Obituaries - Artworld - editor Paul Gottlieb - sculptor George Rickey - poet Kenneth Koch - photographer Yousuf Karsh - art dealer Norman Hirschl - gallery director J. Carter Brown - art collector Phyllis Wattis - art dealer Holly Solomon - Obituary

Art in America, Sept, 2002 by Stephanie Cash, David Ebony

Paul Gottlieb, 67, publisher and editor, died suddenly on June 5 of a heart attack in Manhattan. As publisher and editor-in-chief of Harry N. Abrams for more than two decades, Gottlieb played a large role in expanding the horizons of the art book business, traditionally a rather modest branch of the publishing industry.

The first establishment in the U.S. to specialize in art books, Abrams (founded in 1949) was still a small company when Gottlieb took the helm in 1980. During his tenure, Abrams increased its output of carefully produced volumes on art of all kinds and periods, including the firm's particular strength, monographic studies on contemporary artists. Recent offerings focus on Joseph Cornell, Ann Hamilton, Philip Pearlstein and Janet Fish.

Gottlieb also moved the company into many new ventures. Capitalizing on an expanding art world and snowballing audiences for museum exhibitions, he saw the potential for producing the accompanying catalogues as glossy books and distributing them far more broadly than before. He obtained distribution rights and entered into co-publishing arrangements with museums such as the Metropolitan (the first of these resulted in The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Ad, 1983), MOMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim and many others in the U.S. and abroad. By now, museum catalogues have come to dominate Abrams's output in the field of art.

The son of Russian immigrants, Gottlieb was fluent in both Russian and French; as the Soviet period carne to an end, he developed a close relationship with the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and scored a publishing coup in 1995 when, in conjunction with a traveling exhibition that attracted huge crowds at the National Gallery and elsewhere, he brought to U.S. audiences the legendary collection of top-rank French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art works which for many years had been inaccessible, or nearly so. Gottlieb was a savvy publicist, as evidenced by the mass-market success of the book on the Hermitage paintings, as well as Abrams's 1987 volume on Andrew Wyeth's Helga portraits. In conjunction with a traveling show of the works, the book sold over 500,000 copies and was the first art book to be a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Abrams had long published non-art books to strengthen the bottom line; under Harry Abrams, a volume on Norman Rockwell as illustrator, a series of Disney books and a phenomenon called Gnomes, which made the New York Times bestseller list, helped to foot the bill. Gottlieb's successes in this general-audience vein included books on Alexander Graham Bell and Jackie Robinson, as well as The National Geographic Society; 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery, which, since its publication in 1987, has over a million copies in print.

While Gottlieb was an astute businessman skilled at navigating in corporate waters, he was far from the typical CEO. He was at home in the company of artists and writers, and often became intensely involved in the substantive details of his projects. An exceptionally tall and striking man who towered over the social events he enthusiastically attended, he was a connoisseur of good stories and a committed bon vivant.

Prior to joining Abrams, Gottlieb was president and publisher of American Heritage magazine, from 1970 to '75. He had begun his career there in 1962. In 1997, Abrams changed hands, bought from the Times Mirror Company by the La Martiniere Group. Gottlieb had supported the candidacy of the French company among several potential purchasers; after he retired from the top post at Abrams in January 2001, he remained with La Martiniere as vice chairman. Recently, however, after a reorganization at Abrams that included many dismissals, Gottlieb resigned. In April 2002, he was named executive director of the photography publisher Aperture, and was also the new chairman of the Academy of American Poets. He had been a member of the board at MOMA for many years.

George Rickey, 95, kinetic sculptor, died July 17 in St. Paul, Minn. Rickey was in his 50s when he discovered the artistic mode that would bring him widespread recognition: tall stainless-steel sculptures with parts designed to be moved by wind currents. Born in South Bend, Ind., Rickey spent his youth in Europe, attending Oxford University and studying in Paris with Fernand Leger and Amedee Ozenfant. After his return to the U.S. in the 1930s, he initially pursued painting, only switching to sculpture after the Second World War. Influenced by Calder and Russian Constructivism (the subject of a scholarly study that Rickey published in 1967), he developed a method using axles, counterweights, gears and bearings that allowed him to create structures with long, tapered bladelike forms that pivot gracefully in the wind. Subsequently, he also incorporated geometric elements into his work. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he received many commissions for public sculptures around the world. Rickey's last sculpture, a 57-foot high work, was installed at the Hyogo Museum in Japan in March. He was included in Document a 3 (1964) and his work can be found in the collections of numerous museums, including New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern in London. Rickey's most recent New York exhibition was a show of smaller-scale work at Maxwell Davidson Gallery in 2000.