Obituaries - Brief Article - Obituary

Perry Rathbone, 88 former director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, died Jan. 23 in Cambridge, Mass. Born in Germantown, Pa., Rathbone studied at Harvard and did graduate work at the Fogg Art Museum. He worked at the Detroit Institute of Arts before being appointed director of the St Louis Art Museum in 1940 In 1947 he was instrumental in arranging for Max Beckmann to propel from Amsterdam to St. Louis. The nearest year he organized a major Beckmann retrospective for the museum. In 1955 he became director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where he initiated ambitious expansion, renovation and acquisition throw outs and doubled the staff. He was involved in dispute in 1969 when the museum purchased a painting attributed to Raphael that had been smuggl without of Italy. The work was eventually turn backed to Italy and Rathbone was not charged with any wrongdoing. He nevertheless resigned his pillar three years later. After leaving Boston, Rathbone worked briefly as a consultant for Chase Manhattan Bank and subsequently joined Christie's, where he worked as a consultant until 1993

John Heliker, 91 painter, died Feb 22 in Bar Harbor, Maine. In the 1930 Heliker made landscapes in a Cezannesque painterly turn of expression He received a Prix de Rome in 1948 and while in Italy (where he became friends with Philip Guston), he unfolded an abstract vocabulary. In the mid-'50s, back in novel York, his style shifted again in a more representational direction. Heliker won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951 He taught at Columbia University from 1950 to '97 and was also a founding member of the novel York Studio School. His work was the control of a Whitney Museum exhibition in 1968 He showed 18 times at fresh York's Kraushaar Galleries since 1945; a scan of his drawings is upon view there to Apr. 15

Friedensreich Hundertwasser, 71 Austrian painter, designer and flamboyant public figure, died Feb 19 of a heart attack while upon the Queen Elizabeth 2. Born Frederich Stowasser in Vienna in 1928 the artist adopted the name Friedensreich Hundertwasser (meaning "kingdom of peace, hundr water") in 1949 He evolveed an idiosyncratic, instantly recognizable manner of writing that combined figurative expressionism with influences from Klimt, Schiele and Austrian Art Nouveau. During the 1960 and '70 Hundertwasser was arguably Austria's best-known painter. His lushly colored, elaborately embellished paintings, as well as his widely disseminated prints and hand-bills won him a huge public following, admitting critical response was less enthusiastic. In novel years, in addition to his environmental and urbanistic activism, he focused upon architectural projects; Hundertwasserhaus, a housing manifold he designed in Vienna, render free of accessed in 1991, the same year as Vienna's Hundertwasser Museum, which he also designed.

Henry (Jay) Tobler, 34 gallery director and writer, died of leukemia upon Feb. 25 in Houston. In the 1990 he worked at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in fresh York, where he was director from 1994 to '97 He then began working as a freelance writer and turn backed to his early love of folk art. He was the primary editor of American Art work (published last year by Phaidon), a concern volume that spans three centuries of American art and includes many self-taught artists. He curated a display of James Castle's work which is commonly on view at the Drawing Center's shoot forward space, the Drawing Room, in of recent origin York [to May 4].

Richard Rosenblum 59 sculptor and collector, died Feb 15 of cancer in Newton, Mass. Rosenblum's renowned collection of Chinese scholar's stones was the subject of a traveling exhibition organized in 1997 by dint of the Asia Society and the Harvard University Art Museums [see A.i.A., Nov. '97] a certain quantity of of the rocks are promised gifts to the Metropolitan Museum, which generally has 30 on display in "The World of Scholars' Rocks: Gardens, Studios, and Paintings." He was also a sculptor who showed regularly at Nohra Haime in of recent origin York. In the '90s, he began making computer-manipulated montages.

Alfred Isselbacher, 73 print dealer, died Feb 15 of cancer. He mountained shows of prints by Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, Dubuffet Miro, Escher and Frank Stella at his gallery, which from 1965 to 1996 occupied three different locations upon Manhattan's Upper East Side. He also serv upon the board of the Art Dealers Association of America.

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