Willie Choset. Willie Choset was my uncle. He was married to my father's sister Eleanor Choset (born Roseman)]]> Xavier Fourcade, 1927-1987. An obituary of art dealer Xavier Foucade can be found at the New York Times, April 29, 1987, at http://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/29/obituaries/xavier-fourcade-dead-at-60-dealer-in-contemporary-art.html.]]> Alice Eisen]]> Aunt Sophie]]> Barbara Anderson]]> Bob Lehman]]> Bolec Greczynski. An obituary of art therapist Bolec Greczynski can be found in the New York Times, March 10, 1995, at http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/10/obituaries/bolek-greczynski-44-art-therapist-at-creedmoor.html.]]> George Wexler. A notice of death for artist George Wexler can be found in the New York Times, June 21, 2006, at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9903E0DA113AF932A15755C0A9609C8B63.]]> Helen Renzi. An obituary of Helen Renzi can be found at Williamstown.com, July 14, 2012, at http://www.williamstown.com/obituaries_new.php?ob_id=9831.]]> Herb Vogel. Art collector Herbert Vogel's obituary can be found in the New York Times, July 23, 2012, at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/arts/design/herbert-vogel-postal-clerk-and-modern-art-collector-dies-at-89.html.]]> Iris Donnenfeld. Iris was born on March 4, 1941 and passed away on Monday, August 15, 2011. Iris was a resident of Brooklyn, New York. Iris was one of my sister Eileen's best friend when we were growing up in crown Heights, Brooklyn. She and Eileen were often up to mischief.]]> Jean Michel Basquiat. Artist Jean Michael Basquiat's obituary can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/09/specials/basquiat-obit.html.]]> Jerome Badanes. Novelist Jerome Badanes's obituary can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/21/obituaries/jerome-badanes-novelist-dies-at-58.html.]]> John Chamberlain. Artist John Chamberlain's obituary can be found in the New York Times, December 22, 2011, at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/arts/design/john-chamberlain-artist-of-auto-metal-dies-at-84.html.]]> Judy and Frederick Busch. Poet and novelist Frederick Busch's obituary can be found in the New York Times, February 25, 2006, at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/25/pageoneplus/arts/frederick-busch-author-of-poetic-fiction-dies-at-64-827150.html]]> Judy Busch's obituary can be found in the Evening Sun, Jaunary 4, 2007, at http://www.evesun.com/obituaries/people/Judith-Busch/379/.]]> Linda Neely]]> Lottie Robins. A notice of death can be found in the New York Times, August 15, 2007, at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E02E4DD103AF936A2575BC0A9619C8B63.]]> Mary Buckly]]> Phyllis Plouse]]> Ralph Renzi]]> Richard Pomeroy]]> Richard Singer]]> Robert Schoelkoff. An obituary of art dealer Robert Schoelkoff can be found in the New York Times, April 6, 1991, at http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/06/obituaries/robert-schoelkopf-art-dealer-was-63.html.]]> Romulis Linney]]> Roy Davis. An obituary for art dealr Roy Davis can be found in Art Media Agency, September 17, 2014, at http://en.artmediaagency.com/94297/art-dealer-roy-davis-passes-away/.]]> Rudy Burckhardt. An obituary of artist Rudy Burckhardt can be found in the New York Times, August 4, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/04/arts/rudy-burckhardt-85-photographer-and-filmmaker-dies.html.]]> Wendy Wasserstein. An obituary for playwright Wendy Wasserstein can be found in the New York Times, January 31, 2006, at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/theater/31wasserstein.html.]]> Adrienne Elisha ------- 08/10/1958 - 6/12/2017 ----------nnnObituary from Catskill Mountain News, July 5 2017 -------------- It is with great sadness that the family of Adrienne Joy Elisha (“Adie”) announces her passing on Monday, June 12, 2017, at the age of 58 years, after a courageous battle with cancer.nnAdie was born in Glen Cove, and lived in Bayville, L.I. during her first 10 years. The daughter of distinguished professional musicians, the late Dorothy Kesner and Paul Elisha, she was an extraordinary artist whose creative genius included the Performing Arts, Composition, Poetry and Painting. She was a champion of new music – equally talented as both a skilled violist as well as a composer. Her voice was distinctly contemporary but her inspiration was drawn directly from her heart. Mario Davidovsky had described her sextet (Anthelion) as “A new kind of polyphony.” Leonard Bernstein described her work as “Excitingly unpredictable, yet inevitable in retrospect.”nnAdrienne was a 2007 winner of the Thayer Award in music composition and received her Ph D in composition from the University of Buffalo, working with David Felder as a Presidential Doctoral Fellow. Also a graduate of the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana and the Cleveland Institute of Music, Ms. Elisha’s grants and commissions included those from Meet the Composer and The National Music Teachers’ Association, by whom she was named the 1997 Ohio Composer of the Year. Her credits went on to include Fortnightly Music of Cleveland, Cleveland Chamber Music Society, New Ear Ensemble of Kansas City and the American Music Center.nnHer works have been featured both nationally and internationally at June in Buffalo, The Colorado Springs New Music Symposium, The Chintimini Chamber Music Festival and at the International Bartok Festival in Szombathely, Hungary, where she performed her own solo and chamber works and premiered those of other composers. “Cry of the Dove,” her cello concerto, was commissioned and premiered by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony for Solo Cellist, Steven Elisha, who performed it subsequently with The Grand Rapids Symphony, under the direction of conductor, David Lockington.nnIn addition to solo and chamber appearances at new music festivals, Dr. Elisha was principal violist with The Center for 21st Century Music Ensemble and the June in Buffalo Chamber Ensemble. She also performed frequently with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. During the Warsaw Autumn Festival, she was featured as soloist and composer on Polish Radio broadcasts, performing new works for solo viola, including her own. Both of her talents were on display in Bern, Switzerland, where her composition, inspired by Paul Klee’s painting, “Once Emerged from the Grey of Night,” was featured. As guest violist, Dr. Elisha also performed with the Ensemble Paul Klee in the premiere of Liber Fulguralis by Tristan Murail. Other performances and commissions included those by solo bassist James VanDemark, the Rochester City Ballet, Musaica Chamber Ensemble, Ensemble Interface, Netzwerk Neue Musik, eighth blackbird, The Chamber Orchestra of Boston, The American Chamber Ensemble, The Denali Ensemble, New York New Music Ensemble and The Arditti String Quartet.nnIn 2009, nominated by Peter Eötvös, Ms. Elisha was the recipient of the Herrenhaus Composer residency in Edenkoben, Germany, where she spent five months as resident composer. She was also named a Composer Fellow of the 2011 Wellesley Composers Conference, led by Mario Davidovsky, director, and was awarded a 2011 Outer Cape Cod Artist’s Residency. She was a recipient of fellowships from the Mac- Dowell Colony and The Rockefeller Foundation at the Bellagio Center. Recent World Premieres included “Lithuanian Dances” with the Nashua Chamber Orchestra under the baton of David Feltner, and “New Overture” with the Galveston Symphony Orchestra, Trond Saeverud, Conductor.nnShe is survived and lovingly remembered by her husband of 23 years, Peter Laki, stepson, Ben Niran, brother and sister inlaw, Paul Hunkins and Ann Gore, sister and brother-in-law, Jill Hunkins and Carlos Castillo, sister and brother-in-law, Nella Hunkins and Richard Slessor, brother and sister-in-law, Steven and Larisa Elisha. She will be forever remembered by her nieces: Michelle Jezierski, Joanna May Hunkins, nephews: Serge Hunkins, Alain Hunkins, Ron Castillo, Douglas Castillo, Michael Castillo, Nicholas de Leval Jezierski, Patrick Elisha as well as extended family and dear friends. Interment will be Monday, July 10, 2017, 2:30 PM, at Beth Moses Cemetery, 1500 Wellwood Ave., West Babylon. 11704 (Farmingdale - Suffolk County). Additional memorial services are planned in Cleveland, Ohio on July 29 and at Bard College, Annandale on-Hudson. (date and time TBA).]]> Nancy Willard -------- 06/26/1936 - 02/19/2017 -------- Obituary from the New York Times, March 6, 2017 -------- Nancy Willard, a prolific author whose 70 books of poems and fiction enchanted children and adults alike with a lyrical blend of fanciful illusion and stark reality, died on Feb. 19 at her home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. She was 80.nnThe cause was coronary and pulmonary arrest, her husband, the photographer Eric Lindbloom, said.nnMs. Willard’s 1982 picture book, “A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers,” was the first volume of poetry to receive the Newbery Medal, the country’s highest honor for children’s writing. Illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen, it also received a Caldecott Honor as one of the best illustrated books of the year. It was the first time a Newbery winner was also named a Caldecott book.nnMs. Willard traced her weaving of fancy and realism to her upbringing. Her father was a chemistry professor who perfected a method of rustproofing]]> her mother, she said, was a romantic who read to her daughters during summer boating idylls.nn“I grew up aware of two ways of looking at the world that are opposed to each other and yet can exist side by side in the same person,” Ms. Willard wrote in an essay in Writer magazine. “One is the scientific view. The other is the magic view.”nnIn “William Blake’s Inn,” she transformed the English poet and printmaker into a hotelier who keeps an inn for a host of imaginary guests.n“Nancy Willard’s imagination — in verse or prose, for children or adults — builds castles stranger than any mad King of Bavaria ever built,” the poet Donald Hall wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1981. “She imagines with a wonderful concreteness. But also, she takes real language and by literal-mindedness turns it into the structure of dream.”nnHe continued: “If you know children virtuous in imagination, give them this book in which ‘The Wise Cow Enjoys a Cloud’:nn“Where did you sleep last night, Wise Cow?nWhere did you lay your head?”n“I caught my horns on a rolling cloud and made myself a bed,nand in the morning ate it raw on freshly buttered bread.”nnWhile she was best known for her children’s books, Ms. Willard also wrote novels for adults. In 1993 the Times critic Michiko Kakutani described her second, “Sister Water,” as “a luminous, lyrical novel about familial love and loss, a novel that almost literally hums with the power of her language.”nnNancy Margaret Willard was born in Ann Arbor, Mich., on June 26, 1936, the daughter of Hobart Willard, who taught at the University of Michigan, and the former Margaret Shepard.nnThe first texts she read, she said, were the labels on canned goods in her kitchen. (“They gave me an eclectic vocabulary: ‘spinach,’ ‘green beans,’ ‘registered trademark,’ ‘net weight.’ ”) She published her first poem when she was 7, she said.nnMs. Willard, an English major, graduated from the University of Michigan in 1958 and went on to earn a master’s at Stanford, with a thesis on medieval folk songs, and a doctorate at the University of Michigan. She taught creative writing at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie from 1965 until she retired in 2013.nnHer first children’s book, “Sailing to Cythera: And Other Anatole Stories,” was published in 1974 after her son, James Lindbloom, was born. In addition to her husband, he survives her. (She published other “Anatole” stories, and James became a model for a character in several other books.)nnMs. Willard had no illusions about her young audience.nn“Writing a book of poems for children is like sending a package to a child at camp: The cookies are fed to the fish, the books are fly swatters and the baseball cards are traded,” she once observed. “You never know the use to which your gift — or your poems — will be put. if you’re lucky, children a hundred years hence will be skipping rope to them or muttering them over the graves of dead cats.”nnWhile her style evolved, one ingredient remained integral.nn“Most of us grow up and put magic away with other childish things,” she explained in Writer magazine. “But I think we can all remember a time when magic was as real to us as science, and the things we couldn’t see were as important as the things we could.”nnShe added: “I believe that all small children and some adults hold this view together with the scientific ones. I also believe that the great books for children come from those writers who hold both.”]]> The New York TimesnBy Roberta SmithnJan. 14, 2015nnJake Berthot, a painter who gained notice in New York City for his romantically minimal style, then found inspiration in the natural world after moving north to a hamlet in Ulster County, died on Dec. 30 at his home in Accord, N.Y. He was 75.nnBetty Cuningham, whose gallery represented him, confirmed his death. She said he had long been ill but did not specify a cause.nnMr. Berthot (pronounced BEAR-TOE) had a brief flirtation with Minimal Art in the mid-1960s. But, like many members of his generation, he soon sought ways to soften, complicate and enrich the style’s severity. He was guided in this by his admiration for Abstract Expressionists like Milton Resnick and Mark Rothko, whose work was simplified but emotive.nnHe began to work in subtle monochromes of gray and green in the late 1960s in a manner similar to that of the painter Brice Marden. But Mr. Berthot’s surfaces were differentiated by their expressive texture and their suggestions of space and atmosphere.nnnnnIn many ways, Mr. Berthot spent his career exploring how to supplement and expand on the modernist monochrome without straying too far from it. At first he attached narrow vertical bars to either side of all-gray canvases. He also framed thickly worked monochromes with more thinly painted canvases, creating the effect of a window or of an abstract painting within an abstract painting.nnFor a while he pursued thickly built-up surfaces to which he added ovals or column-like rectangles in contrasting, sometimes even bright, colors. Most of his paintings began with an underlying grid of pencil that his brushwork alternately denied and confirmed. After 1996, when Mr. Berthot left Manhattan for Accord, the natural world became an increasing influence. He turned to depicting trees and hills so close in tone to their backgrounds that they almost seemed carved from them. Some of his most beautiful paintings were nocturnal landscapes or expanses of night skies illuminated by a few rays from the moon.nnThese works had a timeless quality and reflected his admiration for 19th-century landscape painters like George Inness, Albert Pinkham Ryder and J. M. W. Turner. He once told an interviewer that he was “not interested in the new but in trying to make paintings that refuse to grow old.” His art started rounding back toward abstraction in 2008.nnJohn Alex Berthot was born in Niagara Falls, N.Y., on March 30, 1939. His father abandoned the family when John was quite young, and he grew up on his grandparents’ truck farm in central Pennsylvania. He received his first drawing lessons from his grandmother.nMr. Berthot initially studied at a commercial art school in Pittsburgh but realized that he lacked the necessary precision in drawing. Moving to New York City, he worked as a window dresser in the Bronx. When his wife got a secretarial job at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, he was able to attend classes there tuition free.nnAt Pratt he began to paint seriously and soon had his first experience as a teacher. Starting in 1974, he taught for extended periods at the Cooper Union, Yale University and the School of Visual Arts.nnMr. Berthot had his first gallery show in New York in 1963 and showed regularly at the McKee Gallery and then the Betty Cuningham Gallery, both in Manhattan. Surveys of his work were held at Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., in 1988 and at the Phillips Collection in Washington in 1996.nnWhen he decided to bequeath the paintings in his studio to the Phillips, the museum offered to exhibit them, as a gift, during his lifetime. Mr. Berthot, who once described painting as “the only thing I can do,” declined, saying that he needed the paintings around him.nnHis marriages to Ginny MacKenzie and Kristin Flynn both ended in divorce. He is survived by his son, John, from his first marriage.nnA version of this article appears in print on Jan. 19, 2015, on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Jake Berthot, 75, Abstract Painter Inspired by Nature. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe]]> Photograph of spine of book by Nicholas Adams, "Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: the experiment since 1936"]]>