Volume 31, No. 2, Jun 2008
ArtPEOPLE
AWARDS
Jean Nouvel, the bold French architect known for such wildly divrse projects as the muscular Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the exotically louvered Arab World Institute in Paris, has received architecture’s top honor, the Pritzker Prize, at 62.
Guggenheim Fellowships for 2008 were given in Fine Arts to Martin Kersels of Sierra Madre, CA; Anthony McCall, New York; Rebecca Morris, Los Angeles; Ruben Ochoa, Los Angeles’ Jeffrey Schiff, Brooklyn; Marc Trujillo, Los Angeles; Rachel P. Youens, Brooklyn, among others.In Photography, Builder Levy of New York; Greg Miller of Brooklyn; Elijah Gowin of Kansas City; Michael P. Berman of San Lorenzo, NM.among others.
American Academy of Arts & Letters selected John Baldessari as a new member, gold medals to Richard Meier in Architecture, Kenneth Frampton received an Academy Award in Architecture; Llyn Foulkes, Judith Linhares, Eric Holzman, Gordon Moore and Susan Smith received Academy Awards in Art; Mark Greenwold received the Jimmy Ernst Award in Art; Willard L. Metcal Award in Art to Anna Conway, among others.
Philippe Vergne, depute director of the Walker Art Center, has been named the director of the Dia Art Foundation
PASSINGS
Jonathan Williams, the founder of the Jargon Society, the small publishing house in the western mountains of North Carolina that for more than 50 years has introduced the works of unknown, little-known and soon-to-be-better-known writers, photographers and artists, died in March at the age of 79.
Angus Fairhurst, one of the “Young British Artists” who stormed the international art scene in the 1990s, died in April by his own hand, at the age of 41. Some of his contemporaries were Damien Hirst, Gary Hume and Sarah Lucas.
Ralph Rapson, the Modernist architect who designed the original Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis as well as a popular rocking chair that bore his name, died in April at the age of 93.
Burt Glinn, a photojournalist, commercial photographer and former president of the Magnum photo agency, died at the age of 82. He was one of the first Americans to join Magnum, that included Capa and Cartier-Bresson. He was a chronicler of the cold war in pictures.
John Ranard, a documentary photographer who depicted the grim realities of modern Russian life and who presented intimate views of boxing and his own fatal illness, died in May at the age of 56.
Walter Netsch, an achitect who employed stubbornly individualistic theories to create the eethereal chapel at the United Stats Air Force Academy as well as bold, modernist conglomerations that repulsed some and enthralled others, died in June at the age of 88. He was associated with Skidmore, Owings & merrill in their Chicago office. He was known for the many libraries he designed, including the University of Chicago and the east wing of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Tasha Tudor, a children’s book illustrator and author whose delicate and dreamy artwork was featured in about 80 books, including a 1944 edition of “Mother Goose” that was so successful it enabled her to buy a farm and crate a lifestyle rooted in the early 19th century, died in June at the age of 92.
Richard J. Koke, Visionary curatory of New York’s History as curator of the New York Historical Society for nearly 40 years, who organized much of the institution’s transformation from a repository of documents and artworks into a space where visitors come face to face with relics of New York City and its place in American history, died in May at the age of 91.
Henri Chopin (1922-2008) is memorialized as an architect of sound spaces in Inter for Spring 2008. He died on 3 January in his home in Dereham, in Norfolk, UK.
Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died in May at his home on Captiva Island, Florida. He was 82.
John Weber, an art dealer known for his early advocacy of conceptual Art, Post-Minimalist sculpture and Italian Arte Povera, died in May at at his home in Hudson, NY at the age of 75.
Cornell Capa, a globetrotting photojournalist who founded the International Center of Photography in New York and dedicated himself to preserving the legacy of his old brother, war-photographer Robert Capa, died of Parkinson’s disease in May in New York at the age of 90.
David Gahr, who turned his back on a promising career as a scholar to take pictures and listen to music and who as a result landed among the pre-eminent photographers of American folk, blues, jazz and rock musicians of the 1960s and beyond, died in May at the age of 85. Working on assignment for Time magazine, he worked with Robert Hughes; he also worked for Life and People, photographing Rauschenberg, Johns, Oldenburg, Dali, Willem de Kooning and Georgia O’Keeffe.
Anne d’Harnoncourt, the distinguished director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for 26 years, died suddenly at the age of 64, on 1 June. She was the first woman to lead amajor museum. She was distinguished for the major acquisitions, successful fund drives, vast gallery renovations, a rehang of the collection, and her refusal to let the museum become a three-ring circus.
Enrico Donati, an Italian-born American painter and sculptor, considered by many in the art world to be the last of the Surrealists, died in April at the age of 99.
Klaus Perls, who sold art for more than 60 years at the Perls Galleries and donated an important collection of African royal art from Benin and modern works by Picasso and Modigliani valued at more than $60 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died in June at the age of 96.
Eugenia P. Butler, a formative figure in conceptual art who often incorporated the written or spoken word in spare exhibits that challenged people to explore how they perceive reality, died in late March at the age of 61 in Santa Rosa, CA of a brain hemorrhage.
Severin Wunderman, the owner of Corum, the Swiss luxury watch manufacturer, who was also an art collector and philanthropist, died in June at the age of 69. After taking over a watch factory, he became the manufacturer and distributor of Gucci watches for more than 25 years. With all his money, he opened up the Severin Wunderman Museum in Irvine, California where he filled it with drawings, paintings, tapestries and art objects by Jean Cocteau that he had been collecting since he was 19. In 1985 he opened the museum to the public. 10 years later, he donated the Cocteau collection to the University of Texas at Austin.
