Obituaries - artworld - Obituary

Stephanie Cash

Larry Rivers, 78, artist and jazz musician, died on Aug. 14. His obituary appears on p. 47.

Erik Dietman, 64, multi-medium conceptual sculptor based in France, died of cancer in Paris on June 28. Dietman was born in Sweden in 1937 but left the country in 1959 to escape being imprisoned for refusing his military service. He vagabonded his way to Paris where, by chance, he met Daniel Spoerri and Robert Filliou in a bar and immediately settled into a bohemian life. Bars and restaurants remained central to Dietman, who mockingly cited his "trente annees d'etudes au comptoir" (thirty years of study at the bar).

He was loosely associated with the Fluxus and Nouveau Realiste artists, and had his first solo show with Gian Enzo Sperone in Turin in 1964. Over the next 38 years, he exhibited regularly in France, Italy, Holland, Germany and the Nordic countries, though less in England and not at all in the U.S. The Moderna Museet in Stockholm gave him a large exhibition in 1976 and originated a traveling retrospective in 1987; the Centre Georges Pompidou mounted a large show in 1994; the Musee des Arts Decoratifs de Paris in 1996 surveyed 10 years of his glass work, in which he subverted traditional vessel forms, as in his 1988 series of oversized phallic-shaped vases.

Dietman relished verbal puns and bodily functions. He created an early wall sculpture by forming the word "PAIN" (bread) with loaves of bread, named one of his alter egos Outil O'Toole (Tool O'Toole), called his 1975 retrospective at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris "Vingt annees de sueur" (Twenty Years of Sweat) and titled a 1992 sculpture of a stuffed pigeon atop a cast bronze dung heap Au Sommet apres en avoir tant chie (On top of it all, after taking so much shit).

Dietman's best sculptures are both funny and serious, and even his biggest pieces seem linguistically inspired and casual. (Martin Kippenberger and Wim Delvoye would be his younger-generation kin.) Known in the '60s for covering everyday objects with Band-Aids, Dietman began receiving public sculpture commissions in the mid-'70s; thereafter he often worked at large scale in cast bronze, stone and, recently, cast aluminum. His 1992 cast bronze L'Ami de personne (Nobody's Friend), in which a ghoulish 12-foot-high figure looms over an empty chair, was installed in the Tuileries Gardens in 2000.

--Anne Rochette and Wade Saunders

Earle Brown, 75, composer, died July 2, at his home in Rye, N.Y., after a long illness. Emerging in the early 1950s, Brown cited the art of Jackson Pollock and Alexander Calder as crucial influences on his music. He often notated his compositions with unconventional, graphic scores that resembled geometric or gestural abstractions. (In 1979, two of his scores were included in the exhibition "Scores and Notations" at P.S. 1.) His composition Calder Piece (1963-69) was scored for a large ensemble of percussion instruments that included an actual Calder mobile, Chef d'Orchestre, which the artist had created at Brown's instigation. In order to perform the piece, four musicians struck the mobile with soft mallets, producing sounds of varying intensity. As they played it, the mobile was set in motion. According to an account by art critic Dore Ashton, as the tempo and volume of the piece increased, the musicians found themselves running in circles to keep up with the rotating instrument. Brown received many awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, and was active in organizing music festivals and directing new music recordings for the Time-Mainstream label.

Mariana Yampolsky, 76, Mexican photographer and curator, died of cancer on May 3 in Mexico City. Known for her black-and-white images documenting the everyday lives of Mexico's rural poor, she was the first female member of the Taller de Grafica Popular. After working as a graphic illustrator in the '40s and '50s, she studied with Lola Alvarez Bravo and dedicated herself to photography exclusively in the '60s. From 1989 to '93, she curated "Memoria del Tiempo," a large show on the history of Mexican photography that debuted at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, before embarking on an extensive international tour. In 1998, the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City mounted an exhibition of her work.

Jiri Kolar, 88, Czech collage artist and poet, died Aug. 11 in Prague. Considered one of the most influential Czech artists of the 20th century, Kolar was known for innovative collages in which he used images of well-known art works, from the past and present. He first exhibited in 1937, and published his first poem in 1941. Kolar was a leading figure of a Czech Surrealist group in the 1940s. He was a constant agitator against the Communist government that rose to power in 1948, and was jailed for nine months in 1950 for one of his writings. He emigrated to France in 1980, returning to Prague after the fall of Communist rule in 1989. In 1981, he had a show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Emily Genauer, 91, art critic, died Aug. 23 after a long illness. She wrote for various New York newspapers during her four-decade-long career, championing modern painting and sculpture at a time when newspaper criticism was unsympathetic to the new styles. Through her writing and social contacts, she brought early attention to such artists as Chagall, Rivera, Picasso and Clyfford Still. In 1929, Genauer began writing for the New York World, which later became the New York World-Telegram after a merger. In 1949, when she was told she could no longer write about Picasso and other artists suspected of Communist sympathies, she left the paper and joined the staff of the New York Herald Tribune. After that paper folded in 1967, she penned a weekly column for the Newsday Syndicate until the mid-'70s. From 1966 to '70, she was also a member of the National Council on the Humanities. She won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished art criticism in 1974.

Esphyr Slobodkina, 93, artist and author, died July 21 in Glen Head, N.Y. Born in Siberia in 1908, she came to the U.S. at age 20. Known for her colorful canvases with clearly defined, stylized forms, she was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group, established in 1936, which included such figures as Albers, Reinhardt, de Kooning, Pollock and Ilya Bolotowsky, to whom she was married for three years. A retrospective of her work was held earlier this year at Kraushaar Galleries in Manhattan. Slobodkina also had a successful career as a children's book author and illustrator, and best known for her 1938 book Caps for Sale, which remains a classic.

Hans van Dijk, 56, patron of Chinese art, died Apr. 30 in Beijing. Born and educated in Holland, he moved to Beijing in 1986, and began documenting the work of contemporary artists. He founded an art consultancy, which organized exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art. In 1999, he cofounded China Art Archives and Warehouse and the Beijing Modern Art Foundation. His computerized archive currently contains information on over 5,000 artists.

Maida Abrams, 63, collector of Dutch art, died of cancer on May 9 in Newton, Mass. With her husband, George, she built one of the major private collections of 17th, century Netherlandish drawings in the U.S. In 1999, they gave 110 works, estimated to be worth $20 million, to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard.

--Artworld" is compiled by Stephanie Cash and David Ebony

Eduardo Chillida, 1924-2002

Eduardo Chillida, 78, preeminent Basque sculptor known for spare, abstract forms in steel, bronze, stone and wood, died of a stroke on Aug. 22, at his home near San Sebastian, Spain. Chillida studied architecture in Madrid in the 1940s. After shifting his focus to sculpture and drawing, he moved to Paris to study art. Chillida's early works of the late '40s, Brancusi-like reductive studies of the figure, attracted the attention of Musee d'Arte Moderne curator Bernard Dorival, who featured his work, along with that of Pablo Palazuelo, in two well-received exhibitions in 1949 and '50 at the Salon de Mai.

In 1951, Chillida and his wife Pill returned to Spain, where he began his first series of large-scale works in iron. His reputation was established when some of these bold, abstract pieces, featuring architectonic forms reminiscent of twisted beams, were presented in 1954 in his first solo show, at the Galeria Clan in Madrid. Subsequently, the artist held numerous exhibitions around the world, and created many monumental public works. Major museum surveys appeared at the Kunsthalle, Basel (1962), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1966), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1969), the Grand Palais, Paris (1977), the National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (1979), and the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1980). In 1999 Chillida became the first Spanish artist to be given a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.

He won numerous awards, including the sculpture prize at the 1958 Venice Biennale, the 1978 Andrew W. Mellon Prize (shared with de Kooning), and Japan's Praemium Imperiale in 1991. His most recent U.S. show appeared at Tasende Gallery, Los Angeles, earlier his year.

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