George Schneeman

The New York Times covers the death of the 74-year-old bohemian artist:

Mr. Schneeman, who began the collaborations in the late 1960s, was not the first painter to work in double harness with a poet: Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara had done so in the late ’50s. But he was undoubtedly the most prolific. Over four decades Mr. Schneeman produced hundreds of collaborative pieces that were neither pure visual art nor pure verbal art but something tantalizingly indefinable between the two.

Considered vital works of postwar Modernism, Mr. Schneeman’s collaborations were exhibited on occasion in museums and galleries. But most found their permanent places in his home and in the homes of friends.

Mr. Schneeman died on Tuesday. His death of heart failure, in Manhattan, came after two recent falls, his family said.

George Schneedman, 74, Poet-Artist, Dies (New York Times)

Aldo Crommelynck

The Telegraph offers an appreciation of print-maker Aldo Crommelynck, who died on December 22nd, that is worth quoting at some length. (Better yet, read the whole thing):

Aldo Crommelynck, who has died aged 77, was a master printmaker and midwife to the genius of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Georges Braque as well as younger artists such as David Hockney, Richard Hamilton, Jasper Johns and Jim Dine.

Crommelynck was much more than a mere technician. While he had an absolute command of intaglio, aquatint and etching techniques, he was also endlessly inventive and open to new ideas. Tall and gaunt, with piercing eyes and long, spindly fingers stained with ink and nicotine, he cut a distinctive and eccentric figure. Artists adored him and he understood them. His patience was endless, and he remained calm through the most tempestuous tantrums. [ . . . ]

But Crommelynck was best known for his work with Picasso. He and his younger brother Piero collaborated sporadically with the artist for some 20 years and produced all his prints after 1961. In August 1963 they established a workshop with a small printing press in a former bakery at Mougins, not far from the Riviera villa where Picasso and his wife Jacqueline had moved two years earlier. An extraordinarily fruitful partnership ensued. Between 1963 and his death in 1973 Picasso produced some 750 intaglio plates, virtually doubling his lifetime’s production as a printmaker.

These included the erotic etchings that make up Series 347, which became a succès de scandale when they were exhibited simultaneously in Paris and Chicago in 1968. The Art Institute in Chicago had withheld 25 prints as “unfit for public consumption”; even so it was deluged with complaints. “The engravings,” noted one reviewer, “represent what may well be the most exhaustive study of genitals, mainly female, ever seen in legitimate art galleries”.

Aldo Crommelynck (Telegraph)