Lord Briggs of Lewes (Asa Briggs), the historian of the Victorian era and culture, educator and Bletchley Park code-breaker, died on 15 March, aged 94. Briggs was educated at Keighley Boys’ Grammar School and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he took his BA in 1941 and a BSc the same year from the University of London. He was a member of the Intelligence Corps working on code breaking at Bletchley Park from 1942 to the end of the war. He was one of the original founders in 1969 of the Open University and was made a life peer in 1976. He published a five-volume history of broadcasting in the UK as well as works on the social and cultural history of 19th-century England, including his popular books Victorian People (1955), Victorian Cities (1963), Victorian Things (1989) and the guidebook Marx in London (2008).
Anita Brookner, the award-winning novelist and art historian, died on 10 March, aged 87. Brookner took her BA in history from King’s College London, and in 1953 a doctorate in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She taught art history at the University of Reading until she was appointed Slade professor of fine art at Cambridge in 1967; in 1977 she was appointed by Anthony Blunt as reader at the Courtauld. She published a monograph on Jacques-Louis David (1980), the first in English, as well as books on Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1972), and Soundings, a collection of art-historical essays (1997). Her career as novelist began when Hotel du Lac (1984) won the Booker Prize, after which she published a novel nearly every year. She retired from the Courtauld in 1988.
Claude Parent, the architect and theoretician of “oblique function”, died on 27 February, aged 93. In 1936 he became an apprentice to Joël Lemaresquier in Toulouse, but ten years later moved to Paris to join the workshops of Le Corbusier and others, including Jean Nouvel. When he and Paul Virilio, the cultural theorist and urban planner, became teachers at the École Spéciale d’Architecture, they founded the Architecture Principe group dedicated to the notion of oblique function—seeking ways to unbalance traditional architectural features. Parent’s built work was limited, but influential.
Tamuna Sirbiladze, the Georgian abstract painter and widow of Franz West, died on 2 March, aged 45. Born in Tbilisi, Sirbiladze studied at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts (1989-94) and then at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (1997-2003). While in Vienna she met and married West, the sculptor of colourful public works, who collaborated with her. He died in 2012. Her paintings were characterised by their expressions of speed and incorporation of texts—an attempt to merge the figural and the gestural. She was known in Europe, but her first two solo shows in New York and another in Miami came only last year.
Philip Taverner, the public relations expert who is said to have invented the “blockbuster” exhibition, died on 6 February, aged 86. Born in Chelmsford and educated at the Bryanston School, Dorset, Taverner read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. He opened a public relations company for Pirelli and was then headhunted by the Thomson Group, where he was appointed the marketing director of Times Newspapers. In 1972 the Times and the Sunday Times jointly sponsored the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum. Using all his skills Taverner whipped up expectations, organised special trains for schoolchildren, created a mass of merchandise and was rewarded with attendances of 1.7 million people. He repeated this success with The Genius of China at the Royal Academy the following year, The Gold of Eldorado (1978), The Horses of San Marco (1979), and, for the National Maritime Museum, 1776: The British Story of the American Revolution (1976). He led the project to found the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, which opened in 2003.