Getty and Guggenheim News; Farewells to Elizabeth Murray, Brooke Astor, Bruce Wolmer

NEW YORK—The end of July and beginning of August marked major losses for the art world, with the deaths of the abstract painter Elizabeth Murray at 66, legendary philanthropist Brooke Astor at 105, and Art & Auction's own Bruce Wolmer at 59. The film industry also mourned the deaths of two legendary directors, Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman. Meanwhile, several art-world giants saw significant staff changes, with Lisa Dennison resigning from the Guggenheim, Kelly Troester leaving Christie’s for Bloomsbury, and a 40-year Smithsonian veteran departing in controversy. Help us keep our readers informed by sending the latest happenings to newseditors@artinfo.com.

NEW YORK— Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum director Lisa Dennison, a 29-year veteran of the institution who became director less than two years ago, has resigned from her post to join Sotheby’s, where she will focus on international business development at the auction house, the New York Times reports. “I’ve been at the Guggenheim almost my entire life,” Dennison said. “And this is the moment where if I’m going to make a change I should do it now.”

LOS ANGELES—The Getty Research Institute's ten-month search for a new director may be over. Thomas Gaehtgens, a respected scholar and the founder and director of the German Center for the History of Art in Paris, is expected to be named head of the L.A. institute today, reports the L.A. Times. He will replace Thomas Crow, who left to chair the department of modern art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts last year.

NEW YORK—Kelly Troester, head of the print department at Christie’s New York, recently resigned from the company to join Bloomsbury Auctions, where she will launch a print department in early 2008, according to Bloomsbury. Following last year’s expansion into Rome, the London-based Bloomsbury is opening an auction room in New York this fall. Troester began her career at Butterfield & Butterfield in Los Angeles in 1988, becoming a print specialist and the eventual head of the department. In 1998, she moved to New York to become a senior specialist at Christie’s, where she became department head in 2001. She was named senior vice president of the company in 2006.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—James M. Hobbins, executive assistant to the secretary of the Smithsonian, has ended a four-decade career at the institution after admitting he destroyed records from an important Smithsonian Board of Regents meeting in January, reports the Washington Post. The meeting concerned the excessive spending of Secretary Lawrence M. Small, who has since resigned.

Farewells
NEW YORK—Bruce Wolmer, the former editor-in-chief of Art & Auction magazine and an intellectual heavyweight in the international art world for over 20 years, died in New York of complications from diabetes on Aug. 10. He was 59 years old.

A widely published freelance critic and journalist for a bevy of publications, from the Paris Review to the Wall Street Journal, Wolmer also held senior positions at a number of art magazines before joining Art & Auction in 1990. Wolmer navigated the magazine through four distinctly different owner-publisher regimes and was intimately involved in the its growth and stature as the art market rose, fell, and recuperated to its present bull strength. As he aptly put it in his last editorial for the magazine, in October 2006, “At times, frankly, things were touch and go.”

NEW YORK—The philanthropist and legendary socialite Brooke Astor died Aug. 13 of pneumonia at 105. Astor was a great friend of the arts in New York, giving away nearly $200 million in support of cultural and civic institutions, especially those she called the “crown jewels,” reports the AP. These include the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Natural History, Central Park, and the Bronx Zoo. "Brooke was truly a remarkable woman," longtime family friend David Rockefeller said. "She was the leading lady of New York in every sense of the word." 

NEW YORK—Elizabeth Murray died Aug. 12 of complications from lung cancer at the age of 66, reports the New York Times. The abstract painter, whose four-decade career was honored in a sprawling retrospective at MoMA last year—one of few in the museum's history devoted to a female artist—was best known for her bright, oddly shaped canvases, which took on love, domestic life, and painting itself. [See "Elizabeth Murray's Dream."]

NEW YORK—The artist Jeremy Blake died at the age of 35, the New York Times reports. Police said a body found in the water off Sea Girt, N.J., was identified as Blake’s, and the cause of death was presumed to be suicide. Blake, whose rise to prominence began in the 1990s, was known for his lush digital-video works and was featured in three Whitney Biennials. He also created abstract art sequences for the 2002 film Punch-Drunk Love. Blake was scheduled to mount an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in October, and while some of the planned pieces remain unfinished, Jonathan P. Binstock, the exhibition’s curator and a former curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran, said the gallery would try to “present as full a picture as possible of this work.”

STOCKHOLM, Sweden—Ingmar Bergman, one of the most influential film directors of the 20th century, died July 30 at his home on the Swedish island of Faaro, reports the Agence France-Presse. He was 89. Bergman won three Oscars for best foreign language film and despite his dark themes he was widely acclaimed for movies such as The Seventh Seal (1957) and Fanny and Alexander (1982).

ROME—Film legend Michelangelo Antonioni, director of the 1960s hit Blow Up and one of the last figures of Italy's golden age of cinema, died at age 94, reports the Agence France-Presse. In addition to Blow Up, made in England in 1966, Antonioni's major films included L'Avventura in 1960, and The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson, in 1975. Blow Up won Antonioni the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1967, while the Venice Film Festival honored him with the Golden Lion for Il Deserto Rosso in 1964 and a career Golden Lion in 1983, followed two years later by a career Oscar.

NEW YORK—The painter Fannie Highsmith died on July 27 at her home in Jaffrey, N.H., the New York Times reports. She was 96. Hillsmith was born in Boston in 1911 and trained for four years at the Boston Museum School, which her grandfather co-founded. In 1934 she moved to New York and was influenced by the avant-garde, studying first at the Art Students League and then at the A. E. Gallatin Collection at New York University. Hillsmith is best known for an abstract style that combined the Cubism of Picasso, Miro, and Gris with recognizable American motifs.

APTOS, Calif.—Sculptor and arts educator Gurdon Woods died July 21 at the age of 92, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Woods was born in Savannah, Ga., and trained at the Art Students League in New York before serving in World War II. He was director of the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) for ten years beginning in 1955 and created the fine arts department at the University of California Santa Cruz. He also served as director of the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and as deputy director of programs for the Los Angeles Natural History Museum.

HONG KONG—Tsang Tsou-choi, a Hong Kong graffiti artist known as the "King of Kowloon" whose Chinese calligraphy on walls and phone boxes across the city gained attention worldwide, has died of a heart attack at the age of 86, reports the Agence France-Presse. He achieved greater fame after some of his works were displayed at the Venice Biennale in 2003, with his work inspiring interior decorators and fashion designers including Louis Vuitton. In 2004, one of his pieces sold at a Sotheby's auction for $7,000.