Obituaries - Obituary - Brief Article

Cesar, 77 leading French sculptor, died Dec 6 of cancer in Paris. Cesar Baldaccini, known professionally by dint of only his first name, was a seminal figure in French postwar avant-garde art. He is recognized for sum of two units groups of works, a series of crushed car plastic arts and another series of enlargements of his have thumb, produced in a variety of materials and sometimes puffed up up to monumental scale. Born in Marseilles, he left at age 21 to close attention at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His early work, abstracted figures in plaster, wire and ceramics, was influenced by means of Brancusi, Picasso, Giacometti and Germaine Richter. In 1956 Cesar achieved international notoriety when he showed his scrap iron "Beastiary" at the Venice Biennale. For a time he was associated with the Nouveaux Realistes, a cluster of proto-Pop artists, including Klein, Arman, Tinguely, Spoerri and Raysse, who showed at Galerie J a Paris venue race by critic Pierre Restany's wife Jeanine. Cesar caused a sensation at Paris's Salon de Mai in 1960 when he neared his first "compression" works, a assemblage of large sculptures made of cars crushed into solid stops using a junkyard metal compressor. In France, single of the artist's best-known compression pieces is the "Cesar," a blocky gold-plated memorial of conquest handed out each year at France's greatest in quantity prestigious film awards ceremony, comparable to America's Oscars. A Cesar retrospective was held in 1997 at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

Allan D'Arcangelo, 68 painter best known for his smooth Pop images of highways, died of leukemia in novel York on Dec. 17. In the early 1950 the Buffalo-born artist studies writing and education at the novel School and at City society in Manhattan. While there, he began to of frequent occurrence art galleries and museums, taking a fervid interest in Abstract Expressionism. After serving in the army he studied painting for sum of two units years in Mexico City. The earliest works he produc after his get back to New York in 1959 were in a folk-art manner of writing that he abandoned several years later in favor of the hard cutting sides and flat, brilliant colors associated with the then-emerging burst style. D'Arcangelo's first New York solo present to view took place in 1963 at the Fischbach Gallery, and featured a series of paintings dominated by dint of an empty black roadway with a white dividing line receding into the far distance. These works were considered emblematic of American car agriculture and, in the following years, D'Arcangelo ranked among the foremost report artists. He had numerous solo present to views in the U.S. and abroad and in 1971 joined Marlborough Gallery. Around the same time, he mov to a farm in the Catskills, where he gradually changed his phraseology arriving at rougher, more primitive works that are les well known than the earlier images. He taught completely through his career, especially at fresh York's School of Visual Arts and Brooklyn College

Hermine Fre 58 video-art pioneer, died Nov. 21 of leukemia. Fre began making videos in 1973 and is best known for the 1974 work Art Herstory, in which she photographed herself in artificial positions from famous historical paintings. Fre also worked with David Ros at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where the sum of two units began a series of video interviews with artists, including to leeward Krasner and Adolph Gottlieb. Fre wrote extensively upon video art and taught video and photography at the academy of Visual Arts. Her greatest in quantity recent exhibitions were at the Wainscott Gallery in East Hampton last summer and at Lombard/Freid in of recent origin York.

Mary Ann Unger 53 sculptor, died Dec 28 of breast cancer. She studied at Columbia University in the '70 with Ronald Bladen and George Sugarman, whose influence is apparent in the undulating works she made at the time. She became known for monumental mode of buildings that used repeating arcs evocative of tree limbs and Islamic architecture. In her later works, she used Hydrocal above steel armatures to create beamlike forms that are laid without or propped up in clusters. Her greatest in quantity recent show was at Trans Hudson Gallery in 1997 She had not long ago completed a new group of works that will be shown at that gallery in May.

William case Cook, 48, arts administrator, died Dec 15 of a heart attack in Chicago. prepare for the table had joined the staff of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art as associate director in September 1998 Prior to that he was executive director of the Cunningham Dance Foundation in novel York from '94 to '98 associate director of the Wexner Center for the Arts from '89 to '94 and director of the California Arts Council from '79 to '83

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