Dina Vierny

The Associated Press covered Dina Vierny’s death, at 89, on Thursday:

Vierny was Maillol’s greatest devotee and the leading force in making his acclaimed figurative bronzes available to the public. In 1963, she gave France a collection of monumental Maillol sculptures that now stand in the Tuileries Garden. In 1995, she created a foundation to house the works of Maillol and others, the Musee Maillol, a cozy house-like museum on Paris’ Left Bank.

But NPR’s Susan Stamberg also just ran a profile of her in December:

“Is this you,” I ask, showing her a Maillol drawing of a nude — much like hundreds of others he drew.

Somehow Vierny knows it’s not her. More: She knows exactly when it was made. And why it was made.

“Je suis un ordinateur,” Vierny shrugs — “I’m a computer. I have an enormous memory. Everything is stored in my brain. Et je me trompe pas — I am never wrong.”

Dina Verny, Model and Muse for Art’s Masters (NPR)

Robert Gumbinier

The Los Angeles Times covers the death of Robert Gumbinier:

Robert Gumbiner, a physician and HMO pioneer who built the managed-care giant FHP and then used his fortune to found the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, has died. He was 85.

“I know something about building things,” Gumbiner — pronounced Gum-buy-ner — told The Times in 2007 while discussing the museum he started in 1996. “In my former career, I built 55 medical centers and four hospitals in nine states.”

Robert Gumbinier dies at 85 (Los Angeles Times)

Shigeo Fukuda

The New York Times fills us in on the significance of Fukuda’s work:

He was a popular figure among American designers. His book “Visual Illusion” (Rikuyosha Publishing, 1982) was a virtual textbook for designers in the United States.

Although he had some commercial clients, most of his work was for social and cultural concerns, like the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, for which he designed the official poster.

In Japan, poster design is not as aggressively sales oriented as it is in the West; rather, it is a form of cultural communication and often a vehicle for advocacy on political and social issues. In 1980, for example, Mr. Fukuda designed a poster for Amnesty International showing a drawing of a clenched fist interwoven with barbed wire.

And yet, in work reminiscent of the pictorial illusionist M. C. Escher’s, Mr. Fukuda often used humor as a tool. Many of his best-known designs are visual puns that evoke double readings. One is a widely reproduced satirical poster, “Victory 1945,” showing an airborne black artillery shell aimed directly at the opening of the cannon barrel from which it was shot.

Shigeo Fukuda, Graphic Designer, Dies at 76 (New York Times)