Reuters announces the death of Thomas Kinkade:

Kinkade died alone on Friday at his residence in Los Gatos, a small town about 45 miles south of San Francisco, from what appeared to be natural causes, family spokesman David Satterfield said. No other details were immediately available. [...]

“Born in Placerville, California, an old gold rush town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and educated at the University of California, Berkeley, Kinkade built an unparalleled art empire, his works distributed through about 4,500 art dealers, according to a 2002 interview he gave to the San Jose Mercury News newspaper. [...]

Kinkade claimed to be America’s most collected living artist, his prints hanging on the walls of an estimated 10 million Americans. A Christian who often depicted scenes from the Bible, Kinkade was known to dress as Santa Claus each Christmas and ride around Los Gatos on a motorcycle to deliver gifts, according to the Mercury News.

Painter of Light Dead at 54 (Reuters)

The New York Times announces the death of John Chamberlain at 84:

Early on, Mr. Chamberlain was drawn to the totemic welded constructions that David Smith made from old tools and machine parts. But in 1957, he had an epiphany while staying with the painter Larry Rivers in Southampton, N.Y. Using two fenders he pulled from a 1929 Ford rusting on Mr. Rivers’s property, he made a sculpture by running over the pieces repeatedly with a truck to bend them the way he wanted, then he fitted them together almost like puzzle pieces.

The sculpture, “Shortstop,” opened his eyes to the potential of pre-painted junk metal. And work like it, heavily indebted to his Abstract Expressionist mentors, attracted admirers like the influential collector Allan Stone [...]

Mr. Chamberlain worked with a broad range of materials, some as pliant as foam rubber and as ephemeral as brown paper bags. But he returned again and again to the more substantial stuff of the scrap yard, explaining the attraction as one of practicality. “I saw all this material just lying around against buildings, and it was in color,” he said, “so I felt I was ahead on two counts.”

But auto bodies also provided him with a material that could bear more than its weight in art-historical significance: as a chaotic riff on Duchamp’s readymades, as a renegade form of truth-in-materials Minimalism, as a bridge between the raw expressiveness of the New York School painters and the assembly-line deadpan of Warhol.

Critics often saw his crumpled Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles as dark commentaries on the costs of American freedom, but Mr. Chamberlain rejected such metaphorical readings.

John Chamberlain, Who Wrested Rough Magic From Scrap Metal, Dies at 84 (New York Times)

BBC News reports the death of British Pop artist Gerald Laing:

He spent much of the 1960s working in pop art in New York and was a close friend of artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

Laing’s most famous works included images of actresses Brigitte Bardot and Anna Karina.

In October this year, he showcased a series of paintings and drawings of [Amy] Winehouse in London.

Laing was also a sculptor and created a statue of Sherlock Holmes that stands in Edinburgh and also the Exiles, a statue at Helmsdale that recalls the Highland Clearances in Scotland.

Four Rugby Players at Twickenham Stadium, Ten Dragons at London’s Bank Underground Station and The Glass Virgins at Standard Life’s building in Edinburgh are among his other sculptures.

It was understood Laing had been battling cancer.

Pop artist and sculptor Gerald Laing dies aged 75 (BBC News)

Cargill Macmillan, heir to the Cargill commodities fortune, died on Monday. He lived in Minnesota and Palm Springs, he and his wife, Donna, donated $20 to $25m in art to the Palm Springs Art Museum:

Their massive art collection included works from Louise Bourgeois, Ellsworth Kelly and Andy Warhol. Their “Your Dog” sculpture by Yoshitomo Nara has greeted museum guests for several years. Palm Springs Mayor Steve Pougnet, who sits on the art museum board, said MacMillan used his wealth to create a legacy of “unwavering” support of the arts. “Cargill MacMillan’s passionate pursuit of modern art was unparalleled and incredibly prolific,” Pougnet said in a statement to The Desert Sun.

Philanthropist, Company Heir Cargill Macmillan Jr. Dies (The Desert Sun)

The New York Times remembers Everett Ellin who began his career as a lawyer, a clerk to a California Supreme Court Justice, a talent agent, an art dealer and eventually a museum official before becoming a pioneer of art information technology:

As the first executive director ofthe Museum Computer Network, a nonprofit organization begun in 1967, he helped bring about the reluctant marriage between the conservative world of art museums and wild frontier of information technology.

The marriage prefigured the ready electronic access to museums and their holdings that is taken for granted today.

“Few bastions of the humanities have withstood the march of technology more tenaciously than the art museum,” Mr. Ellin wrote in a journal article in 1969. “But now, at long last, the computer has entered the house of the Muse and — like the man who came to dinner — the guest is here to stay. It would behoove the host to know something about his visitor’s care and feeding.”

Everett Ellin Dies at 82; Helped Computerize Art Catalogs (New York Times)

The New York Times acknowledges the death of Richard Turner, Leonardo scholar, who published Inventing Leonardo in the 1990s:

The well-known reticence of Leonardo, whose notebooks were not published until the late 19th century, and the scarcity of his work have made him elusive prey for the art historian. Mr. Turner, spying an opportunity in this information vacuum, focused on the multiple Leonardos created by biographers, critics and artists from Vasari to Freud and beyond, each reshaping the artist and man according to his own cultural values and notions of creativity.

“There is a 1550 Leonardo, an 1800 one, an 1850 one, and so on,” Mr. Turner wrote in his introduction. “Each is a different character based on the needs of the given time that produced him, and each has ties to the Leonardo that went before.”

A. Richard Turner Dies at 79 (New York Times)

Texas billionaire, Charles Wyly, died in a car accident over the weekend in Aspen, Colorado.

Charles Wyly was a past chairman of the Dallas advisory board for the Salvation Army and board chairman for the Dallas Theater Center. He served on the boards of the United Way of Dallas, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Dallas Summer Musicals, among numerous civic involvements.

The Securities and Exchange Commission last year accused Charles andSam Wylyof reaping $550 million from illegal insider trading over a 13-year period.

They allegedly traded tens of millions of shares in Michaels, Sterling and other companies on whose boards they served, allegedly administering the transactions through offshore trusts named after “Louisiana towns and schools associated with the Wylys’ youth,” according to the SEC’s lawsuit against the Wylys.

Texas billionaire Charles Wyly dies in Aspen crash (The Denver Post)

One of the central figures in the Sotheby’s-Christie’s price-fixing drama, Sir Anthony Tennant, died last week. The Telegraph offers this obituary that refutes the conviction of Alfred Taubman by claiming neither man knew each other well-enough to engage in illegal collusion. For those without immediate recall of the events surrounding the price-fixing scandal, the essential question was whether Davidge and Brooks had conspired to fix prices or whether they were carrying out a scheme agreed to by Taubman and Tennant: