Dead Celebrity Alert

February 2, 1921 - May 18, 2008

As Michelangelo was to Pope Julius II, and Bernini to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, so was Pietro Cascella to Silvio Berlusconi. Neither was perhaps in the same league as their predecessors as artist and patron respectively, but despite his many public monuments, notably that at Auschwitz, Cascella is most likely to be remembered for having sculpted the Italian Prime Minister’s colossal private mausoleum. …

The turning point in his career came when he and his brother and the architect Julio Lafuente won a competition in 1957 to build a monument at Auschwitz. … Read full obituary

1924 - April 8, 2008

Kazuo Shiraga was a distinguished Japanese avant-garde artist noted for his unusual method: using his own body to apply paint to the canvas. Revolutionary in the 1950s, this technique now seems to anticipate later international developments in performance art and conceptual art.

Born in Hyogo Prefecture in Western Japan, Shiraga initially studied Japanese-style painting at the Kyoto City Specialist School of Arts (now the Kyoto City University of Arts). After graduating in 1948, however, he gravitated towards Western styles, taking up oil painting. In the aftermath of Japan’s wartime defeat, the time was ripe for iconoclasm, and in 1952 he became a founder member, along with Akira Kanayama, Saburo Murakami and Keiko Tanaka, of the “Zero Group”, so named because of the artists’ belief that every work of art is created from nothing. By 1955, he and his fellow Zero Group artists had joined a more significant avant-garde movement: the Gutai Art Association… Read full obituary

PETALUMA, California (AP) — Alton Kelley, an artist who helped create the psychedelic style of posters and other art associated with the 1960s San Francisco rock scene, has died. He was 67.

Kelley died Sunday of complications from osteoporosis in his Petaluma home, according to his publicist, Jennifer Gross.

Kelley and his lifelong collaborator, Stanley “Mouse” Miller, churned out iconic work from their studio, a converted firehouse where Janis Joplin first rehearsed with Big Brother and the Holding Company.

The pair created dozens of classic rock posters, including the famous Grateful Dead “skull and roses” poster designed for a show at the Avalon Ballroom, as well as posters and album covers for Journey, Steve Miller, Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles. … Read full obituary

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg’s mediums knew few bounds.

One of his most famous works or “combines” was “Bed,” created when he woke up in the mood to paint but had no money for a canvas. His solution was to take the quilt off his bed and use paint, toothpaste and fingernail polish for his creation. He was also a sculptor and a choreographer.

Rauschenberg died Monday of heart failure at 82, it was announced Tuesday by Jennifer Joy, his representative at PaceWildenstein gallery in New York. His use of odd and everyday articles earned him regard as a pioneer in pop art, first gaining fame in the 1950s. …

Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, in his book “American Visions,” called Rauschenberg “a protean genius who showed America that all of life could be open to art. … Rauschenberg didn’t give a fig for consistency, or curating his reputation; his taste was always facile, omnivorous, and hit-or-miss, yet he had a bigness of soul and a richness of temperament that recalled Walt Whitman.” … Read full obituary

An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered in Turkey.

The naked body of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, 33, known as Pippa Bacca, was found in bushes near the city of Gebze on Friday.

She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people. …

Ms di Marineo was hitch-hiking from Milan to Lebanon with a fellow artist on their “Brides on Tour” project. … Read full story

Also:

Police arrested Murat Karatas, who later confessed that he first raped and killed di Marineo. Turkish people condemned the murder as the leading newspaper Hurriyet wrote “We are ashamed” in the headline.

Italian artist, also known as Pippa Bacca, was last seen on March 31. She was raped and then killed on March 31, according to the initial autopsy results, Dogan News Agency (DHA) said. …

Di Marineo’s mother Elena Manzoni told reporters her daughter was trying to prove that people could be reliable. …

Turkish people condemned the murder and expressed their feelings in the internet. Turkey’s leading newspaper Hurriyet said “We are ashamed” in the headline of its internet edition. … Read full story

John Plumb was one of the most notable of the abstract painters to emerge in Britain after the war. His work, though represented in the Tate and other important collections, was never as widely admired as it deserved to be, partly no doubt because of the resurgent interest in figuration that followed the commercial success of Pop Art during the 1960s. …

John Plumb, painter, was born on February 6, 1927. He died on April 6, 2008, aged 81 … Read full obituary

Angus Fairhurst, one of the group of “Young British Artists” who came out of London’s Goldsmiths College, has died at age 41.

Spokeswoman Erica Bolton said Fairhurst committed suicide Saturday during a walk in a remote part of Scotland.

A contemporary of bad boy artist Damien Hirst, who attend Goldsmiths at the same time and a former partner and collaborator of Sarah Lucas, he was one of new generation of installation and conceptual artists who gained international recognition in the 1990s.

Fairhurst was known for installation, photography and video works, including an installation in which he rewired the phones of London art dealers so they could only talk to each other — a comment on the insular nature of the art world. … Read full obituary

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — Writer Hugo Claus — an artist, poet, playwright and novelist whose books painted a scathing picture of repression and hypocrisy in bourgeois Flanders — died Wednesday by euthanasia, his wife said. He was 78.

Claus, who had Alzheimer’s disease, died at Middelheim Hospital in Antwerp. “He himself picked the moment of his death and asked for euthanasia,” not wanting to extend his suffering, his wife, Veerle De Wit, said in a statement. …

Claus produced some 200 works during his career but was best known for his classic, “The Sorrow of Belgium” — a scathing attack on social injustice, stifling family relationships and Roman Catholic repression in his native Flanders in northern Belgium.

The partly autobiographical work defined his career and shot him to prominence on the international scene. … Read full obituary

LONDON (AP) — Philip Jones Griffiths, a photojournalist who spent years traveling across Vietnam to capture the effects of the war on its people, died Wednesday. He was 72. …

Jones Griffiths was perhaps best known for his book “Vietnam Inc.” — described as one of the most detailed studies of any conflict.

In one of the book’s most haunting photos, he captured the image of a naked, young boy cowering and covering his ears to drown out the sound of a passing U.S. helicopter. He wrote that the unnamed boy went mad after witnessing his mother killed by a helicopter gunship. … Read full obituary

Wolfgang Sievers, one of Australia’s most accomplished photographers whose work captured the relationship between man and machine, has died aged 93.

Fleeing Nazi persecution, German-born Sievers arrived in Australia at the outbreak of World War II and quickly found his niche in documenting the country’s post-war manufacturing boom. …

His specialty and skill was in recognising the beauty in industrial forms and documenting the working lives of ordinary men and women, typified in what is possibly his most recognised work, Gears for Mining Industry 1967. … Read full obituary

Wallace Seawell, a top Hollywood portrait and glamour photographer during the heyday of movie stars including Sophia Loren, Tony Curtis and Gregory Peck, has died. He was 90.

Seawell died Tuesday of age-related causes at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said his friend, publicist Alan Eichler.

During his more than 60-year career, Seawell shot portraits of a range of luminaries from Ronald and Nancy Reagan and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to the Harlem Globetrotters and the Gabor sisters.

President Lyndon Johnson, the Shah of Iran and the King and Queen of Siam were among world leaders who posed for Seawell.

But Hollywood stars were his specialty, and he did work for movie studios and fan magazines. … Read full obituary

Roy DeForest, a nationally renowned artist and professor who was a founding member of what was described as the “California funk” art movement, has died. He was 77.

DeForest, whose work was exhibited throughout the United States, disliked the “California funk” term coined by Washington Post art critic Sidney Lawrence, who called it a Northern California style in which “counterculture thinking fused with an anything-goes, anti-art attitude.” … Read full obituary

HARTFORD, Conn. — Sol LeWitt, an artist known for his dynamic wall paintings and as a founder of minimal and conceptual art styles, died Sunday in New York, according to published reports.

The 78-year-old artist, who was born in Hartford and lived for the last two decades in Chester, Conn., died from complications from cancer, The New York Times and The Hartford Courant reported Monday.

Much of his art was based on variations of spheres, triangles and other basic geometric shapes. His sculptures commonly were based on cubes using precise, measured formats and carefully developed variations. … Read full obituary

JOHANNESBURG, Sept. 5 — Vladimir Griegorovich Tretchikoff, an exile from Siberia whose emotional depictions of wilting flowers, dancers and especially the daughter of a San Francisco Chinese merchant earned both global popularity and critics’ scorn, died in Cape Town on Aug. 26. He was 92.

His daughter, Mimi Mercorio, announced his death. He had been in a Cape Town nursing home, in poor health, since a stroke in 2002. …

If sales are a yardstick, then Mr. Tretchikoff was a Leonardo, and his most popular painting was, as Ms. Mercorio often says, his Mona Lisa. The 1952 painting, variously called “Chinese Girl” and “Blue Lady,” depicts a heavy-lidded young woman clad in a yellow gown, with neon-red lips and a face washed in blue. Published but unverified reports estimate that at least a half-million prints of the portrait have been sold, and many reports rate Mr. Tretchikoff among the world’s best-selling artists. … Read full obituary

Joe Rosenthal, Pulitzer prize-winning Associated Press photographer who shot the spontaneous (and ubiquitous) picture of World War II soldiers raising an American flag over Iwo Jima; Sunday, at age 94.