John Bellany, 1942 - 2013

John Bellany, Male and Female Figures Chained, 1968

John Bellany died on 28 August 2013.
A forthcoming memorial tribute exhibition to John Bellany at Beaux Arts Gallery (5-28 June 2014) has belatedly alerted me to his passing.
The Scottish artist's distinctive, expressionist paintings were (at their best) drenched in a dour, Celtic mythology mixed with Calvinism and rooted in the lives of fishermen; his vision was for much of his life fuelled by alcohol and seemed to channel the spirits of Beckmann, Bosch and Kokoschka. My selection of paintings is taken from the 1960s and 70s when his work was at its darkest - his palette subsequently lightened considerably.
Read obituaries by Janet McKenzie and in The Telegraph.

John Bellany, The Fright, 1968

John Bellany, The Obsession, 1966

John Bellany, Star of Bethlehem, 1965

John Bellany, My Father, 1966

John Bellany, The Kilnlochbervie, 1966

John Bellany, Mizpah, 1978

Martin Sharp, 1942 - 2013

Martin Sharp, Mister Tambourine Man, 1967

Martin Sharp died on 1 December 2013.

Hearing of the death of Martin Sharp took me back to hairy, adolescent days, to what was undoubtedly a formative engagement with visual culture.  As a schoolboy ‘agent’ for selling posters (‘Big O’?), recruited from/suckered in by the ads at the back of New Musical Express I pored over the catalogue in which Sharp’s Dylan and Van Gogh posters stood out. But the one that made the deepest impression was his Max ‘The Birdman’ Ernst: this was certainly my first introduction to the work of Ernst – though it was some time before I twigged that the image was not actually the invention of Sharp but culled from Ernst’s brilliant 1933 collage novel Une Semaine de Bonté. Though my taste later turned more to Ernst than Sharp those early posters (and Cream album covers) made a deep impression.

Read obituaries by Marsha Rowe, Richard Neville (ce-editor of Oz, for which Sharp was art editor) and in The Telegraph.

Martin Sharp, Vincent, 1968

Martin Sharp, cover for Cream's Disraeli Gears, 1967

Martin Sharp, Jimi Hendrix, 1967

Martin Sharp, Max 'The Birdman' Ernst, 1967

Arthur C. Danto, 1924 - 2013

Andy Warhol, Brillo Box, 1964

Arthur C. Danto, philosopher and art critic, died on 25 October 2013. 
It is the role of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the artworld, and art, possible. Arthur Danto (1964) ‘The Artworld’ in Ross, S.D. ed. (1994) Art and Its Significance, Albany: State University of New York, p479  
Danto's epiphany as a philosopher of art occured in the Stable Gallery in 1964 when he was confronted by Andy Warhol's Brillo Box. Presented as a sculpture, this plywood, painted and silkscreened object was 'visually indiscernible' from the manufacturer's carton. For Danto this puzzle crystallised the problem of art, and in particular the problem of determining what distinguished a work of art from a 'mere real thing': Why is ‘Brillo Box’ art when the Brillo cartons in the warehouses are merely soap-pad containers? Danto, Arthur C. (1993) ‘Andy Warhol: Brillo Box’, Artforum, September, p129. What followed was an essay, The Artworld, first published in the 'Journal of Philosophy' in 1964, in which  he proposed that, 
To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld. Arthur Danto (1964) ‘The Artworld’ in Ross, S.D. ed. (1994) Art and Its Significance, Albany: State University of New York, p477
His ideas were further elaborated in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981) in which he invited the reader to imagine an exhibition comprising a series of visually identical red panels: he then proceeds to demonstrate how although visually indiscernible the individual panels may have very different meanings.

Other books followed, including After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (1997), The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept ofArt as well as regular art criticism and many exhibition catalogue essays.
Read his Letter to Posterity.

Read obituaries in The Guardian and The New York Times.

Steve Pyke, Arthur Danto, From 'Philosophers' Oxford University Press, 2011

Sir Anthony Caro, 1924 - 2013

Sir Anthony Caro, Early One Morning, 1962

Sir Anthony Caro died on 23 October 2013.
The passing of Sir Anthony Caro feels like the end of a chapter in British art that looks back to the early 1960s. The prolific and ever developing sculptor was a major figure and a sculptural revolutionary. His brightly painted, welded, abstract sculptures of the 1960s were a spectacular and radical turning away from the organic carved sculpture of Henry Moore for whom Caro worked as an assistant in the 1950s. The shift came about following a visit to the United States in 1959 where he met Clement Greenberg - the influential critic who articulated the then dominant ethos of Modernism and abstraction - the painters Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland and the sculptor David Smith. On his return to the UK he swapped his chisels for a welding kit and never looked back.
Caro was an influential teacher at St Martins School of Art (1952-79) inspiring not only a generation of abstract sculptors ('The New Generation' - William Tucker, Phillip King, Tim Scott et al) but also a generation of anti-'heavy metal' conceptual artists (Richard Long, Barry Flanagan, Gilbert & George, Bruce McLean et al) - I imagine Caro was amongst those lampooned by McLean:

The St. Martin’s sculpture forum would avoid every broader issue, discussing for hours the position of one piece of metal in relation to another. Twelve adult men with pipes would walk for hours around sculpture and mumble. Bruce McLean quoted from an interview with Nena Dimitrijevic, 1978-79 in Dimitrijevic, Nena (1981) Bruce McLean, London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, p7

Read obituaries by Norbert Lynton and William Grimes, an appreciation by Alastair Sooke and a tribute from Nicholas Serota.

Sir Anthony Caro, Sculpture Seven, 1961

Anthony Caro, Midday, 1960

Sir Anthony Caro, The Window, 1966-7

Sir Anthony Caro, Sunfeast, 1969/70

Sir Anthony Caro, Blazon, 1987-90

Sir Anthony Caro, Goodwood Steps, 1994-5, installed at Chatsworth House

Sir Anthony Caro, installation commissioned for Le Choeur de Lumière (Chapel of Light), Eglise de Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Bourbourg, France, inaugurated 2008

Allan Sekula, 1951 - 2013

Allan Sekula and Noël Burch, still from The Forgotten Space, 2010

Allan Sekula died on 10 August 2013.
Photographer and filmmaker, Allan Sekula practiced a form of critical realism. His work was marked by a consistent preoccupation with politics and economics and a firm commitment to a practice with a socially critical purpose: he saw photography as having a “special aptitude for depicting economic life, for what used to be called ‘documentary’, and for an affinity between documentary and democracy.” 
He cared nothing for the debates about photography’s status as art but was clear sighted about the ‘art world’ which he described as: 

“a small sector of culture in general, but an important one. It is, among other things, the illuminated luxury-goods tip of the commodity iceberg. The art world is the most complicit fabrication workshop for the compensatory dreams of financial elites who have nothing else to dream about but a ‘subjectivity' they have successfully killed within themselves."

Significant works include Untitled Slide Sequence (1972), Fish Story (1988-94) and (with Noël Burch) The Forgotten Space (2010).

Allan Sekula, Untitled Slide Sequence, 1972

Untitled Slide Sequence (1972) could be seen as a take on both documentary and street photography – but one that is at some distance from the contemporary work of Winogrand or Friedlander. The work consists of 25 images of workers leaving the General Dynamics Convair Division aerospace plant at the end of their shift. The work comprises every shot Sekula took until stopped by company officials. The images were shown as projected 35mm slides: “The rhythm of the slide projector is the rhythm of the automated factory, but the individual frame individuates both the photographer and the subject."

The container box is the unlikely focus of Fish Story (1988-94) as well as the film, developed out of that project, The Forgotten Space (2010).

Allan Sekula, "Doomed Fishing Village of Ilsan, September 1993", from Fish Story 1989–95

Allan Sekula, "Welder’s Booth in Bankrupt Todd Shipyard, Two Years After Closing, Los Angeles Harbor, San Pedro, California. July 1991", from Fish Story, 1989–95

Allan Sekula, “’Pancake’, a former shipyard sandblaster, scavenging copper from a waterfront scrapyard, Los Angeles harbour, Terminal Island, California” from Fish Story, 1989–95

As Jennifer Burris notes, the invention of the container in the 1950s revolutionised shipping and brought profound social and economic consequences: the rise of the super-ship and the super-port reduced the required workforce, and the contrivance of registering ships under a ‘flag of convenience’ allowed a deregulation of international labour markets which allowed "labour conditions to remain at standards set in the nineteenth century". Fish Story examines this story in 7 chapters of image and text.

The Forgotten Space (2010) "showcases the maritime world as the ultimate ‘forgotten space’ of global capitalism".

Allan Sekula and Noël Burch, stills from The Forgotten Space, 2010

"The Forgotten Space follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, and those marginalised by the global transport system. We visit displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory workers in China, whose low wages are the fragile key to the whole puzzle."

Following his death, Thomas Lawson wrote, 

"As a writer, Allan described with great clarity and passion what photography can, and must do: document the facts of social relations while opening a more metaphoric space to allow viewers the idea that things could be different. And as a photographer he set out to do just that. He laid bare the ugliness of exploitation, but showed us the beauty of the ordinary; of ordinary, working people in ordinary, unremarkable places doing ordinary, everyday things. And, like the rigorous old-style leftist that he was, he infused that beauty with a deep sense of morality."

See:
Jennifer Burris (2011) "Material Existence: Allan Sekula's Forgotten Space", Afterall
Edward Dimendberg (2005) "Allan Sekula", Bomb
Bill Roberts (2012) "Production in View: Allan Sekula's Fish Story and the Thawing of Postmodernism", Tate Papers, Issue 18
Sukhdev Sandhu (2012) "Allan Sekula: Filming the Forgotten Resistance at Sea", The Guardian