Canada’s Globe and Mail reports on the death of noted collector and Art Gallery of Ontario patron, Murray Frum who began collecting shortly after his marriage to television personality Barbara Frum:

The couple bought their first piece of African art on their honeymoon in a museum gift shop, and later amassed an internationally recognized collection, which has been donated to the Art Gallery of Ontario. […] As a collector, Dr. Frum loved the chase, the sleuthing, the knowledge that came from finding a treasure and the pleasure of displaying a piece in harmony with seemingly disparate works. He had a keen eye for business deals, people and objets. […] “He was very engaged with us as a trustee, and was very knowledgeable and strategic as a member of the building committee of the new gallery,” said Matthew Teitelbaum, the director and CEO of the AGO.

“There are very few people in my experience who had a finer sense of taste,” Mr. Teitelbaum said, describing Dr. Frum “as a very generous collector, who had a real interest in and fidelity to the hand-made in art.”

Gagosian Gallery announces the death of artist Richard Artschwager:

With great sadness we acknowledge the death of Richard Artschwager at the age of 89, just days after his second Whitney Museum retrospective “Richard Artschwager!” ended. For more than five decades, Richard forged a richly maverick path, confounding the genres and limits of art while forever changing how we view and understand space and the everyday objects that occupy it. His work has been the subject of many important exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1988 and 2012–13); Centre Pompidou, Paris (1989); Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2003); and Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2003) and is included in many museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Ludwig Cologne, and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris. “Richard Artschwager!” will tour to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Haus der Kunst, Munich later this year.

The Sydney Morning Herald has the news:

Australian art critic Robert Hughes has passed away in New York after a battle with illness. He was 74.

A statement from his wife, Doris Downes Hughes, released today from New York City said she was with her husband when he passed away peacefully at the Calvary Hospital about 3.40pm local time in the Bronx, New York.

I love Franz West. The way he glided from medium to medium (and rare to have such facility in all he touched), and even beyond–the creation of a hybrid genre called sitting sculptures (or climbing). Is it art, is it furniture, does it matter? Categories were of no interest, the works are democratic, participatory and often came with a bottle of whisky to loosen up the jaded, self-satisfied, too reined-in by the unspoken rules of art world etiquette. To me they are about freedom, a childlike impetus to make things with no regard for the possibility of failure, rather, they courted disaster. There were often newspapers strewn over the installations to mark time, make things more accessible; and, simultaneously, less precious and pretentious. He came from a background of linguistics and late to art but in the transition introduced much color, joy, and above all humor into a universe painfully lacking in a sense of wit or the absurd. West collected wine but in the end couldn’t drink, and had a classic italian sports car but couldn’t drive. He poured paint over the car and sold it as art, but i’m not so sure he figured as safe an exit route from the booze.

www.RoveCars.com

www.RoveTV.net

GalleristNY reports on the death of Ivan Karp:

Mr. Karp worked at Castelli from 1959 through 1969, during a hugely influential period that saw the gallery launch the career of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, RobertRauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann and John Chamberlain. Before joining Castelli he had worked for the Martha Jackson Gallery.

Over its 43 years on West Broadway (first at 383, then 485), O. K. Harris has been known for its staunch support of representational (particularly Photo Realist) painting. It also presented early shows of a wide variety of artists, including Bill Bollinger. One of the largest spaces in Soho, it sometimes hosted up to five one-person shows at a time.

Ivan Karp, Castelli Director Who Founded Soho’s O. K. Harris Gallery, Dies at 86 (GalleristNY)

Paul Jenkins’s work is a mainstay of mid-season sales of Contemporary art, especially at Sotheby’s in New York. Now the painter who befriended Pollack and Rothko after moving to New York in the 1940s has died at

His work attracted collectors and museums in the United States, but he had a stronger following in Europe, where, with his flowing hair and beard — a friend said he looked like Charlton Heston’s Moses — he seemed to embody an old-fashioned archetype of the avant-garde artist. In a 2009 review of work from the 1960s and ’70s, Roberta Smith wrote in The Times that Mr. Jenkins’s paintings were “more a popular idea of abstract art than the real thing” and “too gorgeous for their own good.”

Paul Jenkins, Painter of Abstract Art Work, Dies at 88 (New York Times)

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)