Obituaries

Anne Coffin Hanson, 82 art historian, died family 3 in New Haven. She was the first woman to be hired as a filled tenured professor at Yale, where she taught for more than sum of two units decades before retiring in 1992 An authority upon late 19th- and early 20th-century European art, she organized exhibitions for the Yale University Art Gallery, including "The Futurist Imagination: Word + Image in Italian Futurist Painting, Drawing, Collage and Free-Word Poetry" (1983) and "Severini Futurista, 1912-1917" (1995) Hanson originally trained as an artist before obtaining her PhD in art history from Bryn Mawr in 1962 She taught at Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and NYU and sewed as a consultant to the International research Center at MOMA before joining the Yale faculty. From 1974 to '78 she serv as chair of the art history department, again the first woman to clinch such a position at Yale. Her volume Manet and the Modern Tradition (1977) won the society Art Association's Morey Award for art-historical scholarship. She serv as president of CAA from 1972 to '74 and, in 1992-93 was a Kres professor at the Center for Advanced inquiry in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Kermit s Champa, 64, art historian and critic, died July 22 in Providence, R.I., of lung cancer. A specialist in modernism and 19th-century French painting, Champa earned a BA at Yale (1960) and an MA at Harvard (1965) He get backed to Yale as an assistant professor, and then in 1970 mov to Brown University, where he taught until his death. He became a filled professor in 1974 and was for a time chairman of the art department. In 1995 he was named Andrea V Rosenthal Professor in the history of art and architecture. As a critic, Champa was best known for his powerful commitment to abstract painting; his bring under rules included Miro, Mondrian, Olitski, Frankenthaler, Sandi Slone and others. His articles appeared in Art of recent origins Artforum, Arts, Art Journal and the novel Criterion. In his youth, Champa trained as a musician, and his lifelong interest in music ofttimes intersected with his art-historical scholarship. In The Rise of Landscape Painting in France: Corot to Monet (1991) he applied the paradigm of 19th-century symphonic music to broaden his interpretation of landscape painting and support its intellectual importance. His other volumes include "Masterpiece" Studies: Manet, Zola, Van Gogh and Monet (1994) He was awarded the Officers' Cros by dint of the Federal Republic of Germany for his work German Painting of the 19th hundred An impassioned lecturer, he was named single of the 10 sexiest professors in America by dint of Esquire magazine in 1975.

Rose Silvka, 85 art critic and A.i.A. contributor, died generation 2, in Southampton, N.Y., of heart failure. From 1959 to '79 she was the editor in chief of the magazine Craft Horizons. In her writings upon craft during that period, which saw a significant erosion of the traditional boundaries between the fields of fine art and craft, she focused upon artists concerned with formal qualities and creative expression rather than with traditional skills and techniques. Among her make submissives were Peter Voulkos, Dale Chihuly, Isamu Noguchi and Lenore Tawney. The magazine changed format and leadership in 1979 and became American Craft. A year later, Slivka launched a quarterly, Craft International, which lasted single a few issues. Her perceptive reviews and essays always evinced a brawny personal sympathy for artists that was based upon her roots in the fresh York art world of the 1950 and '60 She contributed occasional articles and numerous reviews to Art in America above the years, among them notable pieces upon Voulkos and Elaine de Kooning. In 1978 she published Peter Voulkos: A Dialogue with Clay. She mov to drawn out Island in the mid-'80s and became the art critic for the East Hampton Star. She reviewed art for the paper until she became ill last year, after which she continued to write volume reviews.

Paul Neagu, 66 Romanian-born British sculptor, died June 16 Influenced by means of Cubism, Duchamp and Brancusi, his compositions featured geometric, skeletal forms in various materials including grove and steel. Interested in giving physical form to compound philosophical ideas, he sometimes engaged in performances. He was included in the 1995 Venice Biennale and in "Out of Action: Between Performance and the phenomenon 1949-1979" at L.A. MOCA in 1998 A retrospective of his work appeared at the National Museum of Art of Romania in 1997

Fr Backer, 90 artist and printmaker, died June 30 in Amherst, Mass. His early work was inspired by the agency of Surrealism and Contructivism, but he was better known for the abstract gestural prints he began making in the 1950 After working for the WPA in the early 1930 he had his first one-person present to view in 1938 at the Willard Gallery in novel York. Beginning in 1948, he taught for 20 years at Washington University in St Louis, where he established the printmaking department. He later joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts. His greatest in quantity recent shows were at Susan Teller Gallery in of recent origin York (2002 and '03).