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Page 1 of 2 2009 in Review: In Memoriam
The international art world suffered dozens of losses this year, from the 27-year-old downtown provocateur Dash Snow to the nonagenarian choreography titan Merce Cunningham. Here are some of the most notable.
Coosje van Bruggen
Artist, curator, and critic Coosje van Bruggen died on January 10 at the age of 66 of breast cancer. Van Bruggen served on the curatorial staff of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from 1967 to 1971; she then taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Endschede, the Netherlands. In 1976, she collaborated for the first time on a large-scale sculpture with Claes Oldenburg, who became her husband the following year. The two moved to New York in 1978 and continued to collaborate on site-specific urban works, which van Bruggen called Large-Scale Projects. Their work has been the subject of surveys at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Hayward Gallery in London, among others. Van Bruggen also continued to work as a curator and critic, serving on the selection committee for Documenta 7 in 1982 and contributing to Artforum from 1983 to 1988. She wrote extensively on a number of artists, including Frank Gehry, Bruce Nauman, and John Baldessari. She was recognized, along with Oldenburg, with many honors and distinctions, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in Washington, D.C., in 1994 and the Nathaniel S. Saltonstall Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 1996. Andrew Wyeth
American painter Andrew Wyeth died in his sleep on January 16 at the age of 91. Wyeth was among the country's most celebrated living artists, although his realist, figurative paintings of rural life in Pennsylvania and Maine split critical opinion at a time when Abstract Expressionism was at the fore. Wyeth had his first solo gallery exhibition at William Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1937; he went on to have solo shows at museums around the country and the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where his 1976–77 exhibition was the institution's first devoted to a living artist. He painted his most famous work, Christina's World, in 1948; the picture was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art for $1,800 the same year. He was honored by Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and George W. Bush. Helen Levitt
Influential street photographer Helen Levitt, best known for her striking photographs of the residents of Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side from the late 1930s and early ’40s, died in her sleep on March 29. Levitt’s work was influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans, both of whom she knew. After dropping out of high school, she started working for a commercial portrait photographer in the Bronx for $6 a week. Her most famous photograph shows three children anxiously preparing to begin trick-or-treating on Halloween in 1939; a year later, the picture was included in the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department. A solo show of Levitt’s work followed at the museum in 1943. Levitt would later work as a film editor and director, and in 1952 she released In the Street, a 14-minute documentary about Spanish Harlem. In 1959 she became one of the first photographers to work in color, and she received Guggenheim grants the following two years. She had surveys of her work at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1980 and at the Laurence Miller Gallery in 1987, but she remained little known nationally until the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a traveling exhibition of her work in 1991. Dash Snow
Twenty-seven-year-old artist Dash Snow died July 13 of a heroin overdose. Snow, something of a representative of the downtown New York scene, was known as much for his outlandish drug- and sex-filled lifestyle as for his art, which included graffiti when he was younger and then photography, collages, and artworks involving his own semen. A close friend of artists Ryan McGinley and Dan Colen, he was among the early artists of the now-defunct Rivington Arms gallery on the Lower East Side and went on to be represented by Peres Projects. Snow's work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, has been shown at galleries around the world, and is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. He was the grandson of art collector and patron Christophe de Menil.
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