Howard Kanovitz

The New York Times covers the death from complications after heart surgery of Photo Realist Howard Kanovitz

Mr. Kanovitz’s technique was to project photographic images onto a canvas and paint over them, allowing them to guide the work in composition and scale. Works presented in his first solo show as a Photo Realist, at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan in 1966, put him at the forefront of a movement that gathered momentum in the next several years and included Chuck Close, Ralph Goings and Richard Estes.

“His influence was that he made working from photographs seem like a good idea,” Mr. Close said in an interview on Wednesday.

Often misunderstood as photographic replication, Photo Realism was actually more about questioning what is thought of as reality than about representing it. In a signature work called “The Opening,” (1967), for example, Mr. Kanovitz painted a gallery-show opening attended by prominent members of the New York art scene — painters, critics, curators and the like — all of whom would be recognizable to visitors at the gallery where the painting was being shown, and whose images were drawn from photographs taken at actual art openings. As a companion piece, he created stand-alone canvases of individual people (also from images snapped at openings) who are seen gazing at the painting, an implicit query into the relationship between looking and being looked at.

Howard Kanovitz, 79, Recreated the Real, Dies (New York Times)

Olga Raggio

The first woman to head a major department at the Met, Olga Raggio, who died at 82, spent 60 years at the institution and had been considered a possible successor to Thomas Hoving:

One of the first women to lead a curatorial department at the Met, Dr. Raggio was the chairwoman of its department of European sculpture and decorative arts from 1971 to 2001. She was responsible for tens of thousands of objects, including sculpture, ceramics, tapestries, furniture, jewelry, metalwork, glass, clocks, mathematical instruments and architectural pieces — almost every kind of art made in Europe from 1400 to 1900 that was not painting or drawing.

Dr. Raggio was concerned with the stuff of everyday life — everyday life, that is, if one happened to be an Italian duke, a Spanish grandee or a Frenchman whose first name was Louis and whose last name was a Roman numeral.

Olga Raggio, a Scholar and Art Curation, Dies at 82 (New York Times)