Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

Obit watch: March 1, 2024.

Friday, March 1st, 2024

Richard Abath.

Mr. Abath was one of the two guards on duty at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum early in the morning on March 18, 1990. He was the one who let the two robbers, disguised as police officers, into the museum.

Over the next hour and a half, the thieves stole more than a dozen works of art, including pieces by Edgar Degas, Rembrandt van Rijn, Édouard Manet and Peter Paul Rubens, cutting the works from their ornate wooden frames. They also took an ancient Chinese beaker and a bronze eagle finial from a Napoleonic-era flagpole.

All together they took some $500 million in art, the equivalent of $1.2 billion today, making it by far the biggest art heist in history.
Suspicion immediately turned to Mr. Abath. City and federal investigators zeroed in on important details, like the coincidence of the thieves arriving so soon after the second guard left to make the rounds. A video camera outside the museum showed Mr. Abath briefly opening a side door not long before the robbery occurred.
Mr. Abath maintained his innocence throughout the rest of his life, and he was never named as an official suspect. He said that he regularly opened the side door to make sure it was locked and that while museum protocol forbade him from letting anyone in after hours, there was no contingency should the visitors be uniformed police officers.
“You know, most of the guards were either older or they were college students,” he told NPR in 2015. “Nobody there was capable of dealing with actual criminals.”

Brian Mulroney, former Canadian PM.

Obit watch: January 26, 2024.

Friday, January 26th, 2024

Herbert “Cowboy” Coward.

Generally, I like to give credits beyond the ones in the headline. But Mr. Coward’s other credits as an actor are “Ghost Town: The Movie” and one episode of the “Hillbilly Blood” TV series. That’s it. (He also produced “Ghost Town” and it looks like he appeared as himself in an episode of “Moonshiners”.)

The NYT ran a very nice obit for David J. Skal. (Previously.)

Jon Franklin, journalist. I’d never heard of him before today, but he had an interesting career:

In 1979, Mr. Franklin won the first Pulitzer ever given for feature writing for his two-part series in The Baltimore Evening Sun titled “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster.”

He won his second Pulitzer, this time under the new category of explanatory journalism, in 1985, for his seven-part series “The Mind Fixers,” also in The Evening Sun. Delving into the molecular chemistry of the brain and how neurons communicate, he profiled a scientist whose experiments with receptors in the brain could herald treatment with drugs and other alternatives to psychoanalysis.

“Mrs. Kelly’s Monster” online.

David L. Mills, Internet guy. He developed the Network Time Protocol, and did a lot of other leading edge work as well.

Carl Andre, “minimalist sculptor”. I thought this was worth noting because I haven’t done anything with (regular) art recently, and because Mr. Andre was also famous for a lengthy interruption in his career.

On Sept. 8, 1985, he was arrested and charged in the death of Ms. {Ana] Mendieta, 36, who plunged from a window of their 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment after a long night of drinking with her husband, whom she had married eight months earlier.

He was aquitted of second-degree murder, but there were a lot of people in the art world who thought he’d gotten away with it and the prosecution botched the case.

NYT obit for Fred Chappell. (Previously.)

Obit watch: August 27, 2023.

Sunday, August 27th, 2023

Bob Barker. THR. Tributes. Variety.

Claude Ruiz-Picasso, son of Pablo and administrator of his estate (through July of this year).

Alexandra Paul, Olympic figure skater from Canada. She was 31.

David LaFlamme, of It’s a Beautiful Day. As usual, I feel guilty not saying more about this, but the band was…not exactly before my time, but I was terribly young then.

Arleen Sorkin, actress. Other credits include “Perry Mason: The Case of the Killer Kiss” (which was the last Perry Mason movie with Raymond Burr), “Frasier”, and “The New Mike Hammer”.

Obit watch: May 9, 2023.

Tuesday, May 9th, 2023

Bruce McCall, artist.

Borrowing from the advertising style seen in magazines like Life, Look and Collier’s in the 1930s and ’40s, Mr. McCall depicted a luminous fantasyland filled with airplanes, cars and luxury liners of his own creation. It was a world populated by carefree millionaires who expected caviar to be served in the stations of the fictional Fifth Avenue Subway and carwashes to spray their limousines with champagne.
“My work is so personal and so strange that I have to invent my own lexicon for it,” Mr. McCall said in a TED Talk in 2008. He called it “retrofuturism,” which he defined as “looking back to see how yesterday viewed tomorrow.”

In 1970, Mr. McCall and his friend Brock Yates, the editor of Car and Driver, invented a series of mythical airplanes, among them the Humbley-Pudge Gallipoli Heavyish Bomber, for which they wrote pseudo-scholarly historical notes. Playboy bought the idea, assigned Mr. McCall to do the illustrations and ran the collaboration in January 1971 under the title “Major Howdy Bixby’s Album of Forgotten Warbirds.” It went on to win Playboy’s annual humor award.

In addition to “Playboy”, “National Lampoon”, and the “New Yorker”, he was briefly a writer for “Saturday Night Live” and also did work for “Car and Driver”. Lawrence sent over an obit from that august publication.

Obit watch: May 1, 2023.

Monday, May 1st, 2023

Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, author. (When Bad Things Happen to Good People and other books).

Detective Troy Patterson of the NYPD.

One night in 1990, three punks tried to hold Officer Patterson up. The robbery went bad, and Officer Patterson was shot in the head. He’d been in a vegetative state for the past 33 years.

Patterson was promoted to detective in 2016.
The three suspects — Vincent Robbins, Tracey Clark and Darien Crawford — were later arrested in the unprovoked shooting.
Robbins, now 53, was convicted of assault and attempted-robbery charges and sentenced to a prison term of five to 15 years. He was released in 2000, state records show.
Clark, the alleged gunman in the shooting, also went to trial in the case. The outcome of the case is not immediately available, nor are any details of the charges against Crawford.

Tim Bachman, of Bachman-Turner Overdrive. You may recall that his brother, Robbie, passed in January.

Mike Shannon, former player and later broadcaster for the St. Louis Cardinals.

John Stobart, artist.

A product of Britain’s Royal Academy of Art, Mr. Stobart moved to the United States in 1970, when conceptual art, Op Art and minimalism were riding high in the wake of Abstract Expressionism.
Affable, unassuming and unfailingly candid, Mr. Stobart would have none of it. “I’ve never bought it, and the general public has never bought it either,” he said of abstract art in an interview with The Boston Globe in 1986. “That’s a lot of baloney, that stuff.”
Instead, he conjured the past as a master of richly detailed historical works brimming with schooners, brigs and sloops, their sails flapping under moody clouds, with shore lights twinkling in the distance.
Working out of studios in the Boston area, Martha’s Vineyard and several other locations, Mr. Stobart, who lived in Medfield, Mass., employed the same taste for exhaustive historical detail as Patrick O’Brian, the prolific Anglo-Irish author known for his bracing tales of naval heroics.
He left no detail to chance, traveling to the locations he painted, consulting old daguerreotypes of harbors and ships and going out to sea on various watercraft to learn the most arcane points about their engineering and behavior on the water.

By the mid-1980s, he had written the first of his three books, “The Rediscovery of America’s Maritime Heritage,” and thanks in part to a lucrative operation selling first-edition prints, was making up to $2.5 million a year. In recent years, his originals were selling for $15,000 to $400,000 through the Rehs Galleries in New York.

The obit reproduces some of Mr. Stobart’s paintings. I’m probably a sucker for representational art, but I like what I see there, and would be happy to have an original Stobart on my wall.

Obit watch: April 11, 2023.

Tuesday, April 11th, 2023

This is one I’ve been holding for a couple of days because I am lazy and shiftless: James Bowman. countertenor.

When Mr. Bowman started singing professionally in the 1960s, the countertenor — the highest of the male voices, working the same range as female contraltos and mezzo-sopranos — was something of a rarity on opera and concert stages. Alfred Deller, who died in 1979, was the go-to countertenor of the day, but his voice and his acting ability were said to have been limited.
“Bowman was a revolutionary talent,” the critic Rupert Christiansen, revisiting one of Mr. Bowman’s 1970s recordings, wrote in The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2019, adding that “his technique brought a new power to the countertenor repertory.”

“A friend came up from London and told me that Benjamin Britten was holding auditions for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” Mr. Bowman said, referring to Mr. Britten’s 1960 opera, whose Oberon role had originally been written for Mr. Deller. “This is sort of a fairy story — I’d never done anything onstage in my life, but I wrote to Britten and I said, ‘I think I am eminently suited to the role of Oberon.’”
He was invited to audition.
“I knew that you could barely hear the people who had sung the part before,” he said. “So I went to Covent Garden and I made a big noise and socked them between the eyeballs — and it worked! The next thing I knew I was on tour.”
Oberon became one of his signature roles. Mr. Britten wrote other works for him as well, including the part of Apollo in “Death in Venice,” the 1973 Britten opera.

Mr. Bowman was heard frequently in concert settings as well, and he had a knack for deploying his musical gifts to striking effect in famed performance spaces. Tim Page, writing in The New York Times about a two-hour concert of works by Handel recorded at Westminster Abbey in 1985, called his voice “unusually versatile and pleasing.” Twenty years later, also in The Times, Bernard Holland, after catching him in a “Messiah” at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan, said that Mr. Bowman “sang the countertenor parts with a voice and a dramatic personality able to command attention in a crowd.”
His performances and his dozens of recordings encouraged other singers to explore the countertenor repertory, and Mr. Winwood said he was always generous with advice and support for younger singers.
“He would think nothing of hiring a studio and arranging a meeting with young singers who he had never even met,” Mr. Winwood said by email, “and I’m pretty sure he would never charge for his time.”

“He was such a brilliant, instinctive singer and musician, a huge character and incredibly kind and generous,” Mr. Short wrote, “but my fondest memories will always be of him giggling and snorting loudly at something totally outrageous he’d just whispered in the ears of anyone standing close by.”

“We’re a down-to-earth bunch who just happen to like singing in a high register,” he told The Sunday Telegraph of Britain in 1996. “When I look around at my colleagues, I’m struck by how normal most of them are.”

Al Jaffee has passed at 102. THR. Tribute from Mad.

For those who don’t know, he was one of the great old-time “Mad Magazine” guys, perhaps most famous as the creator of the “fold-in” and “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions”.

Al was named the Reuben Awards’ Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year in 2008 and was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2013 and the Society of Illustrators’ Hall of Fame in 2014. He holds the Guinness World Record for the longest career as a comic artist, beginning with his first publication in Joker Comics in 1942 and continuing through his time at MAD until his retirement last year.

“I had two jobs all my life,” Jaffee told the Times upon his retirement. “One of them was to make a living. The second one was to entertain. I hope to some extent that I succeeded.”

Myriam Ullens. Noted here because this is an odd story.

She was a single mom and successful pastry chef when she went looking for investors to expand her business. One of the people she went to seek investment from was the billionaire Baron Guy Ullens de Schooten Whettnal (who apparently prefers “Ullens” as the short form).

They fell in love and married. The two of them got out of the business world and into philanthropy, founding (among other ventures) the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

According to reports, Ms. Ullens and her husband were shot by her stepson while sitting in their car. Her husband was wounded in the leg.

According to the prosecutor’s statement, Nicolas attributed his actions to a family fight over money and said that moments before he shot his stepmother he had been arguing with her and his father at their home and had been asked to leave. He was being held in jail and has been charged with premeditated murder and violating weapons laws, the prosecutor’s office said.

For the record: NYT obit for Michael Lerner.

Elizabeth Hubbard, actress. She doesn’t have that many screen credits beyond the two soaps (“As the World Turns” and “The Doctors”) she was in, but she also did a fair amount of work on Broadway.

Obit watch: March 31, 2023.

Friday, March 31st, 2023

Mark Russell. THR.

Presidents from Eisenhower to Trump caught the flak. He sang “Bail to the Chief” for Richard M. Nixon, urged George H.W. Bush to retire “to a home for the chronically preppy,” likened Jimmy Carter’s plan to streamline government to “putting racing stripes on an arthritic camel,” and recalled first seeing Ronald Reagan “in the picture-frame department at Woolworth’s, between Gale Storm and Walter Pidgeon.”
Did he have any writers? “Oh, yes — 100 in the Senate and 435 in the House of Representatives.” The true meaning of the Cold War? “In communism, man exploits man. But with capitalism, it’s the other way around.” Gun control? “I will defend my Second Amendment right to use my musket to defend my Third Amendment right to never, ever allow a British soldier to live in my house.”

I was a big Mark Russell fan when I was in high school, but I lost touch with his work after I went to college the first time.

Critics said that the political satire of Mort Sahl and Tom Lehrer had more cutting edge, but Mr. Russell thrived on subtler material that went over with students, politicians and public television audiences. He exploited popular presidential images: Gerald R. Ford’s stumbling, Bill Clinton’s sexual foibles, Reagan’s jelly beans. But he also struck a balance between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, with humor that required a certain familiarity with national and international affairs, if not political sophistication.

Michael Blackwood, filmmaker. He wasn’t someone I’ve heard of before, but I want to find some of his work.

He followed the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk on tour in Europe. He tagged along as the minimalist composer Philip Glass prepared for the 1984 premieres of his opera, “Akhnaten,” in Houston and Stuttgart, Germany.
He observed the creative process of the Bulgarian-born conceptual artist Christo during his creation of epic environmental projects like “Running Fence” and “Wrapped Walkways.” And he let Isamu Noguchi explain his approach to his art as they walked among his sculptures.

His fascination with architecture led him to make films about some of its stars, including Louis Kahn, Richard Meier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry.
In his review of “Frank Gehry: The Formative Years” (1988) in The New York Times, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote that Mr. Blackwood “has built up an admirable oeuvre of films about architects and architecture,” and that Mr. Blackwood has Mr. Gehry “ramble though his work in a way that is both inviting and informative.”

In a 1993 film, “The Sensual Nature of Sound,” Mr. Blackwood examined four distinctive performers and composers — Laurie Anderson, Tania León, Meredith Monk and Pauline Oliveros — devoting significant time to their discussions of their own work.

Mr. Blackwood also made films about subjects who were not artists, like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe and the diplomat George F. Kennan, and several about Germany and German Americans.

Obit watch: February 6, 2023.

Monday, February 6th, 2023

Charles Kimbrough.

Ignoring “Murphy Brown” for the moment, he was also in the original Broadway casts of both “Company” and “Sunday in the Park With George”, among other theater credits.

Interesting side note: in 2002, he married Beth Howland, who was also in the original Broadway cast of “Company”.

Pervez Musharraf, former ruler of Pakistan.

Harry Whittington, most famous as the man Dick Cheney shot.

As a lawyer and investor, Mr. Whittington was a fierce proponent of property rights. He repeatedly questioned the city of Austin’s use of eminent domain to acquire private property — some of it his own — for public purposes.

In 1979, Gov. Bill Clements appointed Mr. Whittington to the Texas Corrections Board (now the Board of Criminal Justice), where he was the only Republican on a nine-member panel that had tended to rubber-stamp everything prison managers wanted.
“It was time for somebody to question,” Mr. Whittington said in an interview with The Austin American-Statesman. “There was no other way I knew how to do it.”
He uncovered secrets that stunned him: drug-running by prison officials, no-bid contracts, families paying off guards to protect their loved ones. At meetings, he asked hard questions.
His tenacity led to the creation of a separate unit for developmentally disabled prisoners and an end to wardens’ using prisoners to punish other inmates.

Lawrence emailed an obit for Shlomo Perel, Holocaust survivor with an interesting story.

So this man poses as an Aryan in order to appease the insane, fanatical Nazi Herrenrasse machine, becomes a Nazi translator, is conscripted into the Hitler Youth, and then joins the German military. That’s a fraught path to take.

Fred Terna, also a Holocaust survivor. He became famous for abstract art inspired by his experience.

Mr. Terna’s art became his Holocaust testimony. In acrylic works like “In the Likeness of Fire” and “An Echo of Cinders,” he painted in reds, yellows, oranges and blues to illustrate the flames that incinerated Jews in crematories. In some paintings, he used sand pebbles to represent ashes.
“I know how the fire of a crematorium chimney casts flickering light on a barrack wall,” he wrote in 1984 for the Berman Archive at Stanford University, which documents American Jewish communities. “How does one paint the near certainty of violent personal annihilation? How does one paint, and then make a viewer want to stop, to look at a canvas, to react to it?”

I know that some people would like for me to include photos. Pretty much all of the time, the obits I link to include photos. I’ve always generally assumed that, if you were that interested in the obit, you’d click through to the link, and including photos here would make these entries longer (and possibly infringe on intellectual property rights). I am trying to make more of an effort to link to archived articles, so people don’t have to navigate paywalls.

What do you guys think? Am I wrong about this?

Obit watch: December 29, 2022.

Thursday, December 29th, 2022

Daniel Brush, who the NYT describes as a “boundary-defying artist”.

He had become an artist known — at first to a small group of cognoscenti, but gradually to a wider circle — for one-of-a-kind works defined by their detail and the devotion that went into them. His jewelry was often intended not so much to be worn as to be cherished. His small sculptures drew comparisons to Fabergé eggs for their delicacy and their small-scale artistry. He made works inspired by rituals of the Tendai Buddhist monks of Japan and works inspired by watching his son dip animal crackers into milk.

He had a morning ritual of sweeping the loft for several hours, “just as a Buddhist monk might sweep the temple ground in meditation,” The Times wrote in 2020. The loft held antique scissors, an 18th-century lathe and assorted other vintage objects and machines, a testament to Mr. Brush’s self-taught mastery of techniques like the aforementioned granulation — visitors who took a magnifying glass to some of his jewelry and other pieces saw that they were adorned with strings of grainlike bits of gold.
“What struck me in his work is his demanding nature and his ability to work gold, aluminum and steel with absolute precision,” Nicolas Bos, chief executive of Van Cleef & Arpels, the French jewelry company, wrote in the preface to the 2019 book “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture.” “He claims to be a goldsmith, a jeweler and a metalworker, but I think, before everything, there’s a sort of magician within him.”

“I am available, and people can come and they can look, and every once in a while they come,” he said. “So what happened in the past 30 years is I became immensely famous to 10 people, and five died.”

I wasn’t familiar with Mr. Brush and his work until I read the obit. There are some photos in the obit, and I confess: his art impresses me.

Yet another batch of hoplobibilophilia.

Friday, November 18th, 2022

As promised, two recently added vintage books…

(more…)

Obit watch: October 28, 2022.

Friday, October 28th, 2022

Lucianne Goldberg, literary agent who was behind the Lewinsky scandal.

It was Ms. Goldberg who advised Linda Tripp, a Pentagon aide, to record her conversations with her young co-worker Monica Lewinsky, who as a White House intern had an affair with President Bill Clinton.
Those recordings became crucial evidence in the special counsel investigation that led to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment for lying under oath in claiming that he had not had an affair with Ms. Lewinsky.

Rod Dreher put up a very nice tribute to her, and links to John Podhoretz’s equally nice tribute.

Robert Gordon, musician.

Mr. Gordon had been the frontman for the buzzy CBGB-era band Tuff Darts when he traded his punk attitude for a tin of Nu Nile pomade and released his first album, a collaboration with the fuzz-guitar pioneer Link Wray, in 1977. At the time, 1950s signifiers like ducktail haircuts and pink pegged slacks had scarcely been glimpsed for years outside the set of “Happy Days” or the Broadway production of “Grease.”
But, turning his back on both the pomp of ’70s stadium rock and the rock ’n’ roll arsonist ethos of punk, Mr. Gordon helped seed a rockabilly resurgence that would flower during the 1980s, with bands like the Stray Cats and the Blasters hitting the charts and punk titans like the Clash and X also paying their respects.

Lawrence emailed an obit for Edward Dameron IV, SF and fantasy artist. He did illustrations for The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands and designed the base for the 1988 Hugo Awards.

Ian Whittaker, set decorator. Among his credits: “Alien”, “Tommy”, and “Highlander”. He did also do some acting. IMDB.

Obit watch: July 19, 2022.

Tuesday, July 19th, 2022

Mickey Rooney Jr.

Not a whole lot of credits in IMDB. I’m wondering if “Beyond the Bermuda Triangle” counts as genre. (Fred MacMurray? On a totally unrelated note, I just picked up the 4K/UHD package of “Double Indemnity” during the Criterion 50% off sale, and am looking forward to watching it soon. I’ve never seen it, but I keep hearing it is one of the great noir films.)

Michael Swanwick posted a nice tribute to Claes Oldenburg on his blog.