Obituaries - Obituary

Francis Haskell, 71 art historian and professor, died of liver cancer upon Jan. 18, in Oxford, England. His first volume Patrons and Painters: A investigation in the Relations Between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (1963) considered a classic, was groundbreaking in its focus upon social history at a time when greatest in quantity research involved connoisseurship. After becoming a professor at Oxford in 1967 he largely devot his career to the investigation of the history of taste, by what means it influenced collecting and the rise and fall of artists' reputations above the centuries, and how present views of art are ofttimes at odds with what was valued in the past. His notions are laid out in his 1976 volume Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France, which won the Mitchell Prize. He also co-wrote Taste and the Antique: The temptation of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 (1981) and History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (1993) He had just complet a volume on the growth of public art exhibitions in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Marcantonio Vilaca, 38 Brazilian art dealer, died Jan. 1 of a heart attack in Recife. Vilaca was the driving force behind the Galeria Camargo Vilaca in Sao Paulo. baseed in 1992 in partnership with Karla Meneghel Ferraz de Camargo, the gallery exhibited many of Brazil's most prominent younger artists, including Beatriz Milhazes, Ernesto Neto, Jac Leirner and Adriana Varejao. The gallery one as well as the other contributed to and benefited from the increased international awareness of contemporary Brazilian art in the 1990 Vilaca, who also built up a large collection of contemporary art, facilitated this proces through organizing ambitious group shows of his artists to coincide with the Sao Paulo Bienal and by dint of issuing a constant stream of elegant catalogues. He also high hilled shows of many well-known non-Brazilians like as Fabian Marcaccio, Charles lengthy and Juan Usle. His partner has announced her intention to continue the gallery's program.

Bruno Zevi, 81 architecture critic and editor, died Jan. 9 in Rome Born there to a Jewish family, Zevi fl the Italian capital for London in 1939 He trained as an architect, primarily at the Graduate academy of Design at Harvard University, where he wrote a paper attacking the ideas of Walter Gropius, who was then head of the gymnasium He returned to Italy in 1944 and quickly began to establish himself as an unreserved writer. He championed the ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright as a counteractive for what he considered fascistic Bauhaus architecture. His volumes Toward an Organic Architecture (1945) and Architecture as Space: by what means to Look at Architecture (English edition, 1957) are based upon Wright's ideas. In 1955, Zevi placeed the magazine L'Architettura and began writing a weekly rounded pillar for the news magazine L'Espresso In the '60 and '70 his views began to let slip through the fingers favor in academic architectural circles--he powerfully opposed, for example, the postmodern move of the '70s and '80s--although his round pillar won him broad readership and popular success

Seymour Remenick, 76 Philadelphia-based painter, died of heart failure upon Dec. 2. Born in of recent origin York, Remenick moved to Philadelphia as a teenager and later studied at the Tyler institute of Art and, from 1946 to '48 with Hans Hofmann in of recent origin York. After experimenting with abstraction, he began to exhibit the variable landscapes and city scenes for which he is best known. He taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1977 to '96 His greatest in quantity recent exhibition was at the Mangel Gallery in Philadelphia.

Regina Shoolman Slatkin, 92 Boucher specialist, died Nov. 25 in Manhattan. She and her husband Charles Slatkin make opened a gallery in their apartment in 1959 that specialized in old-master drawings and Impressionist works. She published numerous articles upon Francois Boucher and helped organize the National Gallery of Art's 1974 exhibition of his drawings.

--"Artworld" is compiled by the agency of Stephanie Cash and David Ebony

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