Jane, Lady Abdy, an art dealer and society hostess who influenced British taste, died on 22 December 2015, aged 81. Born in Leicester, the daughter of a doctor, Jane Noble read English at Somerville College, the University of Oxford. She took her degree in 1955, after which she worked in a London art gallery, where she met Sir Robert Abdy, a bon vivant, aesthete and enormously wealthy baronet, who had advised Paul Getty on 18th-century French art. They married in 1962, when he was 66 and she was 28. He proceeded to shape her mind and launched her in society. She became an exquisitely dressed bluestocking with a passion for the then under-appreciated 19th-century society artists such as Blanche, Boldini and Helleu. She organised exhibitions at the Ferrers Gallery in Piccadilly and, with Charlotte Gere, wrote the catalogue of, and organised an exhibition of works by, the Edwardian artists called the Souls.
Ellsworth Kelly, the American painter, sculptor and printmaker, died on 27 December 2015, aged 92. Kelly studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1941 until he joined the army in 1943. After the Second World War, he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and then at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Although he had first painted in the Abstract style in 1949, he began to work in collages and in very large formats on his return to New York in 1954. His abstract paintings stressed shape and planar masses and, from the mid-1960s, Minimalism and reductive art, when he also started working on irregularly shaped canvases. He left New York City in 1970 for Spencertown, New York, where he lived until his death with his partner, the photographer Jack Shear. From 1973, he made large-scale outdoor sculptures in steel, aluminium and bronze. He received many public commissions throughout his career.
Agatha Sadler, the art bookshop owner—“the queen of art books”—and a collector of antiquities and Renaissance works of art, died on 13 December 2015, aged 91. Born in Vienna, Agatha Brill was sent to England by her parents, who were imprisoned by the Nazis. After the Second World War, the family was reunited in London, where she met and married Charles Sadler, who helped her to establish a bookshop in Duke Street, between the showrooms of Sotheby’s and Christie’s. She gradually built up a circle of distinguished clients and advisers, and by the late 1950s, she was supplying reference books to the auction houses, the National Art Library, the Courtauld Institute and the National and Tate Galleries.
Annet Tellegen-Hoogendoorn, a Dutch Van Gogh specialist, died in the Hague on 13 November 2015, just before her 103rd birthday. She worked for more than 30 years at the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD), heading its Modern Dutch and Belgian department. In 1962, she was appointed as a researcher for a panel of art historians who were revising the Van Gogh catalogue raisonné by Jacob-Baart de la Faille, which was first published in 1928. Tellegen-Hoogendoorn privately criticised the panel for its unscientific approach and for including fakes, and she was then sidelined. The revised catalogue was published in 1969.
Sir Brian Tovey, the British intelligence analyst, director of the signals intelligence agency GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) and art historian, died on 23 December 2015, aged 89. Educated at St Edmund Hall, the University of Oxford, and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London, he was recruited by GCHQ in 1950 and served as its director from 1978 to 1983. His name will be familiar to readers of The Art Newspaper as the author of many fluently written reviews of books about Italian Renaissance art. In 2005, he edited and published Philip Pouncey’s index of Filippo Baldinucci’s Notizie.