Obituaries

Alan Shields, 61, died Dec. 13, of complications related to emphysema, at his home on Shelter Island, N.Y. Often labeled a post-Minimalist, Shields was perhaps best known for a colorful hybrid of painting and sculpture often using dyed and woven strips of fabric. Born in 1944 in Herington, Kan., Shields grew up on his family's farm and studied civil engineering at Kansas State University. He eventually gravitated to the university's art department where he began making his first sewn-fabric works. He was strongly influenced at the time by Robert Rauschenberg's work. Shields left Kansas State before graduating and settled in New York City in 1968.

In 1969, he held the first in a series of successful exhibitions at New York's Paula Cooper Gallery, which represented the artist for many years. He participated in numerous group and solo shows in the U.S. and abroad, and established an international reputation during the 1970s. A touring museum survey of his work in 1983-84 debuted at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, and traveled to the Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, Fla., and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. In the late 1980s and '90s, Shields exhibited less frequently. However, he continued to make art in his studio on Shelter Island, which had been his principal residence since 1972 and where he worked as a ferry captain. His last New York exhibition was held in 2000 in a trio of galleries, Paula Cooper, Nicholas Davies and Dieu Donne Papermill.

Atsuko Tanaka, 73, prominent Japanese artist, died Dec. 3 of pneumonia in Nara, Japan. She had been hospitalized since a car accident last spring. She was the only female member of the avant-garde group Gutai, founded in Osaka in 1954, which created Dada-inspired performance-based works, theatrical events and multimedia installations. In her own work, she often used light, sound and performance, as in Electric Dress (1956), a head-to-toe wearable sculpture made of variously shaped, brightly painted lightbulbs and incandescent tubes and cords that she donned for public performances. More recently, she created abstract drawings and paintings, colorful loosely geometric compositions that often relate to her electrical works. Better known in Japan than in the U.S., she was in numerous group shows in her native country, and had solos at the Gutai Pinacotheca in Osaka (1963) and the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History (2001). She was included in "The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1966) and "Japanese Art Since 1945: Scream Against the Sky" at the Guggenheim Museum's SoHo branch (1994-95). In 2004, she was the subject of a survey, "Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka, 1954-1968," mounted by NYU's Grey Art Gallery and the Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver [see A.i.A., Nov. '04]. She showed with Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.

Roger Shattuck, 82, scholar and writer, died Dec. 8 from prostate cancer at his home in Lincoln, Vt. A specialist in modern French literature, Shattuck was particularly interested in the interactions of writers and artists. His multidisciplinary approach was most evident in his influential book The Banquet Years (1968), a study of the Parisian avant-garde in the decades before World War I. His essays on the later developments of Dada and Surrealism can be found in his collection The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts (1984). In recent years Shattuck expressed increasing doubts about some aspects of modernity, a theme he explored in Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (1996) and Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education, and the Arts (2000). Shattuck taught at Harvard and the Universities of Texas and Virginia; at his death, he was professor emeritus at Boston University.

James Ingo Freed, 75, architect, died Dec. 15 in New York of complications from Parkinson's disease. A partner in the firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, he was born in Germany and immigrated at the age of nine to Chicago, where he had family. He studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology under Mies van der Rohe, and later worked with him on the Seagram Building in New York. Freed joined I.M. Pei's firm in 1956. His early projects included residential and office complexes in Manhattan, such as University Plaza at Bleecker Street and LaGuardia Place (1967), and 88 Pine Street (1973). From 1975 to '78 he served as dean of architecture at IIT, during which time he was associated with the Chicago Seven group. He later designed New York's Jacob Javits Convention Center, which opened in 1986, and is perhaps best known for the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (1993).

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