Jutta Limbach, the German jurist and politician who headed the advisory committee on the return of cultural property seized by the Nazis, died on 10 September, aged 82. Limbach grew up in Berlin where she studied law, as well as in Freiburg. She was the president of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany (1994-2002). In 2003, she led the so-called Limbach Commission, the German government’s advisory body for the recovery of cultural artefacts, especially Jewish property, seized by the Nazis. Famously, the commission advised in 2014 against the return to its Jewish claimants of the €400m Guelph Treasure, a collection of medieval ecclesiastical art (so-called because of its provenance from the princely Guelph House of Brunswick-Lüneburg). Pieces had passed through the hands of Jewish dealers in the first half of the 20th century, the heirs of whom lodged the claim. A US court gave them permission to proceed but the artefacts were declared national treasures; that is, they cannot leave the country without ministerial permission.
Nathan Lyons, a photographer who helped to raise photography to the status of fine art, died on 31 August, aged 86. Born in 1930 in Queens, New York, Lyons’s interest in photography began when he was a teenager. From 1950 to 1954, he served in the US Air Force as a photographer. He completed a degree in English at Alfred University, after which he became the director of public information of the George Eastman House. He also became the regional editor of Aperture magazine. Throughout the 1960s, he organised exhibitions that aimed to promote the idea of the photographer’s distinct point of view and individuality, featuring artists such as Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, Duane Michals and Garry Winogrand. His own photographs have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He also wrote extensively about his own work and was an editor of many publications.
Hassan Sharif, the Emirati artist who is recognised as a trailblazer of conceptual art in the Middle East, died on 18 September, aged 65. Sharif’s career began in the late 1970s as a caricaturist for the Akhbar Dubai newspaper, but his work was transformed by studies at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London from 1979 to 1984. He returned to the UAE, with the aim of building an audience for contemporary art in the Gulf. Sharif was active at a time when the fledgling UAE federation was seeking an identity and a place in the world. He transformed consumer items and found industrial materials into complex assemblages and weavings and his Fluxus-inspired performance pieces made waves in the conservative UAE. He established the Sharjah-based Al Marijah Art Atelier in 1984, a mentoring organisation for emerging Emirati artists, and co-founded the Emirates Fine Art Society in 1980.
Robin Spark, the Scottish painter, photographer and print-maker, died on 6 August, aged 78. Spark was the son of the writer Muriel Spark (née Camberg) and Sydney Spark, a manic depressive. Born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1938, his parents’ marriage fell apart when he was two. From the ages of four to seven he was placed in an Edinburgh convent and he was then moved to his maternal grandparents in whose Edinburgh home he lived for the rest of his life. He was for 20 years a civil servant in the Scottish Law Commission. In 1983, he enrolled as a mature student at the Edinburgh College of Art, where he later taught. His work was expressionistic and figurative, but then more abstract. His life and work were, however, dogged by the acrimonious public arguments he had in the press with his famous mother, whom he accused of denying their Jewishness (she became a Catholic in 1951), disparaging his work and neglecting him. Three years before her death, he broke all communications with her and she cut him out of her will.