Tuesday, December 3, 2002

Eugene Gregorie, Automobile Designer, Dies at 94 December 3, 2002 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS DETROIT, Dec. 2 — Eugene T. Gregorie, the first design chief of the Ford Motor Company and the creator of the Lincoln Continental, died on Sunday in St. Augustine, Fla., where he lived. He was 94. Mr. Gregorie, who was known as Bob, also designed what would become the 1949 Mercury, which was driven by James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause," and the 1936 Lincoln Zephyr, which the Museum of Modern Art in New York called "the first successfully streamlined car in America." After working for ship design companies in New York, Mr. Gregorie moved to Detroit in 1929 to work in the auto industry. He was immediately hired by General Motors but lost his job a few months later at the start of the Depression. Mr. Gregorie was 22 when he was hired in 1931 by Edsel B. Ford, president of Ford and son of the founder, Henry Ford. "Gregorie's primary attribute was he could translate what Edsel Ford wanted into three-dimensional designs," said Jim Farrell, a lawyer in Roseburg, Ore., who has written extensively about the history of Ford's automotive designs. "He could sit and sketch while Edsel talked in his office." In 1935, Edsel Ford made Mr. Gregorie the chief of Ford's new design department. "The difference between Gregorie and every other chief designer is that he himself did all the design work, as opposed to his staff," said Henry L. Dominguez, a General Motors engineer and the author of "Edsel Ford & E. T. Gregorie." His designs included the Lincoln Continental, which was introduced in 1939. Ford announced earlier this year that it would stop making the Continental as part of a companywide restructuring. Mr. Gregorie left the company soon after Edsel Ford's death in 1943. He returned in 1944 at the request of Henry Ford II, but left again two years later when he found himself frequently at odds with top management. At 38, Mr. Gregorie moved to St. Augustine and turned to sailing and designing yachts. Mr. Gregorie is survived by his wife, Evelyn, and three nieces. Copyright 2002 New York Times Company (Registration required) 9:37:29 PM    comment []

Philip B. Meggs, 60, Educator and Historian of Graphic Design, Dies December 1, 2002 By STEVEN HELLER Philip B. Meggs, a scholar of graphic and advertising design who wrote the first full history of the field, from the time of Gutenberg to the postmodern era, died on Nov. 24 in Richmond, Va. He was 60. The cause was leukemia, said his wife, Libby Phillips Meggs. Mr. Meggs, who began his career as a designer specializing in corporate identity and promotion, became the first educator both to teach graphic design and to write its history. Soon after joining the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond in 1968, Mr. Meggs found that his layout and typography students lacked a fundamental knowledge of graphic design's past and its relationship to art, architecture, industrial design and popular culture. He believed that a student's ability to practice graphic design as more than a commercial service or craft would be limited by ignorance of historical context. He eventually developed the first academic curriculum to start with the invention of the printing press and movable type, continue through the modern era and conclude with the influence of the computer. His history classes also critically addressed formal, theoretical and aesthetic issues that were ignored by most programs. With the initial success of his courses, Mr. Meggs received a grant in the late 1970's from the National Endowment for the Arts for a series of traveling lectures for any college or university that asked for them. Becoming an itinerant design historian necessitated developing standardized syllabuses, and they later became the core of his 1983 book, "A History of Graphic Design." It is still required reading in courses around the country. Born on May 30, 1942, in Florence, S.C., Philip Baxter Meggs attended Virginia Commonwealth University, receiving a master of fine arts degree in 1964. He worked as a senior designer for Reynolds Aluminum and as art director of A. H. Robins Pharmaceuticals before starting his teaching career. From 1974 until 1987 he was chairman of Virginia Commonwealth's department of communication arts and design. In addition to preparing three revised editions of his textbook, Mr. Meggs wrote articles for Print magazine and wrote or edited a dozen other books, including "Typographic Design: Form and Communication," "Type and Image: The Language of Graphic Design" and "Revival of the Fittest: Digital Versions of Classic Typefaces." Mr. Meggs was not trained as a historian, but his original research on once-forgotten pioneers, movements and styles, as well as a series of essays on book design and contemporary practitioners, became the foundation for broader scholarship. "He was the first person I ever heard talk about design history in a way that seamlessly, warmly and elegantly connected past and present," said the designer Paula Scher. "He made me feel like I was part of a movement of my time, not an irrelevant practitioner grinding out trivial works for yet another bureaucratic corporation." This year Mr. Meggs was given the Educator Award of the hall of fame of the Art Directors Club of New York. In addition to his wife, Mr. Meggs is survived by his parents, Wallace and Elizabeth Pruitt Meggs of Florence; two brothers, William J. of Greenville, N.C., and Wally of Laurens, S.C.; a sister, Beth Meggs Lever of Lexington, S.C.; a son, Andrew, of Tustin, Calif.; and a daughter, Elizabeth, of Richmond.ml Copyright 2002 New York Times Company (Registration required) 1:19:25 AM    comment []

Saturday, November 30, 2002

Mary Bright, 48, Curtain Maker Who Used Unorthodox Materials, Dies November 30, 2002 By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON Mary Bright, an innovative curtain maker whose work for the Museum of Modern Art, Calvin Klein, Wendi and Rupert Murdoch, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Lauren Bacall and other clients moved the traditional craft of cutting, sewing and pleating curtains to the realm of modern art, died yesterday in New York Presbyterian Hospital. She was 48. The cause was lung cancer, said her husband, David Paskin, who was Ms. Bright's partner in Mary Bright Inc. He is her only immediate survivor. Ms. Bright was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1954. She studied fine arts in London and fashion and millinery in Leeds. She was never formally trained as a designer. Ms. Bright's first career in New York, where she moved in 1979, was as a hat maker. "I couldn't find a hat I was willing to wear," Ms. Bright told The New York Times in 1983, offering an explanation for her constructivist-like head pieces. To complement them, she also designed clothing, including a cocktail dress with a revealing back blocked in, as though to foil window-peepers, by slats from a Levolor window blind. Ms. Bright's first curtain design, for the actress Ellen Barkin in 1983, redirected her professionally into a field that she was acknowledged by design professionals to have redefined — almost single-handedly. Ms. Bright preferred experimenting with new or unorthodox materials, like corrugated paper or rubber or fine metal meshes, to cutting and sewing linen or wool, though her fabric designs also refined and renewed the idea of a simple curtain into something that went well beyond window covering. Ms. Bright, asked in an interview this year why she had chosen something as homely as curtain making to make her artistic mark in the world, said, "I decide that if I was going to do something out of the ordinary, that I'd better start with something ordinary. I respect people who hate curtains." Copyright 2002 New York Times (Registration required) 9:17:47 AM    comment []

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

Matta, Chilean Artist of the Surrealist Movement, Is Dead November 25, 2002 By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren, known as Matta, whose sometimes nightmarish, hallucinatory paintings made him a premier Surrealist and major artist of the mid-20th century, died on Saturday in Tarquinia, Italy. He was 90 or 91. In later years he split his time among Paris, London, Milan and Tarquinia. Born in Chile, he spent much of his life in France and, beginning in 1939, nearly a decade in the United States, where he influenced the development of the New York School. The French saw him as a central member and the last great survivor of the circle around André Breton. His reputation in Europe and South America was always greater than it was in the United States. Like Breton and other Surrealists, Matta embraced the idea of automatic drawing, or working as spontaneously as possible and as much as possible without forethought, which was purported to be a way of tapping the unconscious. He described his own paintings as "the subconscious in its burning, liquid state; a conscious daytime substitution of the phenomenon of dreams."His early Surrealist works, from the late 1930's and early 40's, were meant to suggest primordial upheaval: he painted gelatinous landscapes and cosmic spaces filled with eerie organic shapes in off-key, fluorescent colors. After World War II, these sorts of images gave way to a different but no less fantastical variety: he populated canvases with robotic, mutant creatures that sometimes seemed to be responses to the war. Painting figures when abstraction was increasingly in vogue drew criticism in the United States, but he said the figures were necessary to express man's inhumanity to man. "He sought to send a message to other artists to inspire them also to deal directly with these kinds of difficult issues," Elizabeth Smith, a curator of a recent Matta retrospective, said. Matta, an articulate, energetic, famously difficult man, gave his birth date as 11/11/11, although it was also said that he was born in 1912. He came from a prestigious family of Basque origin that included diplomats and a former president. He rebelled against his strict Roman Catholic upbringing once he became a student at Universidad Católica in Santiago, studying with Hernán Gazmuri, a painter whose anticlerical beliefs deeply affected Matta. In 1935 he left Chile for Paris, where so many ambitious young artists went to make their careers. For a while he worked in the architectural studio of Le Corbusier. He also traveled, and at his aunt's house in Madrid he met the poets Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda. García Lorca's assassination in the Spanish Civil War greatly disturbed Matta, and he responded by composing a fantastical film script (no film was ever produced) that announced his leftist sensibilities. Later, during the 60's, Matta became an ardent, outspoken supporter of Chile's Socialist president, Salvador Allende Gossens; when the dictator Augusto Pinochet took charge of the country, Matta became persona non grata there. He learned that Pinochet had put him on a "hit list" and for a while surrounded himself with bodyguards. It was then that he decided to become a French citizen. He had been blacklisted as a communist in the United States during the 1950's, and although that did not prevent him from visiting the country, he had difficulty obtaining an entry visa as late as the 1980's. It was through a letter of introduction from García Lorca that Matta met Salvador Dali and Breton in Paris and joined the group of Surrealists. Breton liked his drawings — Matta was a refined and elegant draftsman with a gift for imaginary architecture — and invited him to exhibit with the group. In 1939, like Breton and others, he moved with his wife to New York City, into a community of expatriates. He was one of the only Surrealists who spoke English, so he especially helped to translate Surrealist ideas to American artists. During the next decade Matta made a big impact on, and even instructed, some of the painters who became associated with Abstract Expressionism, including Pollock, Rothko, William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell and especially Arshile Gorky. But Matta never felt entirely at home in the United States, partly because his work, after he began to paint figures, moved in one direction while American art began to move in another, and so in 1948 he returned to Paris. Notoriously fickle, the Surrealists around Breton spurned him at first, accusing him of causing Gorky's suicide because Matta had had an affair with Gorky's wife. He was reinstated to the Surrealist ranks only in 1959, by which time the movement had pretty much run its course. It is sometimes said that after Matta left New York, he recycled his earlier art and turned out pictures to satisfy the market, but this was not fair. During the late 70's and early 80's, he explored fresh themes in large paintings, often with a lighter, more varied palette than before. His later works were rarely exhibited in American museums, however, and it was his art of the late 30's through the 50's that continued to be best known in the United States. Matta retrospectives were held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1957 and the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1985, and recently a show of his work of the 1940's traveled around the United States. About his early paintings, Duchamp once wrote, "His first contribution to Surrealist painting, and the most important, was the discovery of regions of space until then unknown in the field of art." Matta talked about "inscapes," morphologies of the psyche, maps of the mind. Martica Salwin, the Matta expert, described inscapes as "visualizing the psyche, which means not just looking at one thing in one time, one point of time and space." Inscapes encompassed, she said, "the past, present and future all mixed into one." In his private life a notorious womanizer and (some relatives say) erratic father, Matta left an unusually complicated personal legacy. With his first wife, Anne Alpert, he had twin sons in 1943, both of whom became artists: Sebastian, who died in 1977, and Gordon Matta-Clark, who died in 1978. Matta's second wife, Patricia, married the dealer Pierre Matisse after divorcing Matta and died in the early 1950's. With Angela Faranda he had a son, Pablo Echaurren, an artist in Italy. With Malitte Pope he had a daughter in 1955, Federica Matta, also an artist, and a son in 1960, Ramuntcho, a musician and record producer; they live in Paris. He is also survived by his wife, Germana Ferrari Matta, and their daughter, Alisée, born in 1970. Germana Ferrari Matta has been preparing the complete catalog of Matta's work, only the first volume of which has been published. Art, Matta once said, is necessary for everyone because it "awakes in you and shakes in you energies that otherwise might transform themselves into violence and could be very dangerous." True art is the imagination unfettered, he believed. "You may need this imagination," he added, "at the critical moments in your life." Copyright 2002 New York Times Company (Registration required) 8:39:33 AM    comment []

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

RADOSLAV KOVACEVIC, 79 November 25, 2002 Radoslav Kovacevic, 79, an architect who designed dozens of churches during a 50-year career in the Chicago area, died Friday, Nov. 22, of heart failure in Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, he fled to Austria with his anti-Communist parents before the end of World War II. There he received a Ph.D. in architecture before moving to Chicago in 1950 to begin a career with the firm of Shaw, Metz & Dolio, said his wife, Milka. Five years later he became an American citizen and obtained his license in architecture, which allowed him to manage several architecture partnerships before opening a solo practice. He moved to an apartment in the cutting-edge Marina City while it was under construction and was joined by his wife after their 1964 wedding. He lived there until his death. Mr. Kovacevic designed about two dozen houses of worship for Russian, Greek, Serbian, Protestant and Roman Catholic congregations. His last project was the yellow brick St. Archangel Michael Serbian Orthodox Church in Lansing, which was consecrated last year. "He has created a worshiping space that breathes, which is not that common in Orthodox architecture,"said Rev. Milos Vesin, St. Archangel Michael's pastor. Mr. Kovacevic also designed schools and commercial and industrial buildings. Visitation will be held from 6 to 9 p.m. Monday in Muzyka & Son Funeral Home, 5776 W. Lawrence Ave., Chicago. Services will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the chapel. Mass will be said at 10 a.m. Tuesday in Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Cathedral, 5701 N. Redwood Drive, Chicago. Copyright 2002 Chicago Tribune (Registration required) 2:28:42 AM    comment []

Sunday, November 24, 2002

Lynda Van Devanter, Nurse Who Became Chronicler of Her Wartime Pain, Dies at 55 November 23, 2002 By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN Lynda Van Devanter, whose pained account of her life as an Army nurse in Vietnam focused attention on the burdens of American servicewomen in the war, died on Nov. 15 at her home in Herndon, Va. She was 55. At the Vietnam Veterans of America, where Ms. Van Devanter founded and administered a project dealing with the concerns and complaints of the 7,465 women who had served in Vietnam, a spokesman said she had long been ill with a vascular disease that she attributed to wartime exposure to chemical agents. "She had an Agent Orange claim that we will continue to pursue for her daughter, Molly," said the spokesman, Rick Weidman. Ms. Van Devanter's memoir was "Home Before Morning" (Beaufort Books, 1983), which helped inspire the television series "China Beach." In it, she wrote of her transformation in 1969 from "an all-American girl" and idealistic supporter of the war into an overworked, confused nurse at the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku, where the gore and horrors of war were constantly before her. She wrote of surgeons' sometimes working drunk on alcohol or high on drugs; of overburdened nurses and medics who sought release not only in liquor but also in marijuana and desperate if casual relationships; of the way her early pro-war enthusiasm waned amid the blood and casualties. Her experience was so alarming to her that the most pleasurable work she could later recall was her assignment to help a leper colony of Vietnamese. And then, after a year, it was over. Her tour of duty in Vietnam completed, Lieutenant Van Devanter returned to the United States to continue her service, only to discover another kind of pain. "Somewhere between 1945 and 1970, words like bravery, sacrifice and valor had gone out of vogue," she wrote. "When I returned to my country I began to learn a very bitter lesson. In the eyes of most Americans, the military services had no more heroes, merely baby-killers, misfits and fools." After her discharge she worked as a nurse in several civilian hospitals, but failed to free herself of the traumas inflicted by Vietnam. She later described her work record as spotty and her relationships as tormented and unfulfilling. She drank heavily, she said, and cried continually. "I was on unemployment and food stamps and in therapy," Ms. Van Devanter said in an interview in 1981. "But I never told my therapist I was in Vietnam. That's how deeply I buried it." Then one night in 1979, while visiting friends on eastern Long Island, she was awakened by a siren from a nearby volunteer firehouse. It made the same sound as the alert that had signaled rocket and mortar attacks on Pleiku, and Ms. Van Devanter found herself compulsively crawling out of the house. That led her to enlist in a counseling program known as "walking through Vietnam," which in turn led her to write her memoir and to focus attention on the concerns of female veterans. At the outset of the book, which she wrote with Christopher Morgan, she said she had initially tried "to exorcise the Vietnam War from my mind and heart." In the process, she said, she learned that she wanted not to obliterate her memories but rather to show "that the war doesn't have to own me, I can own it." She dedicated her book in part to "all of the unknown women who served forgotten in their wars." When it appeared in 1983, it provoked a sharp dispute between Vietnam War nurses who claimed that the accounts of partying, drinking and drug use were exaggerated and those who insisted that the descriptions were accurate. The critics, who called themselves Nurses Against Misrepresentation, or Nam, complained that Ms. Van Devanter's account could leave relatives of dead soldiers believing that their kin had not received the best possible treatment. But others jumped to the author's defense. One, Winnie Smith, has written that she was close to suicide when she recognized the demons of her own traumatic stress after reading "Home Before Morning." That experience led her to write her own book in 1992, "American Daughter Gone to War." Ms. Van Devanter established the Women's Project at the Vietnam Veterans of America, overseeing studies that underscored her view that though Vietnam veterans in general were "a forgotten minority," the women who had served as nurses were "the most forgotten." She cited complaints she gathered that no women had been included in studies on the effects of the defoliant Agent Orange and that veterans' hospitals provided no gynecological or obstetrics clinics. Ms. Van Devanter, a native of Arlington, Va., is survived by her husband, Tom Buckley, and their daughter, Molly; a stepdaughter, Brigid Buckley of Raleigh, N.C.; and Ms. Van Devanter's mother, Helen Van Devanter of Sterling, Va. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company 9:15:44 AM    comment []

Saturday, November 23, 2002

Two Magnificent Heart Attacks I like obituaries. I think there is nothing better you can do for a stranger who just died than to find out about what they spent their lives on the day after they're gone. I am also a big fan of the patterns of the present moment. And I often wonder if someone's final moment is ever preconfigured, pre-known, in such way that it is palpable. Princess Diana, for instance. She certainly had an air about her. Maybe part of that "air" had to do with the eventual slamming of metal against concrete pilings. Or maybe Kurt Cobain's songs stung so much while he was alive because somehow the soon-time gunblast was heard by us underneath it all. Every once in a while the obituaries make me wonder if those moments were ever felt in smaller ways, too. Among one or two or dozens of people instead of millions. Take this week's news that two movie types were dead: Marvin Mirisch, Film Producer of 60's died on Sunday in Los Angeles of a heart attack. Then James Coburn, a Sly Presence in 80 Films, died on Monday in Los Angeles of a heart attack. Marvin Mirisch, 84 years old, was "the quietest of a team of three brothers who helped steer movie production from a studio-dominated system to an independent approach that gave directors creative freedom," said the New York Times. He was a great guy who shared an idea with his family that they built into something real-- the United Artists movie production company. He also helped make "West Side Story". As far as I'm concerened, that's all you need to know about him to understand that he did something great with his life. He also helped make a movie called "The Magnificent Seven" in 1960. James Coburn, 74 years old, was "the rugged actor who reveled in playing rakish men of action and slyly humorous villains and overcame a debilitating illness to win an Academy Award for his performance in "Affliction" in 1998." The NYT goes on to say that he "first established his reputation in 'The Magnificent Seven' in 1960." More: "In the early 1980's he developed rheumatoid arthritis so severe that it hampered his career for most of a decade. After a long and difficult recovery, he appeared in television commercials and in some films his admirers felt were beneath him. "But in 1999, he received an Academy Award as best supporting actor for his role as Nick Nolte's alcoholic father in Paul Schrader's acclaimed film "Affliction." Although many critics hailed it as the best performance of his career, he found it difficult to find work afterward." So this week I had one of those wonder moments, thinking if James Coburn and Marvin Mirisch ever passed each other in a soundstage in 1960 and suddenly clasped their chests, or shared a drink and spoke deeply about mortality, or ever dreamed that they would follow each other into death, many many years away, one day apart, of heart attacks in the City of Angels. 5:45:20 PM    comment []

Thursday, November 21, 2002

Victor Herbert, Scientist Who Linked Folic Acid to Anemia, Dies at 75 November 21, 2002 By PAUL LEWIS Dr. Victor D. Herbert, whose experiments on himself 40 years ago showed that a shortage of folic acid found in leafy vegetables and fruits caused a type of anemia, died on Nov. 19 in New York City. He was 75. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Marilynne. His discovery led to the realization that the anemia once common in pregnant women was due to a dietary deficiency. As a result, many today take folate, as folic acid is also called, to help the fetus develop. Folic acid was also found to be effective in preventing a birth defect, spina bifida. In 1998 the United States Food and Drug Administration required that folic acid be added to all American food grains. While doing research at Harvard University's Thorndike Laboratory from 1959 to 1962, Dr. Herbert began to doubt the prevailing view that anemia induced by shortage of folic acid was rare and largely confined to alcoholics who did not eat properly and to people with digestive disorders. His doubts were aroused when he found a deficiency of folic acid in a Boston man who developed megaloblastic anemia on a diet of hamburgers that had lost most of their folic acid by being overcooked. To prove his theory that the anemia was far more common than thought, he tried to talk a colleague into a diet that included no folic acid. The would-be guinea pig declined, though, so Dr. Herbert decided to do it himself. On October 1961, he started eating nothing fresh or uncooked and only foods that had been boiled multiple times to remove all trace of folic acid. On Christmas Day that year, Dr. Herbert found that his legs had become so weak that he could barely move, a result of having deprived himself of enough potassium. That problem was quickly corrected, though, and then, after 133 days of ingesting no folic acid and losing 26 pounds, Dr. Herbert developed a mild megaloblastic anemia, with its symptoms of fatigue, headache and diarrhea. His experiment is credited with proving the tie conclusively, and today such anemias are recognized to be widespread throughout the world. Victor Daniel Herbert was born in New York City on Feb. 22, 1927. He was named for the famous operetta composer, his father's cousin. When Dr. Herbert was 10, his father was killed fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and his mother died three years later. After living in a succession of foster homes and boys' clubs, he studied chemistry at Columbia University and then bluffed his way into its medical school by pretending to be richer than he was. Once in the school, he maintained the ruse by selling life insurance to his teachers. He also earned a law degree. After an internship at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, Dr. Herbert was a medical officer in the Army in Germany after World War II. He returned to pursue his career as a research biochemist in nutrition and blood disorders. The institutions where he worked included the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, Mount Sinai Medical School, Harvard, SUNY Downstate Medical Center and the Department of Veterans Affairs' Medical Center in the Bronx. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sons, Robert, of Los Gatos, Calif., and Steven, of New Jersey; and his daughters Kathy Rose, of Brooklyn, Alissa, of Bronxville, N.Y., and Laura, of Manhattan. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company 9:51:54 PM    comment []