schroder received her BA at Smith College and her MA and PhD degrees in art history from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, under the direction of Mary Sheriff. Before taking on her position at the Nasher, Schroder was curator of exhibitions at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida, and assistant curator at the Michele and Donald D’AmourMuseum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts. An adjunct faculty member at Duke, she had also taught art history at the University of Florida and the University of Minnesota.
Known for her professionalism and a willingness to serve, Schroder was the president of the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture, a CAA affiliate, from 2005 to 2009, and a member of the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Her warm connection with everyone endowed the organization with a sense of community and camaraderie.
Schroder is survived by her beloved husband Eric and her son Spaulding. We shall all miss her optimism, intelligence, and that great smile.