Displaying items by tag: Dies

Helen Frankenthaler, a New York artist whose bursts of color achieved by pouring thinned paint onto canvas from coffee cans helped point art in fresh directions after the initial post-World War II explosion of Abstract Expressionism, has died. She was 83.

Frankenthaler died Tuesday after a long, unspecified illness at her home in Darien, Conn., her family announced.

In 1952, the 23-year-old Frankenthaler hit upon her "soak stain" technique, achieving some of the vibrancy, lightness and pliancy of watercolor by thinning down acrylic paint and pouring it on a large, unprimed canvas spread on the floor of her Manhattan studio.

"Mountains and Sea," her breakthrough in pink, blue and green, set a style that critics — although not universally — have applauded for its lyricism and luminous use of color. Frankenthaler's stain technique influenced others such as Morris Louis, Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland, giving rise to the Color Field movement of the 1950s and '60s.

Frankenthaler was born Dec. 12, 1928, and grew up amid prestige and comfort on New York's Park Avenue, the youngest of three daughters of Alfred Frankenthaler, a New York State Supreme Court justice, and his wife, Martha. Attending the progressive Dalton School, she was taught by the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo. She set out to be a painter after graduating from Bennington College in Vermont in 1949.

Among those taking note was critic Clement Greenberg, a leading advocate of Abstract Expressionism, with whom Frankenthaler was romantically involved until the mid-1950s. Through him, she met the New York School of painters, including Jackson Pollock, whose drip-painting technique of laying a canvas on the floor and aggressively raining paint upon it would help inspire her own far more judicious and deliberate way of painting by pouring.

In 1958 Frankenthaler married Robert Motherwell, a leading light from the first generation of New York Abstract Expressionists. They were divorced after 13 years. In 1994 she married investment banker Stephen M. DuBrul Jr.

An early prominent forum was her mid-1960s inclusion in "Post-Painterly Abstraction," a touring survey curated by Greenberg that also featured Noland, Sam Francis, Willem de Kooning and Ellsworth Kelly.

Reviewing Frankenthaler's 1967 solo show at one of L.A.'s top venues, the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Times critic William Wilson hailed her work as "a primary wellspring in the development of stained color painting.... There is nothing easy about her large canvases.... Their jarringly factual color and sensitively considered edges finally resolve in works of awesome integrity." Major retrospectives ensued at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969 and the Museum of Modern Art in 1989.

Opinions have varied, however. Current Times art critic Christopher Knight has described Frankenthaler as a "minor, formalist artist," and her influential "Mountains and Sea" as a "slight innovation."

John Chamberlain, a prolific American sculptor whose use of crushed automobile sheet metal became his signature during a career that spanned half a century, died Wednesday in New York City. He was 84.

Reportedly in poor health, he had been working on a retrospective exhibition scheduled to open Feb. 24 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, his second at the Manhattan institution. The artist's death was announced by his wife, Prudence Fairweather, although no cause was given.

The artist claimed that his knowledge of art history was scant, but he often made sculptures that acknowledged ancient precedent in up-to-date materials. The welded metal "totems" David Smith made in the 1950s from old boilers, shop tools and other industrial scrap were the most important immediate antecedent to his work, as were the muscular abstract paintings of his friend Franz Kline. The linear space and vivid Expressionist palette of Willem de Kooning also had a profound impact. Yet, piecing together junkyard scraps of twisted automobiles, Chamberlain could create imposing abstract monoliths that displayed the dramatic sweep of Hellenistic Greek carvings or the coiled energy of Italian Baroque tableaux.

Chamberlain's earliest sculptures were made from welded iron rods. His first sculpture using car parts was 1957's "Short Stop," made from the rusty fenders of a 1929 Ford that he found in the Long Island yard of his friend, painter Larry Rivers. With the incorporation of car parts, the linear nature of his earlier sculptures began to assume rounded volume. By 1961, his mature sculptural style was fully formed, the shallow space of "Short Stop" now voluminous.

Color, which hadn't been a major factor in 20th century sculpture, was also important. It was given by the choice of found materials. Color was also added or subtracted by a studio assistant wielding a spray gun or an industrial sander, or else it was embellished by Chamberlain using cans of spray paint in graffiti-like drawing.

John Angus Chamberlain was born April 16, 1927, in Rochester, Ind., the son of a saloonkeeper. His parents divorced when he was 4. After Navy service in World War II, he returned to Chicago, where he had grown up in the home of his maternal grandmother, and he used the GI Bill to study hairdressing.

Chamberlain also enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he became enthralled with the exceptional collection of paintings by Vincent van Gogh. Among them are vibrant canvases composed of interlocking color shapes, such as "Madame Roulin Rocking the Cradle" and "The Bedroom." He was also taken with De Kooning's large painting "Excavation" (1950), in which fragmented, sliding planes are held in precise visual tension across the entire surface, and Alberto Giacometti's tall, thin, attenuated bronzes of walking figures. Both would inform Chamberlain's later compositions.

Restless, he left school after 18 months. Chamberlain eventually landed at Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina, where his primary influences were literary.

He gravitated toward a Modernist theory free from traditional narrative and dependent on concrete imagery and structural compression, as evident in the writings of his teachers, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. Those influences would turn up in his sculpture, where piecing together existing forms and holding them in place, physically and visually, became the primary sculptural process.

British artist Richard Hamilton, who was regarded by many as the father of pop art, has died today aged 89.   
   
Hamilton created a string of renowned works throughout the sixties that inspired artists such as Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys.

He had continued working on his latest pieces up until a few days before his death. It is not yet known how he died.

Friends and former colleagues have today paid tribute to Hamilton, calling his influence on art 'immeasurable'.

'This is a very sad day for all of us and our thoughts are with Richard's family, particularly his wife Rita and his son Rod,' art dealer and gallery owner Larry Gagosian said.

A statement from the gallery called Hamilton the 'father of pop art' and a 'pioneering artist of unparalleled skill, invention and lasting authority.  

'His influence on subsequent generations of artists continues to be immeasurable.'  
        
Nicholas Serota, director of London's Tate gallery, added: 'Greatly admired by his peers, including (Andy) Warhol and (Joseph) Beuys, Hamilton produced a series of exquisite paintings, drawings, prints and multiples dealing with themes of glamour, consumption, commodity and popular culture.'    

When Sir Anthony Tennant, who has died aged 80, agreed to become chairman of Christie's International in 1993, he could never have imagined that his decision would mean him ending his life as a fugitive from justice, certain to be arrested if he ever set foot in the US.

Tennant embodied the world's idea of the patrician British gentleman. His father was from a wealthy, aristocratic Scots farming and military family, his mother was a viscountess. Born in London, he was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and served in the Scots Guards in Malaya. During his working life he collected a knighthood (1992), a couple of honorary degrees and the Médaille de la Ville de Paris. He was a chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur. His upright, confident manner was reflected in his standing in the business community.

When he left the army at the age of 23, instead of going into the City, Tennant got a job with the then leading advertising agency in London, Mather & Crowther. He was fascinated by marketing, coming up with such slogans as "Schhh – you know who" for Schweppes and "Good Food Costs Less" for Sainsbury's, and stayed in that field for the next decade and a half. In 1970, he joined the brewing group Truman's, piloting the company through the merger with Watney Mann. In 1976, he was poached to become managing director and then chief executive of International Distillers and Vintners (IDV), where he remained until 1987.

There he was responsible for the launch of a number of innovative brands, transforming a mediocre spirits business into a global drinks group. However, he lost out in the contest for the top job at IDV's parent company, Grand Metropolitan. At about the same time, the Department of Trade and Industry, acting on a tip-off from the US department of justice following a plea-bargain from the insider-trader Ivan Boesky, began to investigate an illegal share support operation at Guinness, the brewing group.

As the degree of the share fraud began to unravel, Guinness's chairman, Ernest Saunders, was forced to resign, and Tennant was shipped in to clear up the mess, first as chief executive and then, from 1989, as chairman. He had the perfect combination of respectability and business nous for the Guinness job. What is more, he had the support of the City.

Along the way, he picked up a string of non-executive directorships including Forte, the catering group, the pharmaceuticals giant Wellcome, the Guardian Royal Exchange insurance company and a couple of banks, including the US bank Morgan Stanley. He was also well known and respected across the Channel, becoming a director of BNP Paribas and of the luxury goods and champagne group LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton of Paris. He was even a director of the London Stock Exchange and chairman of the Royal Academy Trust.

So how was it that, less than a decade later, he was indicted by a federal grand jury in Manhattan for allegedly fixing commission rates charged to sellers of fine art at auction? Things started to go wrong when, in May 1993, he agreed to become chairman of Christie's International, which, along with Sotheby's Holdings, dominated the world market in international fine-art auctions.

In the six years that followed, according to the US department of justice, the two auctioneers conspired to agree commission rates charged to sellers, thus depriving the sellers of the opportunity to negotiate rates. At the top of the conspiracy, it was alleged, were the chairmen of the two companies, Alfred Taubman at Sotheby's and Tennant at Christie's.

Tennant insisted from the start that he was innocent of any wrongdoing, claiming he was hired by Christie's to perform an ambassadorial role, hosting events and wooing clients, moving effortlessly through the higher social echelons of London, Paris, New York and Tokyo, winning business for the firm.

Tennant freely admitted that he had met Taubman, who was convicted in 2001, and subsequently sentenced to a year in jail. However, he always insisted that any price-fixing that went on was agreed by the two chief executive officers of the companies, without the knowledge of their respective chairmen.

Lucian Freud, the British painter of regular people in all their fleshy glory who stayed loyal to portraiture and realism even when modern art veered toward the abstract, has died. He was 88.

Freud died July 20 at his home in London after a brief illness, said William Acquavella, owner of Acquavella Galleries in New York, which is Freud’s worldwide dealer. “He lived to paint and painted until the day he died, far removed from the noise of the art world,” Acquavella said yesterday in a statement.

A grandson of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud preferred to use friends and family members, including his mother, as subjects of his portraits, using thick gobs of paint to reveal the human body’s curves, folds and imperfections. (He preferred the term “naked” rather than “nude.”) His paintings were the product of profound observation of human beings and fastidious self-criticism, and he graduated to larger and larger canvases starting in the 1980s.

“I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be,” he said.

Bloomberg News critic Jorg von Uthmann, in a review of a 2010 show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, called Freud’s work “unashamedly traditional, stubbornly figurative and realistic to the point of being brutal.”

Queen’s Portrait

Born in Germany, Freud moved to the U.K. at 11 and later became a naturalized citizen. His longtime studio was at a home in the London neighborhood of Holland Park. In 2000 and 2001, Queen Elizabeth II sat for a portrait that provided fodder for Freud’s fans and critics alike. He painted model Kate Moss in 2002, while she was pregnant.

Freud generally needed as much as a year’s worth of regular sittings to complete a portrait.

In 2008, “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,” his portrait of a 280-pound civil servant named Sue, sold for $33.6 million (20.6 million pounds) -- the highest price ever for a work by a living artist -- in an auction at Christie’s International in New York. The purchase, later reported to be by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, culminated a surge of interest in Freud’s work.

The 1998 sale in London of his “Naked Portrait with Reflection” for 2.8 million pounds ($4.6 million) set a record for the most expensive contemporary work sold in Europe. The portrait, from 1980, depicts a voluptuous woman reclining on a sofa in the nude. It was sold again in 2008, for 11.8 million pounds.

‘Woman Smiling’

Also in 1998, his “Large Interior W11,” which shows two of his children and three friends in a rundown London interior, sold for $5.8 million.

His work continued to draw high prices. In February 2010, at Sotheby’s in London, a 1978 Freud self-portrait showing him with a black eye after a fight with a London taxi driver sold for 2.8 million pounds. At a June 2011 auction at Christie’s in London, “Woman Smiling,” a 1958-1959 Freud portrait of his lover, Suzy Boyt, sold for 4.7 million pounds.

Though he lived simply, his artwork made him a wealthy man, and he had a well-known taste for gambling. The Times of London, on its 2011 list of the U.K.’s richest, estimated Freud’s net worth to be 125 million pounds.

The art critic Robert Hughes, writing in Time magazine in 1993, called Freud “the best realist painter alive.”

T. Lux Feininger, a painter and photographer who, as a young student at the Bauhaus, used his camera to compile an invaluable and visually distinctive record of the artistic avant-garde in Germany between the wars, died last Thursday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 101.

The death was confirmed by his daughter-in-law Kate Feininger.

Mr. Feininger was the younger brother of the photographer Andreas Feininger. His father was the painter Lyonel Feininger, one of the first artists appointed by Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar.

At 16 he became a student at the Bauhaus, which had moved to Dessau. There he collaborated in Oskar Schlemmer’s experimental theater, played in the Bauhaus jazz band, and studied painting with Josef Albers, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.

Above all, he took photographs. The Bauhaus did not have a photographic studio until 1929, but Mr. Feininger, who had begun taking photographs several years earlier with his grandmother’s box camera before graduating to his own 9-by-12-centimeter plate camera, played the role of artistic photojournalist.

Influenced by the New Vision principles articulated by the Bauhaus teacher Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Mr. Feininger chronicled daily life at the Bauhaus in images that showed a playful, spontaneous spirit and a keen sense of new formal developments in photography.

“He captured what the student life was like there in a sophisticated, innovative way, even though he was totally untrained,” said Laura Muir, assistant curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard. “He merged photojournalism with the New Vision aesthetic of exaggerated angles, extreme close-ups and cropping.”

Theodore Lux Feininger was born on June 11, 1910, in Berlin. While at the Bauhaus, he sold his photographs to picture newspapers and periodicals through the Berlin photo agency Dephot. In 1929 his work was included in Film und Foto, a groundbreaking survey of modern photography in Stuttgart.

After he turned to painting that same year, he exhibited widely in Germany under the name Theodore Lux before emigrating to the United States in 1936. He left most of his photographic negatives in Germany, where they disappeared.

Cy Twombly, the US artist whose graffiti-style paintings on large canvases made him the heir to Jackson Pollock in the eyes of many, has died in hospital in Rome at the age of 83.

After emerging from the New York art scene of the 1950s, he developed a deep association with Mediterranean Europe, drawing inspiration from its history, poetry and ancient myths. As a painter, he was known for abstract works combining painting and drawing techniques, repetitive lines, and use of words and graffiti – but is regarded as a key figure among a generation of artists who strove to evolve beyond abstract expressionism.

Born Edwin Parker Twombly Jr in Lexington, Virginia, in 1928, he took on his father's nickname, Cy. After studies at American art colleges, he came to Europe and travelled extensively. In later years he was also influenced by his service as a cryptologist in the US military.

After spending much of the 1950s in New York, where friends included Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Twombly left for Italy which was to become a second home. His work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1964 before he began drifting away from expressionism and embarking on the abstract sculptures so closely associated with him.

Last year, he painted a ceiling of the Louvre in Paris, the first artist given this honour since Georges Braque in the 1950s. For that work he chose something simple: a deep blue background punctuated with floating discs and emblazoned with the names of sculptors from ancient Greece, apt for a gallery of bronzes.

"I got into something new in old age," he said of his unusual choice of colour.

Larry Gagosian, the owner of the Gagosian gallery, which has had close ties with Twombly, said: "The art world has lost a true genius and a completely original talent. And, for those fortunate enough to have known him, a great human being.

"Even though Cy might have been regarded as reclusive, he didn't retreat to an ivory tower. He was happy to remain connected and live in the present. Despite his increasing fame, he never lost the playfulness and sense of humour that was his true nature, and, more importantly, he retained his humility. For me personally, it is an incredibly sad day and my thoughts are with Cy's family and close friends."

France's culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, said: "A great American painter who deeply loved old Europe has just left us. His work was deeply marked by his passion for Greek and Roman antiquity, and its mythology, which for him was a source of limitless inspiration."

Twombly's work sold for millions and ignited the passions of followers. In 2007, a woman was arrested in France for kissing an all-white canvas he painted. Restorers had trouble removing the lipstick and she was ordered to pay compensation.

He had been living in Italy, and entered hospital last week, according to Eric Mezil, director of the Collection Lambert gallery in Avignon, where a show of Twombly's photographs opened last month.

One of his most important exhibitions was at Tate Modern in 2008, featuring Quattro Stagioni (Four Seasons), A Painting in Four Parts, of 1993-94.

"Ah, it goes, is lost," Twombly scrawled in pencil on one of the four tall canvases, in a reflection of some of the themes to which he often returned: time, love, and doomed desire.

Thomas N. Armstrong III, who greatly expanded the Whitney Museum of American Art’s holdings when he was its director in the 1970s and ’80s but whose ambitious plans for a museum addition aroused a firestorm of opposition that led to his dismissal, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 78.

The cause was cardiac arrest, his daughter Amory Armstrong Spizzirri said.

Mr. Armstrong was the director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts when he succeeded John I. H. Baur as the director of the Whitney in 1974. A patrician figure with a fondness for bow ties and colorful stunts, Mr. Armstrong set about strengthening the museum’s permanent collection, buying Frank Stella’s 1959 black painting “Die Fahne Hoch!” for $75,000 in 1977 and Jasper Johns’s “Three Flags” for $1 million, a price that seemed extravagant in 1980 and a steal today.

In a whirlwind fund-raising drive in 1982, he raised more than $1.25 million to buy Alexander Calder’s “Circus” (1926-31), an assemblage of more than 50 miniature performers and animals. It had been on loan to the museum but looked as though it might be sold in Europe to help settle the Calder estate’s tax debt.

“These works are pillars of the Whitney’s collection and of American art,” said Adam D. Weinberg, the current director of the Whitney, who once worked under Mr. Armstrong. “He was brilliant at bringing together coalitions of people to acquire artworks, for which we had a minimal acquisition budget. We still have works coming in that he negotiated as gifts years ago.”

“Art in Place,” a 1989 show highlighting the museum’s acquisitions of the previous 15 years, underlined the growth of the permanent collection to 8,500 works from 2,000.

Under Mr. Armstrong’s directorship, the museum had a number of important shows, including a Jasper Johns retrospective in 1978 and large exhibitions of Mark di Suvero, Cy Twombly, Marsden Hartley and Calder.

Desperate to secure additional space for the museum’s collections, he developed plans for a 10-story, $37.5-million addition to the Whitney’s main building.

The proposed addition, designed by Michael Graves and announced in 1985, drew immediate opposition. Neighborhood residents feared a behemoth, and many architects believed it would destroy the integrity of the existing Marcel Breuer building. After Mr. Armstrong gradually lost the support of many of the museum’s trustees, the plans were dropped in 1989, and the next year he was dismissed.

A champion of Andy Warhol’s work — he had organized an exhibition of Warhol portraits at the Whitney in 1979 — Mr. Armstrong became the first director of the Andy Warhol Museum, which opened in Pittsburgh in May 1994.

Nine months later he resigned. It was reported that he was unhappy at how difficult it was to raise money for the museum and that he and Ellsworth M. Brown, the president of the Carnegie Institute, which managed the museum and provided it with financing, could not agree about the museum’s direction.

Thomas Newton Armstrong III was born on July 30, 1932, in Portsmouth, Va., and grew up in Summit, N.J. He painted in high school and earned a bachelor’s degree in art history from Cornell in 1954.

After serving in the Army, he worked for Stone & Webster, an engineering and securities firm, in Manhattan. But determined to make a career in the arts, he began studying museum administration at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts in 1967. A study project at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection in Williamsburg, Va., led to his appointment as a curator at the collection.

In 1971 he was named director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he put into motion the renovation of the main building, a project completed in 1976.

Mr. Armstrong seemed a conservative choice for the Whitney, and on his appointment he expressed a certain diffidence about his credentials as a promoter of recent American art. “I’m not exactly the kind of person who can now be considered as an active participant on the contemporary scene,” he told The New York Times. “But I go to galleries all the time and I used to be a painter myself.”

Harry Jackson, a Marine combat artist who turned his back on a promising career as an Abstract Expressionist painter to become a prominent realist artist known for his paintings and bronze sculptures of cowboys and Indians, died on Monday in Sheridan, Wyo. He was 87 and lived in Cody, Wyo., and Camaiore, Italy.

His death was confirmed by his son Matthew.

Mr. Jackson, infatuated by the West from early childhood, headed to Wyoming from his hometown, Chicago, at 14 and found work as a ranch hand, working his way up to cowboy. There, when not tending cattle, he turned out shoot-’em-up sketches in the manner of Frederic Remington.

After enlisting in the Marine Corps at 18, he was assigned as a sketch artist to the Fifth Amphibious Corps. He was seriously wounded in the battle for Betio Island in the Tarawa atoll in November 1943 and again at Saipan, for which he was awarded the Purple Heart. Because of his war injuries, he struggled throughout his life with life-threatening epileptic seizures and severe mood disorders.

After being shipped to Los Angeles, he was made an official Marine Corps combat artist, with the assignment to execute drawings and paintings depicting, as he put it, “my bloodiest close-combat experiences.” This he did in paintings like “Tarawa-Betio” (1944), now in the collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Va.

After seeing the Jackson Pollock painting “The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle,” Mr. Jackson underwent an artistic conversion. The painting, he said, “shot the first crack of daylight into my blocked-off brain.” He moved to New York, where he became a close friend of Pollock’s and began painting in the Abstract Expressionist style.

He quickly gained notice as an artist to watch when Meyer Schapiro and Clement Greenberg included him in their “Talent 1950” exhibition at the Kootz Gallery, and over the next several years he exhibited at Tibor de Nagy, a nerve center of second-generation Abstract Expressionism.

Robert Vickrey, a painter whose often unnerving depictions of shadow-streaked streets populated by nuns, clowns or children at play made him a leading figure of the magic realism school, died on Sunday at his home in Naples, Fla. He was 84.

The death was confirmed by his son, Scott.

Mr. Vickrey, who mastered the Renaissance technique of egg tempera painting as a student at Yale, used his consummate skill to create, in his early work, hyper-real scenes suffused by an atmosphere of dread or impending disaster. He was an avant-garde filmmaker on the side, with a deep knowledge of expressionism and film noir, whose shadows, angles and distortions he introduced into his paintings.

In the 1950s and ’60s Mr. Vickrey was a highly visible artist. He was included in no fewer than nine of the Whitney Museum’s annual exhibitions showcasing contemporary art. He was also commissioned to paint dozens of portraits for the cover of Time, notably a portrait from life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the magazine’s Man of the Year issue in 1964.

As his style of painting fell out of favor, Mr. Vickrey was relegated to the margins of the art world. Critics did not always respond kindly to the more upbeat tone of his later painting, moreover, which seemed closer to Andrew Wyeth and Norman Rockwell than his chilling early work.

In the 1980s, a reassessment of magic realism, and of overlooked artists like Paul Cadmus, Jared French and George Tooker (who died on March 27), led to renewed interest in Mr. Vickery’s work. He was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Art, Science and Industry in Bridgeport, Conn., in 1982, and of a biography by Philip Eliasoph, “Robert Vickrey: The Magic of Realism” (Hudson Hills, 2008).