Jorn Utzon (d. November 29; age 90)
Utzon, a Pritzker Prize winner, was best known as the designer of the famed Sydney Opera House. He established his architectural practice in Copenhagen in 1950; in 1957, he was named the winner of the competition to build the Sydney landmark. He moved with his family to Sydney in 1962, but when the shell of the iconic building was completed, in 1966, he came into conflict with the New South Wales minister for public works and left the country. He never saw the building finished, although in 2002, he was commissioned to design interior renovations to the space that would bring it closer to his original vision; his son Jan, who is also an architect, carried out the work in Australia. Utzon practiced in Hawaii, Switzerland, and Spain after leaving Sydney, eventually settling in Majorca in the mid-1970s. Other buildings he designed include the National Assembly of Kuwait, a church in Bagsvaerd, Denmark, and many private homes.

George Brecht (d. December 5; age 82)
Born George MacDiarmid, Brecht appropriated his nom de guerre in 1945. He was an early member of the Fluxus movement, participating from 1958 to 1959 in John Cage’s seminar on experimental composition at the New School for Social Research, where he met many of the future collaborators with whom he would later define the terms for Fluxus “events,” a characteristic practice of the movement. In late 2005, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne organized a retrospective of Brecht’s work, and in 2006, he was awarded the Berliner Kunstpreis.

Francois-Xavier Lalanne (d. December 7; age 81)
Lalanne was a designer and sculptor who, along with his wife, Claude, 84, made playful, surrealist works that drew inspiration from nature. He was known for his fascination with the animal kingdom, and made animal sculptures and furniture from a range of materials, such as bronze, wool, and epoxy stone, on both large and miniature scales. The Lalannes were part of a circle of sculptors and artists that included Constantin Brancusi, Max Ernst, and Jean Tinguely in the 1960s, and they worked side-by-side as a couple for more than 50 years. Their art has been shown together in galleries and museums around the world, and an extensive monograph of their work by Daniel Abadie was published last month by Flammarion. The Lalannes, who are represented by Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York, have had a fashionable following of collectors, including Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge, Valentino, architect Peter Marino, and Reed Krakoff, the executive creative director of Coach. [For more on the Lalannes’ work, see “Animal Instincts” from the December 2006 issue of Art+Auction.]

Willoughby Sharp (d. December 17; age 72)
Sharp was a pioneer in video performance art as well as an independent curator and writer. He was known for his cutting-edge and often shocking pieces that aroused extreme emotions in viewers. His work included films, video installations, video performances, and, later in his career, cable television and broadcast TV programs. He co-founded and published Avalanche magazine with Liza Bear from 1970 to 1976, which featured major European avant-garde artists on the New York art scene — most notably Joseph Beuys. He represented the U.S. in the Venice Biennale in 1976. Sharp taught at several universities across the country, both as faculty and as a visiting artist, and his video and film works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as many others

And last but not least...
Jesse Helms (d. July 4; age 86)
A special mention is due to the late Sen. Jesse Helms, if not for being an art-world figure, then for being an anti–art world figure. Helms was a five-term Republican U.S. Senator from North Carolina and the very definition of a social conservative: He opposed nearly all progressive policies, from school integration to the creation of Martin Luther King Day, abortion rights to gay rights, as well as controversial contemporary art. He launched the culture wars of the 1980s after seeing Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine, at an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He railed against Serrano, as well as against Robert Mapplethorpe for the photographer’s nude pictures of homosexual men sometimes engaged in sex acts, and eventually passed through Congress an anti-obscenity pledge that all National Endowment for the Arts grantees had to sign. His main tactic was arguing that taxpayers’ money should not fund “obscene” or “indecent” works of art. “I like beautiful things, not modern art,” he once said. “I can’t even figure out that sculpture in the Hart Building” (a mobile by Alexander Calder). [For more on Helms and the culture wars, see “Art Hearts the Far Right.”]