Karen Johnson Boyd, a major donor to, and a trustee of, the Racine Art Museum, and owner of the Perimeter Gallery, Chicago, died on 29 January, aged 92. A native of Racine, Wisconsin, Boyd grew up in “Wingspread”, the house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for her father, the owner and director of S.C. Johnson, the household products manufacturer. She took her degree from Bennington College, Vermont, and soon began to collect art in several areas: contemporary painting, crafts, works on paper and photography. She donated more than 1,750 works of art—by Mimmo Paladino, Gerhard Richter, Anthony Caro, Bill Brandt, Lee Friedlander, Duane Michals, Irving Penn and others—mostly to the Racine Art Museum, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Thornton Dial, the US outsider artist whose paintings and collages narrated the story of the struggle of black people in the South, died on 25 January, aged 87. Dial was born in Emelle, Alabama. With only the rudiments of primary education, he was an unskilled labourer from the age of 12. He constructed works of art from found scraps of material, and in 1987 his work was discovered by William Arnett, an Atlanta collector of Southern Folk art, who championed his work. His work was then exhibited at major museums in New York, Houston and Minneapolis.
Gottfried Honegger, the Swiss artist and graphic designer, died on 17 January, aged 98. Honegger studied design at the Zurich Kunstgewerbeschule where, from 1948, he taught. His early work was in commercial graphic design. From 1955 to 1958 he was the art director of Geigy, the chemical dye company. He then relocated to New York and lived there between 1958 and 1960; it was there that he held his first exhibition. In 1961 he moved to Paris where he painted monochromatic works that explored the geometry of circles and squares, and then concentrated on sculpture from 1968. In the late 60s he was the artist in residence at the University of Dallas, Texas, and in 2015 was the subject of a large retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Tanya Schmoller, the personal assistant to Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, and an historian of graphic art, died on 14 January, aged 98. Born in Uruguay to a Russian father and an English mother, she was educated at the British School in Montevideo. She held various jobs in Latin America after her graduation until she met Lane, then exploring the South American market for his new imprint. Lane hired her as a secretary, but she soon became a reader and editor in her own right. At Penguin she met and in 1950 married Hans Schmoller, the house’s chief designer, after whose death in 1985, she became a collector, then historian, of decorated paper.
Borek Sipek, the Czech architect and designer, died on 13 February, aged 66. Following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Sipek fled to Germany, where he studied architecture and philosophy, and then to the Netherlands, where he set up his studio. He became famous for his works in glass and he made designs for brands such as Swarovski, VitrA, Sevres and Saint-Gobain. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Sipek returned to the Czech Republic and, at the invitation of his friend, Václav Havel, the new republic’s first president, he undertook the transformation of Prague Castle as a centre for culture and the arts, for which he created chandeliers, furniture and new entrances. He also designed the Opera House in Kyoto, the Museum of Modern Art in Den Bosch and interiors for Karl Lagerfeld shops.
Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist, essayist, philospher and critic, died on 19 February, aged 84.
• For more, see theartnewspaper.com