July 5, 2011. Cy Twombly passed away today in Rome, after a long bout with cancer. He was 83.

^ Dan Asher singing Karen Dalton's "Every Time I Think of Freedom" ^

News of Dan Asher's passing on Friday, April 23, has been slowly spreading through the downtown NY art world. He was an original, unique presence, an artist of rare expressive power with an uncompromising anarchic temperament. We will all miss him.

Asher was seriously ill with lymphoma/leukemia, a condition which had gravely worsened in recent weeks. He was receiving extensive medication and had been admitted to the hospital for chemotherapy and other procedures. A stem cell replacement was being considered.

In order to help raise money for this health care, the Gavin Brown gallery organized and hosted a benefit sale of Asher's mid-70s photographs of Bob Marley, which was announced in a previous posting on this site.

from the New York Times:

Kenneth Noland, whose brilliantly colored concentric circles, chevrons and stripes were among the most recognized and admired signatures of the postwar style of abstraction known as Color Field painting, died Tuesday at his home in Port Clyde, Me. He was 85.

Although I knew he was also a painter, the Manny Farber I first encountered in back issues of Film Culture and in collected writings like Negative Space (1971) was a brilliant, spirited, clear-eyed, iconoclastic, no-nonsense film critic. Essays like "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" (1962) were lean, mean, superbly on target and amazingly prescient, celebrating B-films and maverick, marginal auteurs long before they became de rigueur among cineastes. He was an early champion of Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Val Lewton and Don Siegel, and penned some of the first American appreciations of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Marguerite Duras, Werner Herzog, Chantal Akerman and other 70s European avantgardists.

"Splotches" (2005)

My relationship to LeWitt's work is a bit unusual. When I was coming up I detested him, along w/ the other Late Minimalists -- or so was he contextually positioned & critically aspected. At that time, the work seemed yet another desperate attempt by one of that flock to reify a movement which had become completely moribund. However as time went by & LeWitt's work developed I found my view changing. -- & do we privilege work which we came to appreciate over time after having responded negatively initially? Perhaps we do, & perhaps we should, as such work has in a sense fought for our appreciaton.