From the NYT on April 23rd0, “E. L. Konigsburg, Author, Is Dead at 83″ (by Paul Vitello):
E. L. Konigsburg, a children’s author and illustrator who twice received the nation’s highest award in children’s literature [the Newbery Medal] — she won it in 1968 for her second book, edging out the runner-up, which was her own first book — died on Friday [April 19th] in Falls Church, Va.
Two things: a note on the pleasures of her most famous book, and a note on her pen name.
(About art, and my life, rather than language.)
In the NYT national edition today (but apparently printed first on the 11th), an obit (by Paul Vitello) for painter Zao Wou-Ki, “Zao Wou-ki, Abstract Painter, Dies at 92″:
Zao Wou-ki, a Chinese émigré who merged Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions in his abstract paintings — helping to shape avant-garde art in postwar Europe and attracting a newly wealthy Asian following that made him one of the most commercially successful living artists in either hemisphere — died on April 9 in Nyon, Switzerland.
… Mr. Zao’s paintings, which are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim and the Tate Modern, among others, have sold at auction in recent years for between $1 million and $2 million each. Since 2011, when sales of his paintings totaled $90 million, art journals and art dealers have frequently referred to him as the top-selling living Chinese artist.
Finding his own identity in that label — as a Chinese artist — was the crucible of Mr. Zao’s artistic vision.
Leaving China just ahead of the Communist takeover, Mr. Zao settled in 1948 in Paris, where his first sustained exposure to Western Modernist painting left him feeling ambivalent about the classical forms of landscape and calligraphic ink painting in which he had been trained. He loved the work of the Impressionists and Expressionists, and of contemporary artists like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.
But through nonobjective Western painting, especially the work of Paul Klee, who was influenced by traditional Chinese and Japanese art, Mr. Zao gained new insights into what the British art historian Michael Sullivan called “the Abstract Expressionist element in his own tradition.”
Putting aside the issue of money in the art market (now a feature of virtually all artists’ obits), there’s the remarkable blending of Chinese and European Modernist artististic traditions in Zao’s work (the Times renders his name with family name first, Chinese-style). And a story from my life.
Just in the past two days, four more deaths of people who have given me pleasure through their work: Ed Fisher and Peter Workman in the NYT yesterday, Jonathan Winters and Maria Tallchief today. There’s some linguistic interest in there.
Four NYT obituaries from recent weeks, not for linguists or language-related figures and not for very famous public figures (like Margaret Thatcher), but for people whose work has brought me enlightenment or pleasure: Anthony Lewis, Paul Williams, Hugh McCracken, and Carmine Infantino.
In the NYT yesterday, an obit for John Gumperz, long of Berkeley and more recently of UC Santa Barbara as well: “John J. Gumperz, Linguist of Cultural Interchange, dies at 91″. As Ben Zimmer posted in Language Log:
John J. Gumperz, the Berkeley sociolinguist who, among his many contributions, introduced “the speech community” as a unit of linguistic analysis, died on Friday at the age of 91. Margalit Fox has a thoughtful obituary in the New York Times.
Ben goes on to extract material from Fox’s obit, which frames the story by means of an anecdote that begins:
The conflict hinged on a single word: “gravy.”
In additional to his many scholarly achievements, John was known for his helpfulness to students and colleagues alike. A few days ago, Jef Verschueren, writing to the International Pragmatics Association, spoke of his “modest, inspiring, and warm presence”. A deeply nice person as well as a smart one, a pleasure to be around.
I first met John so very long ago that I can’t recall the circumstances — except that it was in the early ’60s, when I was still in grad school.
Via John Lawler, a link to the Harvard Gazette story (from yesterday) about the death of the great philologist and linguist Calvert Watkins (on the 20th) at the age of 80. Earlier, a brief notice by languagehat. And now, from Ben Zimmer, a Language Log posting in Cal’s memory. Ben has re-posted the core of the Harvard Gazette piece, from which I’ll extract only these small pieces:
Calvert Watkins, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Linguistics and the Classics, emeritus, died earlier this month at the age of 80.
A towering figure in historical and Indo-European linguistics and a pioneer in the field of Indo-European poetics, Watkins presided over the expansion of Harvard’s Department of Linguistics in the 1960s, and served as its chair several times between 1963 until his retirement in 2003. From then until his death, he served as professor in residence at the University of California, Los Angeles [having followed his wife, the Sanskritist Stephanie Jamison, to UCLA].
… On a … popular level, he was the editor of the Indo-European root appendix to the “American Heritage Dictionary,” first published in 1969. Together with an accompanying essay, the appendix was later published in a separate edition and included in subsequent editions of the dictionary. Accessibly written, it reached a large public and inspired an interest in linguistics and Indo-European in many casual readers, as well as in some who went on to enter the profession.
An impressive obit in the NYT today for Nevin Scrimshaw (by Douglas Martin), who by anyone’s gauge should count as a hero of medicine:
Nevin S. Scrimshaw, Pioneer Nutritionist, Dies at 95
Dr. Nevin S. Scrimshaw, a nutritionist who improved the health of millions of children in developing countries by creating low-cost vegetable-based foods for weaning infants, died on Friday in Plymouth, N.H.
Read the whole thing: a truly admirable life. Here I note his family name, a noun that is in its own way admirable.
Stories of secrets kept until death: Ed Koch’s homosexuality, Strom Thurmond’s fathering an interracial child. Neither publicly acknowledged during their lives.
In today’s NYT, in the New York Region section, a charming, funny, affectionate piece about Ed Koch: “Services to Reflect Koch: Proudly Jewish on His Own Terms” by Sharon Otterman. Much to admire in this piece, but as a linguist I was especially taken by Koch’s views on God’s preferred languages.
