Obituaries

Art in America, Nov, 2004

Richard Avedon, 81, photographer and portraitist, died Oct. 1, as this issue was going to press. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while on assignment in San Antonio. A full obituary will appear in our December issue.

Edward Larrabee Barnes, 89, modernist architect, died Sept. 21 in Cupertino, Calif; he lived and worked in Cambridge, Mass. Barnes studied at Harvard with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer; white he was influenced by the simplified, Bauhaus-based esthetic of both architects, Barnes's own designs are generally less austere. His most conspicuous project in Manhattan is the IBM corporate headquarters on Madison Avenue (1983). He is well known for numerous museum buildings, among them the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1971), widely considered an exemplary space in which to display contemporary art. Later museum projects include the Sarah M. Scaife Gallery at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute (1974), the Dallas Museum of Art (1983-84), the UCLA Hammer Museum in LOS Angeles and the Katonah (N.Y.) Museum of Art (both 1990). His 1981 building for the Asia Society in Manhattan was extensively redesigned in 2001 by Bartholomew Voorsanger as part of an expansion plan. Barnes produced master plans for the State University of New York, Purchase, and for Yale, Colonial Williamsburg and the National University of Singapore. Houses that display a sensitivity to site and to materials dominated his early production, and he continued to design them throughout his career. In 1994, Barnes won the American Institute of Architects' Twenty five Year Award for his Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (1962), a group of shingled cottages linked by wooden decks overlooking the Maine coastline.

Annie Herron, 50, contemporary art dealer, died Sept. 24 of cancer, in the Bronx. In the early '80s, she was director of Semaphore East gallery in the East Village, which showed such artists as Ellen Berkenblit, Mark Kostabi and Martin Wong. A pioneer in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, now a thriving art community, she opened Test-Site in 1991, and gave early exposure to Roxy Paine, David Shapiro and Amy Cutler, among others. In 1995, she co-directed Black & Herron gallery in SoHo, and from 1997 to 2000, she co-directed Eyewash gallery in Williamsburg with Larry Walczak.

Irene Pijoan, 50, painter, died Aug. 18 in Berkeley of breast cancer. She was known for her filigree-like compositions on cutout supports. She also designed public artworks in Oakland, Santa Clara and Seattle. She exhibited with Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco; a solo museum show held at the San Jose ICA in 2001 traveled to Switzerland.

Lillian Orlowsky, 89, painter of abstract canvases with jostling shapes and patches of color, died Aug. 7 in Provincetown, Mass. She studied with Hans Hofmann in the 1930s and was one of the few surviving WPA artists. In 1995, she had a three-venue retrospective at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the Cortland Jessup Gallery in Provincetown and the Cherry Stone Gallery in Wellfleet, Mass., where a show of her oils from the '40s and '50s was on view at the time of her death.

Hubert von Sonnenburg, 76, German-born paintings conservator, died of cancer July 16 in New York. He began working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1959 and remained there until 1974, when he went to Munich as director of both the Doerner Institute, a research center for conservation studies, and the conservation department of the Bavarian State Paintings Collection. In 1987, he was named director general of the Bavarian collection. He returned to the Met in 1991 as chairman of the paintings conservation department. An expert on fakes, forgeries and misattributions, he helped organize the exhibition "Rembrandt/ Not Rembrandt" and a show of works by Goya from the museum's collection, both 1995.

Freddy De Vree, 64, Belgian poet, art critic and essayist, died July 3 in Antwerp. In the early 1960s, he was co editor of the avant-garde periodicals Nul, Randstad and De Tafelronde, in which he championed the COBRA movement. For more than 30 years, he was a producer at BRT-3 (now Radio Klara), the Flemish cultural station. He published numerous essays and monographs on such artists as Marcel Broodthaers, Pierre Alechinsky, Constant, Roland Topor, Andy Warhol, Jan Vanriet, Daniel Spoerri, Enrico Baj and Asger Jorn. From 1987 to 1992, he served as president of the Belgian branch of the International Association of Art Critics.