Silvio Curto, the director of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Turin, died on 24 September, aged 96. Born in Bra in 1919, Curto joined the superintendency for Egyptian antiquities in 1946 as the director of the museum, the world’s second largest collection of Egyptian artefacts. He remained in post until 1971, and was simultaneously the superintendency’s inspector. In the 1960s, he oversaw the dig of the Egyptian site of Ellesiya, which was threatened by inundation by the Aswan Dam project. As a reward for his work, in 1966 the president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, gave him the small temple of Horus that was rescued from the site. The building was erected by the Pharaoh Thutmose III (18th dynasty, 1479-1425BC) and is now one of the museum’s great treasures. In 1965, Curto oversaw the completion of a new museum catalogue and, among other works, wrote a monograph on the temple.
Olga Hirshhorn, a collector of Modern art and the widow of the founder of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, died on 3 October, aged 95. Olga Zatorsky was born and lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she met the oil and mining tycoon and art collector Joseph Hirshhorn, who lived nearby in a neo-Norman chateau. She became his fourth wife in 1964. Through her husband, she met many artists, including Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe and Alexander Calder. At the same time, she began to buy works of art, starting with a painting by Josef Albers. Over the following decades, she amassed hundreds of works by artists such as Picasso, De Kooning, Henry Moore, Man Ray, Daumier and Giacometti. Her husband died in 1981. In 1995, she donated 600 works from her collection to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, as she felt that it had a greater need of them than her husband’s museum.
Carol Rama, the Italian painter and bricolagiste of sexually aggressive subjects, died on 25 September, aged 97. Born Olga Carolina Rama in Turin in 1918, she had a troubled upbringing, and as an unmarried mother began to make anti-Fascist works that challenged state censorship. From the 1950s, she began to include objects such as hypodermic syringes and small mechanical parts in her paintings; by the 1960s, her primary material was tyre rubber. Around this time, she was in touch with the artists Man Ray and Andy Warhol and the film-makers Luis Buñuel and Orson Welles. Her work gained wider recognition in the 1980s. In 1998, her work was exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. She was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.
Robin Wade, the English museum and exhibition designer, died on 11 September, aged 86. Born in Melbourne, Australia, he served an apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker and came to Britain in 1950. He helped to make new carvings for the bombed-out Houses of Parliament and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art’s school of wood, metals and plastics. His first professional work was with R.D. Russell, R.Y. Godden and Alan Tilbury, who were redesigning the Greek and Roman galleries in the British Museum. Wade had by then set up his own business, which was commissioned in 1972 to create the historic Ironbridge Gorge industrial museums in Shropshire. The complex won the first European Museum of the Year award in 1978. He created several important exhibitions: the Royal Academy of Arts’ Chinese exhibition (1973), the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Destruction of the Country House (1974) and the British Museum’s Vikings (1980). He was responsible for arranging and decorating the British Museum’s Egyptian sculpture galleries, painting the spaces a stone colour rather than the Pompeian reds demanded by the Victorian Society; Wade cited the 1858 recommendations of the sculptor Richard Westmacott, who asserted this to be in line with the vision of the museum’s architect, Robert Smirke.