Obituaries

Richard Avedon, 81, Manhattan-based photographer and portraitist, died Oct. 1 of a cerebral hemorrhage while on assignment in San Antonio for the New Yorker magazine. Well known as a fashion and celebrity photographer, he was also highly regarded in the art world, with numerous museum shows to his credit. His stark images of subjects shot against white backgrounds, though formally simple, offer compelling character studies. Over the years, his photos appeared in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Rolling Stone, among other publications. In 1992, he became the first staff photographer for the New Yorker, which published memorable portraits of such individuals as Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn (both from his archives), Christopher Reeve and Hillary Rodham Clinton, and artist John Currin with his infant son. In 1962, Avedon had his first museum exhibition, at the Smithsonian Institution. In 1974, the Museum of Modern Art showed a series of images of his terminally iii father. A large show of his portraits (ranging from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the denizens of Warhol's Factory with their clothes off) followed the next year at New York's Marlborough Gallery. The Metropolitan Museum mounted a traveling exhibition of his fashion and portrait photography in 1977 and another major show in 2002-03. In 1980, a retrospective was organized by the Berkeley Art Museum, and another in 1994 by the Whitney Museum in New York. In addition to publishing his own work--in volumes such as Portraits (1976) and In the American West (1985)--he also served as editor of Diary of a Century: Photographs by Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1970).

Terry Dintenfass, 84, art dealer, died Oct. 26 in Manhattan. For nearly 40 years, she bucked the trends of mainstream 20th-century art, showing socially minded artists when Pop and Minimal art were in the forefront, and black artists when most exhibited artists were white. She regularly mounted shows by Jacob Lawrence, Raymond Saunders, Richard Hunt and Horace Pippin. Her gallery was also home base for classic modernists Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler and Ben Shahn. Born Theresa Kline, she grew up in Atlantic City, and as an adult she slowly began buying art from the Whitney Museum's annual exhibitions of painting and sculpture. Her first gallery, called D Contemporary Gallery, was in an Atlantic City hotel, where she showed work on consignment from New York dealers, including pieces by Milton Avery and artists from the Alfred Stieglitz circle. In 1959, she opened a gallery in a garden apartment on East 67th Street in Manhattan, before moving, in 1975, to a large space on 57th Street. She retired in 1999.

Jane Meyerhoff, 80, art collector and philanthropist, died Oct. 16 in Baltimore following heart surgery. With her husband, Robert, she collected works by Rothko, Pollock, de Keoning, Johns, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and Stella, which were displayed in special galleries attached to their home. In 1987, the Meyerhoffs promised their collection, now valued at over $300 million, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. They also funded the gallery's purchase, in 1986, of Barnett Newman's "Stations of the Cross." In 1996, the museum mounted an exhibition of the Meyerhoff collection.

Rona Goffen, 60, art historian, died Sept. 8 in Princeton of ovarian cancer. A specialist in Venetian Renaissance art, she had been a professor at Rutgers University since 1988 and previously taught at Indiana, Princeton and Duke universities; she served as department head for three years at the latter. Her books include Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice: Bellini, Titian and the Franciscans (1986), Titian's Women (1994), a monograph on Giovanni Bellini (1994) and Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (2002).

Roland Balay, 102, art dealer, died Sept. 16 in Manhattan. The grandson of Michael Knoedler, founder of Knoedler & Company, he served as president of the New York gallery from 1956 to '76 and was the last family member to run the company. Balay was involved in the 1930 transaction in which the Soviet government sold $6.5 million in art from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg to Paul Mellon for the establishment of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Under Balay's leadership, Knoedler began showing modern art, including works by Picasso, Braque, Leger, Moore, Newman and de Kooning.

Ma Chengyuan, 77, Shanghai Museum president, died on Sept. 25. He saved valuable artifacts in the museum from Red Guard vandals during the Cultural Revolution (196676), when Mao ordered the destruction of remnants of pre-Revolutionary China. In 1966, during an early rampage in Shanghai, Ma helped organize efforts to catalogue and protect artifacts in collectors' homes. Before the Red Guard arrived at the museum, he had employees dress in Red Guard uniforms and paint slogans on display cases to thwart vandalism. Accused of selling museum property for profit, he was imprisoned and tortured in a storage room for nine months when he refused to confess, and was then sent to a labor camp. He was brought back to Shanghai in 1972 to help organize an exhibition that traveled to the U.S. following Nixon's groundbreaking visit to China. An authority on ancient Chinese bronzes, he managed to raise funds and obtain government approval for a new building, which opened in 1996. He published more than 80 books and articles on bronzes in the collection, which he helped build shortly after the museum's founding in 1952.