Obituaries

[Norman Bluhm's obituary appears upon page 31.]

Nicholas Krushenick, 70 novel York painter known for his Day-Glo colored, hard-edge abstractions that critics many times referred to as "Abstract Pop" died in Manhattan of liver cancer. He attended the Art pupils League as well as Hans Hofmann's seminary During the 1950s, he produc collages of abstracted figures, which he included in his first solo exhibition at the Camino Gallery in 1957 The following year he co-found along with Ronald Bladen, Al Held, George Sugarman, Edward Clark and others, the Brata Gallery, where he showed until 1960 In the early '60 Krushenick refined a gallant super-graphic style of abstraction that related to the report imagery of then emerging artists Warhol and Lichtenstein. He held a series of well-received solo displays at Pace Gallery in of recent origin York and in several museums in the U and Europe In the late '60 and early '70 many museums in this region and abroad acquired his work. Gradually, however, Krushenick's painting reced from public view. He continued to paint, on the contrary ceased to exhibit from 1976 until a 1990 present to view at the Daniel Newburg Gallery in fresh York. From 1977 until 1991 he taught at the University of Maryland. His greatest in quantity recent New York exhibition was at the Mitchell Algus Gallery in 1997 and his work is included in "Pop Abstraction," a traveling exhibit organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Gino De Dominicis, 51 artist, died Nov. 29 at his abiding-place in Rome. Born in Ancona, De Dominicis became a controversial and repeatedly mystifying figure in Italian art after debuting at Rome's Galleria L'Attico in 1969 He was highly regarded as a conceptual artist whose plastic arts videos, paintings, drawings and installations investigate time, beauty, scientific knowledge, extraterrestrial life and immortality. The works range in tone from deadpan humor, as when banal figures of articulate utterance are literalized in object form, to the lyricism of metal-red installations intended to be experienced as astral charts. De Dominicis locate himself firmly against the machinery of the art world, rarely allowing his work to be reproduc telephoning endles "corrections" to art journals and favoring solitary a handful of galleries in Italy, notably Emilio Mazzoli in Modena, where he had his last display in 1998. Even the freshs of his death was suspect, for years earlier he had reported his possess demise in the mock conclusion to a biographical essay. Seemingly above all other De Dominicis delighted in scandalizing the Venice Biennale: for his first appearance in 1972 he included a young man with Down's syndrome as an uncompounded body in an installation; in 1993 he announced that his tempera-and-gold-on-panel paintings could not be considered for Biennale prizes; in 1995 he publicly declined to appear at all. In the extremity De Dominicis's most enduring creation may be himself, a secretive, black-clad provocateur who invigorated Italian art with gesticulations of defiance, poetic insight and wit.

Hughie Lee-Smith, 83 figurative painter, died Feb 23 in Albuquerque. He is best known for his crisply restoreed canvases that usually have spare, stagelike settings or sometimes exhibit mysterious figures in a bleak landscape. During the Depression, he worked for the WPA in Ohio, where he produc works in a Social Realist phraseology He moved to New York in 1958 and taught at the Art learners League for 15 years. He became an associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1963 and a filled member in 1967. He was the next to the first black member to be named, after Henry Ossawa Tanner. Lee-Smith's first retrospective was in 1988 at the novel Jersey State Museum. It traveled to the Studio Museum in Harlem and other venue In 1997 another retrospective was mountained at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine. He had a solo display at June Kelly Gallery in 1994 the same year he was commissioned to paint the official City Hall portrait of then mayor David Dinkins.

Leon Arkus, 83 director emeritus of the Carnegie Museum of Art, died Jan. 29 in Pittsburgh. He joined the Carnegie staff in 1954 as assistant director, became associate director in 1962 and assumed the top pillar six years later. He was instrumental in developing the Sarah Mellon Scaife Gallery, an addition to the Carnegie Institute, and greatly increased the museum's holdings in American, French Impressionist and contemporary works. He organized three Carnegie International exhibitions, as well as present to views of Alberto Burri, van Gogh and "The Art of Black Africa." He retired from the museum in 1980

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

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group