2008 in Review: In Memoriam

Robert Rauschenberg Grace Hartigan Cornell Capa George Brecht Angus Fairhurst Claude Lalanne Francois-Xavier Lalanne Ettore Sottsass

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Robert Rauschenberg (d. May 12; age 82)
Rauschenberg was known worldwide as one of the purveyors and shapers of American art in the 20th century, working across media in painting, sculpture, and drawing, as well as across disciplines, designing sets and costumes for dance and theater companies. He initially became famous for his all-black and all-white paintings as well as his assemblages of found materials, and in 1953, he made waves in the art world when he erased a de Kooning drawing. He was a close friend of fellow artist Jasper Johns, with whom he lived in a series of lofts in lower Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s. In 1964, he represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennale, where he was the first modern American to win the international grand prize. His work was shown in major exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art during his lifetime.

Ettore Sottsass (d. December 31, 2007; age 90)
Italian postmodernist designer Ettore Sottsass has been hailed as “the greatest Italian designer of the last half century.” His creations include limited-edition ceramics and furniture as well as everyday objects like silverware and television sets. He is credited as one of the founders of the Milan design group Memphis in the 1980s, which emphasized bright, colorful, often playful furniture, lighting, and ceramics. Trained as an architect, he also designed the Milan Malpensa airport, and built apartments and designed a golf resort for the People’s Liberation Army in China. In 2006, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented the first major American survey of his work, and a retrospective exhibition celebrating his 90th birthday ran in Trieste, Italy, from December 2007 to March 2008.

Angus Fairhurst (d. March 29; age 41)
Angus Fairhurst, one of the Young British Artists (YBAs), was found dead on March 29 in a remote part of Scotland. He took his own life at the age of 41. Fairhurst was among the 16 Goldsmiths College students who participated in the influential YBA exhibition “Freeze,” which was organized by Damien Hirst, in 1988. He also showed at the Tate Britain with Hirst and Sarah Lucas in 2004. Born in Pembury, Kent, Fairhurst was known primarily for his bronze gorilla sculptures. Hirst said of him: “He was a great artist and a great friend, he always supported me in fair weather and foul. He shone like the moon and as an artist he had just the right amount of slightly-round-the-bend. I loved him.”

Cornell Capa (d. May 23; age 90)
Photojournalist Cornell Capa worked for Life magazine from 1946 to 1954 and then for Magnum Photos, documenting political events with a focus on social justice. He used the term “concerned photographer” to describe those like him in his profession who took pictures with a humanitarian focus. He founded the International Center of Photography in 1974, which evolved from his International Fund for Concerned Photography, which he established in 1966 with the goals of assisting photographers, preserving photographic archives, and encouraging public engagement with the medium. Capa served as the director of the ICP for many years. He also helped establish his brother Robert Capa’s legacy as a great war photographer.

John Weber (d. May 23; age 75)
Weber was an art dealer known for his early promotion of conceptual art, Postminimalist sculpture, and Arte Povera. Weber first worked at the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio before becoming the director of the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1960. In 1962, he moved to Los Angeles to work at the Virginia Dawn Gallery, where he organized several group shows, including “De Europa,” one of the first exhibitions of Arte Povera in the U.S. Weber became the director of Virginia Dawn”s New York gallery in 1968, and in 1971 opened his own space in the first gallery building in SoHo. The gallery later moved to Chelsea and closed in 2000. He represented a wide range of artists, often early in their careers, including Giovanni Anselmo, Richard Long, and Dorothea Rockburne.

Anne d'Harnoncourt (d. June 1; age 64)
D’Harnoncourt, the director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, died unexpectedly of natural causes on June 1. She had served as the museum’s director since 1982 and the CEO since 1997, previously working as the curator of 20th-century art from 1972 to 1982. As the director, she oversaw the reinstallation of the museum’s European collection, the renovation of the modern and contemporary galleries, and a number of major exhibitions. She recently helped the museum win the chance to represent the U.S. at the 2009 Venice Biennale with artist Bruce Nauman, as well as orchestrating the sale of a number of works by Thomas Eakins in order to keep his masterpiece The Gross Clinic in Philadelphia.

Hildy Beyeler (d. July 18; age 86)
Hildy Beyeler was the wife of famed modern art dealer Ernst Beyeler. She played an active role in his business, and the couple also amassed a legendary collection of their own over 50 years. They established the Fondation Beyeler Basel, Switzerland, in 1982 to house it, and in 1997, the foundation opened as a public museum in a new space designed by Renzo Piano. The roughly 200 works in the collection include pieces by Francis Bacon, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, and Vincent van Gogh. The Beyelers were also instrumental in the creation of the Art Basel fair in the 1969.

John Russell (d. August 23; age 89)
Russell, a famed British art critic, began his career writing for British publications Cornhill Magazine and Horizon while working for Naval Intelligence during World War II. Shortly thereafter, he began reviewing books, plays, and music for the Sunday Times of London, and in 1950, he became the paper’s art critic, a role in which he championed emerging British artists Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Bridget Riley, among others. He also organized exhibitions devoted to Modigliani, Georges Rouault, and Balthus at the Tate and co-organized a survey of Pop Art at London’s Hayward Gallery. In 1974, the chief art critic of the New York Times, Hilton Kramer, brought Russell to New York. Russell took over the helm as the paper’s chief art critic from 1982 to 1990. In addition to his writing about art, he published a number of travel books, a biography of conductor Erich Kleiber, and a few translations of modern French novels.

Patricia Faure (d. October 21; age 80)
Faure became a prominent art dealer and fixture on the L.A. art scene in the 1970s, after previous careers as a model and a fashion photographer. She was appointed director of the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles in 1972, after which she partnered briefly with the late collector and dealer Betty Asher to found Asher/Faure Gallery, which ran from 1979 to 1990. Finally, she opened her own space, the Patricia Faure Gallery, in Santa Monica in 1994, although failing health eventually caused her to leave the enterprise; it has since evolved into the Samuel Freeman Gallery. Faure championed such artists as Joel Shapiro, Richard Artschwager, Gwynn Murrill, John M. Miller, Joe Goode, and Margaret Nielsen. She is also acknowledged for launching the careers of Salomon Huerta, the Rev. Ethan Acres, and Mark Bradford.

Jan Krugier (d. November 15; age 80)
International art dealer Jan Krugier opened his first gallery in Geneva in 1962 on the advice of his friend, the artist Alberto Giacometti. In 1987, he opened a branch in New York. He was the exclusive dealer for the Marina Picasso collection, the largest group of Picasso works outside of the Musée Picasso in Paris, and for the Alejandra, Aurelio, and Claudio Torres collection of works by Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres-Garcia. Krugier was well known for his traveling exhibitions, and the French government presented him with the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 1996 for his outstanding contribution to French art fairs.

Grace Hartigan (d. November 16; age 86)
Hartigan was an Abstract Expressionist painter who moved to New York in 1945 and found fast fame for her large, boldly colored abstract canvases — although she gradually moved away from pure abstraction and introduced images and figures into her works. In 1953, Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, made her first museum purchase. Her marriage to Johns Hopkins University scientist Winston Price in 1960 led her to move to Baltimore, which distanced her from the New York art scene. She joined the faculty at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 1964 and founded its graduate school of painting, later called the Hoffberger School. Beginning in 1979, she returned to the public sphere with a MICA exhibition and a series of shows at Baltimore’s C. Grimaldis Gallery. Her work is displayed at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

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.”]