Violet Kinney Parkhurst Dies at 86

NEW YORK—Paul Morris, president and co-founder of the Armory Show, has shut down his fifth-story Chelsea gallery after 13 years to manage Merchandise Mart Properties Inc.'s six art fairs, including the Armory Show, Bloomberg reports. Morris and dealer Matthew Marks, co-founder of the Armory Show, sold the contemporary art fair to the Chicago-based firm last year. Upper East Side gallery Jeannie Freilich Fine Art signed a three-year lease for Morris's former spot and will open on March 14 with a show by Spanish-born artist Fernando Renes.

NEW YORK—Gagosian Gallery has hired modern art specialist Andrea Crane, who will focus on works by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and other modern masters. “Collectors understand it's very exciting to look backwards,” Crane told Bloomberg. “There's an enormous amount of crossover collecting between modern and contemporary art.”

NEW YORK—The New York Historical Society has added Alice Walton, daughter of late Wal-Mart Inc. founder Sam Walton and president of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, scheduled to open in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2010, to its board of directors, Bloomberg reports. Also added to the board were philanthropist and history teacher Helen Appel; Ira Lipman, chairman of security company Guardsmark LLC; Carl Menges, retired vice chairman of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette; and Bruce Mosler, chief executive of Cushman & Wakefield, the real estate services company.

CHICAGO—The Art Institute of Chicago has appointed Stephanie D'Alessandro as its new curator of modern art in the Department of Medieval through Modern European Painting and Sculpture. D'Alessandro has been with the Art Institute since she took a curatorial fellowship there in 1998. Prior to that appointment she held curatorial positions at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, and between 1995 and 1998, she served as an exhibition assistant for the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, while also serving as a lecturer at the University of Chicago. She received both her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago.

DALLAS—The Dallas Museum of Art has appointed Maria de Corral to its newly created Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art position. The position was established with a $5 million gift from Adelyn Hoffman in honor of her son, Robert Hoffman, an art collector and philanthropist who died in August 2006. De Corral, an art critic and independent curator based in Madrid, has been named Hoffman Family Adjunct Senior Curator of Contemporary Art for 2008, and one of her duties will be advising museum leadership on the appointment of a future, resident Hoffman Family Senior Curator. Her prior experience includes co-directing the 2005 Venice Biennale and, from 1990 to 1994, directing the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid. From 1995 until 2002, she was director of the contemporary art collection of Fundación "la Caixa." In the United States, de Corral has served on a number of art-world advisory committees.

SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y.—The Parrish Art Museum has appointed Terrie Sultan as its new director, the New York Times reports. Sulton, who previously served as director of the Blaffer Gallery at the Art Museum of the University of Houston, will take over by April 1 for Trudy C. Kramer, who is retiring after 26 years at the museum.

VENICE—Cincinnati Art Museum director Aaron Betsky has been chosen to direct the 11th International Architecture Exhibition at the 2008 Venice Biennale, the Architects Newspaper reports. Before serving in Cincinnati, Betsky led the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. He said this year’s Architecture Exhibition, “Out There. Architecture Beyond Building.,” focuses on how art, literature, film, landscape architecture, and design influence the way we think about and live in buildings.

Farewells
NEW YORK—The Russian-born artist and Holocaust survivor Boris Lurie, known for depicting the horrors of the Holocaust in his work and leading the confrontational art movement No! Art, died at the age of 83 on January 7, the New York Times reports. Born in Leningrad, he moved with his family to Latvia as a child and was held in concentration camps during World War II. He began painting after he moved to New York in the 1940s. Here he formed a group that first exhibited art at the March Gallery and later became known as No! Art. According to the Times, “They wrote that they were reacting to ‘the hallowed sickness of a world preparing to die’ and called their work ‘Art for Survival.’” Lurie all but disappeared from the art scene in the 1970s and 1980s, continuing to make art but showing in very few exhibitions. He reemerged in 1993, when the Clayton Gallery organized a show of his work, and, after that, his etchings, paintings, and collages appeared again around the United States, Latvia, and Germany. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.—Art conservation pioneer Caroline K. Keck died December 17 at the age of 99, the New York Times reports. Along with her husband, Sheldon Keck, she was considered one of the most influential conservators of her time, with an approach that combined scientific research, modern technology, and shared methodological standards. She advocated conservators' sharing and documenting their techniques, and using techniques that could easily be reversed. In 1960, Keck founded with her husband the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and in 1970 the couple founded the Cooperstown Conservation training program (now at Buffalo State College, part of the State University of New York) under the auspices of the State University of New York College at Oneonta. They also served as consultants and helped establish conservation departments at a number of major museums. Keck, who was born in New York and educated at Vassar and Harvard, also wrote several books on conservation and served as a personal conservator to Georgia O’Keeffe, to Edwin Dickinson, and for the art collection of Nelson A. Rockefeller.

SAN PEDRO, Calif.—The artist Violet Kinney Parkhurst died January 13. Born in Derby Line, Vt., in 1921, Parkhurst became known for her legendary seascapes, which are in more than five million private collections around the world, including those of four U. S. presidents, two presidents of China, the King of Saudi Arabia, and a host of celebrities, including Clark Gable. Her works are also in the permanent collections of major museums such as the China National Museum of Fine Art and the Stockholm Museum, and have been exhibited in others such as the Louvre and the Prado. In the spring of 2002, Parkhurst was honored as the first Western artist to have paintings in the collections of the Great Hall of the People's Republic of China and the China National Museum of Fine Arts, and was installed as professor emeritus at the Jilin Art College. She also was as a philanthropist for arts, culture, and other causes, including animal rights.

LONDON—The Japanese potter Tatsuzo Shimaoka died December 11 at the age of 88, the Guardian reports. Born in Tokyo, Shimaoka “was one of the most distinguished Japanese potters of the 20th century and an important pupil of the legendary Shoji Hamada," according to the newspaper. “Shimaoka began as an early product of the mingei movement, which wanted to give new life to traditional Japanese handicrafts in the modern era.” His work has appeared in exhibitions all over the world and is in the collections of institutions in Britain, the United States, Canada, Germany, Israel, and China.

LONDON—The Barcelona-born painter Josep Guinovart died December 12 at the age of 80, the Guardian reports. Guinovart, whose art tended toward the political and was influenced by nature, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miro, had little formal education, but he began painting alongside his father and uncles, who were house painters, at the age of 14, and later attended evening classes in drawing and painting. He was an illustrator for the Dau al Set (Seven-sided dice) magazine, produced by the group of the same name associated with Antoni Tàpies and Modest Cuixart. By 1951, he was working full-time as an artist, painting theater sets and illustrating magazines, and in 1952, he left to study in Paris on a scholarship and a grant from the French state. His works ranged from ceramics to painting to collage and was exhibited in hundreds of solo shows. His pieces are in major museum collections around the world.