A Shocking Death, an Unexpected Departure

NEW YORK—The art world seemed to have settled into the long, lazy days of summer, with comings and goings fewer and further between as June faded into July. But then, like lightning, some significant deaths and unexpected staff changes packed a considerable punch. For starters, the art world is reeling from the news that painter and video artist Jeremy Blake might have wandered into the ocean and drowned a week after his girlfriend, filmmaker and writer Theresa Duncan, committed suicide. Legendary MoMA photography curator John Szarkowski also died, at age 81, on July 7. And in the UK, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s chairman-to-be delivered some surprising news. Keep us up to date by sending the latest happenings to NewsEditors@artinfo.com.

NEW YORK— The artist Jeremy Blake might have drowned a week after his girlfriend, filmmaker and writer Theresa Duncan, committed suicide, the New York Post reports. Duncan overdosed on pills July 10, and on the evening of July 17, Blake was seen walking into the choppy surf off Rockaway Beach, leaving a pile of clothing and a handwritten note claiming he was “despondent” over Duncan’s death, police sources told the Post. Police helicopters were scanning the waters off Rockaway Beach on July 21 as the art world reeled from the news. "It was kind of a double shock. They were both totally unexpected," said Lance Kinz, whose Chelsea gallery, Kinz, Tillou + Feigen, represented Blake. "This is an extraordinarily sad story. He couldn't go on without her, so he decided to be with her, so to speak."

NEW YORK—John Szarkowski, “a curator who almost single-handedly elevated photography’s status in the last half-century to that of a fine art, making his case in seminal writings and landmark exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,” according to The New York Times, died in Pittsfield, Mass. on July 7, at the age of 81.

Szarkowski was the first to recognize the artistic significance of works by photographers Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand with his 1967 MoMA show, “New Documents.” The curator died from complications of a stroke, Peter MacGill of New York’s Pace/MacGill Gallery told the Times.

LOS ANGELES—Acclaimed architect George Yu has died at the age of 43, of a rare form of lung cancer that afflicts nonsmokers, the Los Angeles Times reports. Yu, who was born in Hong Kong and grew up in British Columbia, had “a deep interest in digital design tempered by an obsession with the act of making,” according to the Times. “Yu emerged in the last five years or so as an important link between the city's leading firms and architects in their 20s and 30s, many of whom Yu taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and elsewhere.”

DALLAS, Texas—Heritage Auction Galleries has named Delia E. Sullivan its new Native American art specialist and consignment director. Sullivan joins Heritage with a master’s degree in cultural anthropology from the New School for Social Research in New York, where she studied primitive art and shamanism. She also worked for 14 years at Christie's, seven of which were spent as head of the American Indian art department.

ROCHESTER, Minn.—Ted Hartwell, the founding curator of the photography department at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, died at the age of 73 on July 5, the Star Tribune reports. Harwell, a contemporary of Szarkowski, was nationally known as a pioneering advocate for photography as an art form, and “merged down-home humanism with international vision” during his 35-year career at the museum, according to the Tribune. Hartwell "was one of our heroes, a beacon," said Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

OXFORD, Miss.—Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette died in a car accident July 10, The New York Times reports. He was 57. Marlette, who was known for shocking audiences with his work, created the popular syndicated strip “Kudzu,” turned it into a musical, and wrote two novels. Originally from Greensboro, N.C., he had worked at The Charlotte Observer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, New York Newsday, and The Tulsa World. He took home a Pulitzer in 1988 for his work at the Charlotte and Atlanta papers.