RIP - artists who died in 2012

As I begin to start the end of year review, it's worth remembering the artists - and those involved in art in a significant way - who passed on in 2012.

Check below to see if you missed any - or I did (althouh I've not tried to include everybody).

They include:

January 2012

• Ronald Searle - a very popular cartoonist.  He was a camouflage artist in the Second World War and drew fellow POWs working on the  infamous 'death railway' in Siam. He survived - but came close to death at times but continued recording sketches of his experience.
• The Guardian - Ronald Searle - A Life in Pictures

February 2012

• John Gage
• The Guardian - John Gage obituary - Art historian who wrote groundbreaking studies on Turner and a magisterial book on the understanding of colour in western art
• The Telegraph - John Gage John Gage, who has died aged 73, was one of Britain’s most original, creative and inspirational art historians
• Book: Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction by John Gage

Colour and Culture is the most exhaustive historical analysis we have of understandings of colour in western art.

• Leonard Rosoman Leonard Rosoman RA, died aged 98. He was the last of the official artists of the Second World War and later won acclaim as an illustrator, painter and teacher; his most famous student was the artist David Hockney.
• The Guardian - Leonard Rosoman obituary Official second world war artist who later flourished as an illustrator and painter.  
• The Independent - Leonard Rosoman: Painter whose work profited from his oblique approach to life. During the Blitz he spent hours fighting a blaze, then was ordered to leave it. The boy replacing him died
• He was a Royal Academician - whose drawings I will miss. You can see the Murals he did for the Restaurant at the Royal Academy below.  Those familiar with the RA will recognise the scenes he depicted.

Murals in the Restaurant of the Royal Aacdemy by Leonard Rosoman

March 2012

• Lord St John of Fawsley - who was that rare thing a Minister for the Arts who really enjoyed the arts! 

May 2012

• Maurice Sendak - an author and illustrator whose books were very popular with children
• New York Times - had an obituary Maurice Sendak, Author of Splendid Nightmares, Dies at 83 and a slideshow A ‘Wild Rumpus’ With Maurice Sendak
• Thomas Kinkade - Not a painter who was favoured by the braodsheets, obituaries tended to focus more on the negative aspects of his latter career
• New York Times - Thomas Kinkade, Artist to Mass Market, Dies at 54 characterised hims as a prolific painter of bucolic and idealized scenes 
• The Guardian - Thomas Kinkade: the secret life and strange death of art's king of twee
• The Telegraph - Thomas Kinkade 

Thomas Kinkade, the painter, who has died aged 54, specialised in sentimental scenes of gingerbread cottages, frothing oceans, riotously colourful country gardens and churches in dappled morning light, becoming the most collected artist in the United States, possibly the world.  The Telegraph

June 2012

• Mary Fedden She was a very popular artist up in the UK and her work can be found in collections all over the world. Composition and use of colour kept her work contemporary and avoiding accusations of cuteness.
• The Telegraph Artist whose bracing, blazing visions of the everyday were only fully appreciated towards the end of her life
• The Guardian - Mary Fedden obituary Artist whose still lifes remained rooted in the European tradition of belle peinture

August 2012

• Robert Hughes - one of my favourite art critics
• New York Times - Robert Hughes, Art Critic Whose Writing Was Elegant and Contentious, Dies at 74
• Telegraph - Irreverent art critic and cultural commentator who challenged the posturing and hyperbole of modernism
• The Guardian - 'Robert Hughes was brutally honest about art and himself,' writes Nicolas Kent and 'Robert Hughes was Australia's Dante,' says his friend Peter Carey
• Making A Mark - Robert Hughes (1938 - 2012) will be missed

September 2012

• Jeremy Le Grice  my first tutor when I started painting again after a break of over a decade.  A really lovely man who was never averse to encouraging you to be bold rather than timid or to stop trying to improve a failure and just erase and start again.  I carry his words around in my head to this day.
• The Guardian - Jeremy Le Grice obituary 

Musee d'Orsay

November 2012

• Gae Aulenti - The Italian architect and designer who led the design transformation of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris from a railway station to a great and renowned art museum
• The Guardian - Gae Aulenti obituary 
• The Telegraph - Gae Aulenti 

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