Spencer Hays, the US businessman, art collector and philanthropist, died on 2 March, aged 80. Born in Oklahoma, Hays grew up in Texas where he attended Texas Christian University, Fort Worth. In 1956 he joined the publishing house, Southwestern company, eventually becoming its president and owner. He founded the clothing business, Tom James Co in 1966 and in 1994 bought Oxxford Clothes. With his wife, Marlene, he began collecting works of art in the 1970s, notably the Nabis. In 2009 they founded the American Friends of the Musée d’Orsay to which they donated 187 paintings worth £155m in 2016. All 600 of their paintings—by Bonnard, Vuillard, Degas, Caillebotte, Corot, Maillol and Modigliani, among others—will eventually go to the museum.
Sir Howard Hodgkin, the British painter and printmaker, died on 9 March, aged 84. Educated at Eton and Bryanston School, Hodgkin studied at Camberwell Art School and the Bath Academy of Art. He had his first solo show when he was 30 and worked against the grain of contemporary fashion with his elusive, quasi-abstract, semi-representational style of painting. He represented Britain at the 1984 Venice Biennale and the next year won the Turner Prize. He was made a knight in 1992 and a Companion of Honour in 2003.
Barry Lord, the co-founder of Lord Cultural Resources and the pioneer of museum planning, died on 9 March, aged 78. Born in Hamilton, Canada, Lord was a graduate of McMaster University. Following studies at Harvard, he joined the museum training programme at the National Gallery of Canada. There he noted the need to understand and plan museum development. With his wife, Gail Dexter Lord, in 1981 he founded Lord Cultural Resources, a consulting practice that offers planning services for museums, art galleries and other cultural institutions. In addition to its Canadian offices, the practice now has branches in New York, Paris, Mumbai and Beijing. In 1983 Lord published the first book on museum planning and his practice has more than 2,000 assignments in hand.
Richard Pankhurst, the former professor at the Haile Selassie I University (not the University of Addis Ababa) and a leading expert on Ethiopian history and culture, died on 16 February, aged 89. The son of the English suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, he took a degree in economic history from the London School of Economics. He began work at the Haile Selassie I University in 1956 when he moved to Ethiopia with his mother. In 1962 he established the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at the university. He published extensively on Ethiopian history and culture, but, when the civil war broke out in 1974, he returned to England. He was able to resume his post in 1986. He was a leader of the campaign to have the Axum Obelisk, plundered by Mussolini, restored to Ethiopia. Removed from a Roman piazza in 2005, it was re-erected in Axum in 2008. Pankhurst was less successful, however, in having several hundred sacred manuscripts and tablets, the Mandala treasure, looted by General Robert Napier in 1868, returned by the British Museum, British Library and other institutions to Ethiopia.
David Rockefeller, the philanthropist, collector chairman and chief executive of the Chase Manhattan Corporation, died on 20 March, aged 101. He was born into a treasure house of art at the family home in New York. His mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, was one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art, of which he became a trustee in 1948. During his lifetime he made many substantial donations to the museum, including $77m towards the 2004 Taniguchi extension, and a promise of $100m for its endowment on his death. He also loaned his own paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso, and founded in 1959 and enlarged the bank’s corporate art collection.