Obituaries - Artworld - Obituary

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Raphael Rubinstein

Enrico Baj, 78, Italian artist, died June 16 of cancer at his home in the northern town of Vergiate. From the time of his emergence in the early 1950s until the end of his life, Baj was a font of paintings, sculptures, collages, artist books, prints and multiples. He also authored numerous polemics, engaged in frequent collaborations with writers and other artists and, more than once in his career, encountered official censorship.

His early paintings employed automatist drips and stains that coalesced into quasi-figurative forms. As Baj explained in "Manifesto della pittura nucleare," a 1952 text he coauthored with artist Sergio Dangelo, these images, which suggested mushroom clouds, were a response to the atomic age. In the late '50s, his paintings became populated with stumpy, beastlike figures, often adorned with military medals. Along with a passionate antiwar stance, Baj's collage-based art was characterized by relentless, playful experimentation with unorthodox materials such as mirror shards, wood veneer, Meccano toys, embroidered fabric and upholstery tassels.

Among his collaborators were some of postwar Europe's most significant writers and artists, including Raymond Queneau, Piero Manzoni, Lucio Fontana and Asger Jorn. In the mid-1950s, he and Jorn helped found the Mouvement pour une Bauhaus imaginiste, a forerunner of the Situationist movement, in which he briefly participated. Baj and Jorn's recycling of altered flea-market paintings in the 1950s are early examples of appropriation art. Similarly, Baj's ludic approach to political themes anticipated later artistic and social developments of the 1960s. His 1972 mural about a radical activist who had died in police custody, The Funeral of the Anarchist Pinelli, also provoked controversy. The day it was to be unveiled in Milan, local authorities banned it from public view.

In the early 1980s, Baj embraced a kind of gaudy Neo-Classical style to produce multifigured, intentionally kitschy paintings that tackled subjects from overpopulation to the Garden of Eden. More recently, he made a series of paintings inspired by the epic of Gilgamesh. Prolific to the end, Baj had a show in April at Gio Marconi in Milan that included 50 works made in 2002.

Although he was much better known in Europe than in the U.S., Baj had solo shows at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art (1971) and the Indianapolis Museum of Art (1978) and was included in "The Art of Assemblage" (1962) and "'Primitivism' in 20th-Century Art" (1984), both at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

--Raphael Rubinstein

Doug Michels, 59, a founding member of the San Francisco-based collaborative Ant Farm, died June 12 near Sydney, Australia. He was climbing to a whale observation point and fell to his death. Michels and Chip Lord, both trained as architects, founded Ant Farm in 1968; they were later joined by Hudson Marquez and Curtis Schreier. The group originally sought to make "underground architecture," in the countercultural sense of the term, yet became more recognized for their performances and art projects. Among the latter is the well-known Cadillac Ranch (1974) near Amarillo, Tex., which consists of 10 upended, half-buried tail-fin cars. For Media Burn, a 1975 performance, Michels drove a white Cadillac through a pyramid of burning TV sets.

After the group split up in 1978, Michels concentrated on works that reflected his interest in futuristic worlds, such as a room, created in 1979 for a Houston home, that resembled a "Star Trek" lounge and contained the newest communications equipment. For the last 25 years, he worked on "Bluestar," a design for a space station for humans and dolphins. Over the years he taught at the University of Houston, Rice University, Texas A&M and UCLA. A retrospective of Ant Farm's work, organized by the artists, will appear at the Berkeley Art Museum, Jan. 21-Apr. 26, 2004. Cedric Price, 68, British architect, died Aug. 10 of a heart attack. He was particularly influential in the 1960s, forming a bridge between the earlier Brutalist style and the rising Pop sensibility. Among his finished projects are the 1961 London Zoo aviary, designed with Lord Snowden and Frank Newby, and the Interaction Center in Kentish Town in London, completed in the early '70s. But Price was better known as a designer of ambitious, visionary projects that were never realized. The Fun Palace (1961-64) was to be a megastructure with movable floors and walls that contained such elements as an open university, a performing arts center and an amusement park. Two other unrealized designs from the '60s were Pop-Up Parliament and the Potteries Thinkbelt. In 1999, Price garnered renewed attention when he participated in a competition sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Architecture for the hypothetical redesign of the west side of Midtown Manhattan. His proposal called for the removal of many buildings and the creation of a public green space to function as a "lung."

Moshe Kupferman, 77, Israeli painter, died June 21 in Tel Aviv of a heart attack. Born in Poland, Kupferman emigrated to Israel in 1948. He helped found the Lohamei Hagetaot kibbutz near the Lebanese border, where he lived and worked until his death. Using generally somber colors and striated marks, Kupferman developed an abstract vocabulary that ranged from dense grids to more turbulent compositions. Looking at his work, many critics saw references to the Holocaust, in which Kupferman lost his entire family. For his part, the artist, who once described himself as an "artisanal painter," declined to either confirm or deny such interpretations. His work was shown at the Centre Pompidou (1987), the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (1999-2000) and, last year, at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.