Obituaries

Anne Coffin Hanson, 82, art historian, died Sept. 3 in New Haven. She was the first woman to be hired as a full tenured professor at Yale, where she taught for more than two decades before retiring in 1992. An authority on late 19th- and early 20th-century European art, she organized exhibitions for the Yale University Art Gallery, including "The Futurist Imagination: Word + Image in Italian Futurist Painting, Drawing, Collage and Free-Word Poetry" (1983) and "Severini Futurista, 1912-1917" (1995). Hanson originally trained as an artist before obtaining her PhD in art history from Bryn Mawr in 1962. She taught at Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and NYU, and sewed as a consultant to the International Study Center at MOMA before joining the Yale faculty. From 1974 to '78, she served as chair of the art history department, again the first woman to hold such a position at Yale. Her book Manet and the Modern Tradition (1977) won the College Art Association's Morey Award for art-historical scholarship. She served as president of CAA from 1972 to '74 and, in 1992-93, was a Kress professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Kermit S. Champa, 64, art historian and critic, died July 22 in Providence, R.I., of lung cancer. A specialist in modernism and 19th-century French painting, Champa earned a BA at Yale (1960) and an MA at Harvard (1965). He returned to Yale as an assistant professor, and then in 1970 moved to Brown University, where he taught until his death. He became a full professor in 1974 and was for a time chairman of the art department. In 1995 he was named Andrea V. Rosenthal Professor in the history of art and architecture. As a critic, Champa was best known for his strong commitment to abstract painting; his subjects included Miro, Mondrian, Olitski, Frankenthaler, Sandi Slone and others. His articles appeared in Art News, Artforum, Arts, Art Journal and the New Criterion. In his youth, Champa trained as a musician, and his lifelong interest in music often intersected with his art-historical scholarship. In The Rise of Landscape Painting in France: Corot to Monet (1991), he applied the paradigm of 19th-century symphonic music to broaden his interpretation of landscape painting and support its intellectual importance. His other books include "Masterpiece" Studies: Manet, Zola, Van Gogh and Monet (1994). He was awarded the Officers' Cross by the Federal Republic of Germany for his book German Painting of the 19th Century. An impassioned lecturer, he was named one of the 10 sexiest professors in America by Esquire magazine in 1975.

Rose Silvka, 85, art critic and A.i.A. contributor, died Sept. 2, in Southampton, N.Y., of heart failure. From 1959 to '79, she was the editor in chief of the magazine Craft Horizons. In her writings on craft during that period, which saw a significant erosion of the traditional boundaries between the fields of fine art and craft, she focused on artists concerned with formal qualities and creative expression rather than with traditional skills and techniques. Among her subjects were Peter Voulkos, Dale Chihuly, Isamu Noguchi and Lenore Tawney. The magazine changed format and leadership in 1979, and became American Craft. A year later, Slivka launched a quarterly, Craft International, which lasted only a few issues. Her perceptive reviews and essays always evinced a strong personal sympathy for artists that was based on her roots in the New York art world of the 1950s and '60s. She contributed occasional articles and numerous reviews to Art in America over the years, among them notable pieces on Voulkos and Elaine de Kooning. In 1978, she published Peter Voulkos: A Dialogue with Clay. She moved to Long Island in the mid-'80s and became the art critic for the East Hampton Star. She reviewed art for the paper until she became ill last year, after which she continued to write book reviews.

Paul Neagu, 66, Romanian-born British sculptor, died June 16. Influenced by Cubism, Duchamp and Brancusi, his compositions featured geometric, skeletal forms in various materials including wood and steel. Interested in giving physical form to complex philosophical ideas, he sometimes engaged in performances. He was included in the 1995 Venice Biennale and in "Out of Action: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979" at L.A. MOCA in 1998. A retrospective of his work appeared at the National Museum of Art of Romania in 1997.

Fred Backer, 90, artist and printmaker, died June 30 in Amherst, Mass. His early work was inspired by Surrealism and Contructivism, but he was better known for the abstract gestural prints he began making in the 1950s. After working for the WPA in the early 1930s, he had his first one-person show in 1938 at the Willard Gallery in New York. Beginning in 1948, he taught for 20 years at Washington University in St. Louis, where he established the printmaking department. He later joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts. His most recent shows were at Susan Teller Gallery in New York (2002 and '03).