As the days grow shorter and the light of the world fades, thoughts of death haunt my mind. Around this time of year, newspapers and websites run lists of everyone notable who died over the course of the year. The death list is immense every year. I want to acknowledge a few that were meaningful to me in one way or another. I thought of grouping them by what they were known for, but I decided I would order them by age, from oldest to youngest. At the beginning of the month, Jerry Saltz posted the following query: “What six artists/writers died too young? He got a flood or replies (mine was "John Keats, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Franz Marc”). But for my personal 2022 death list, only one of the deceased here died too young, and only barely. All of them had long, full, productive lives. People born in the 1920s are approaching their hundreds. People born in the 30s and 40s are in their 80s and 70s; the Bible says “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” (Psalm 90:10). I don’t feel sad for people who died after long lives.
Philip Pearlstein (May 24, 1924 – December 17, 2022). Pearlstein is the oldest artist on this list, 98 years old when he died. He is famous for being a realist painter in a time of abstraction, a counterrevolutionary. His nude paintings are aggressively unerotic—he was well-known for painting nudes from unusual angles and posing them with strange objects. His vision of the human body as a subject is formalistic. For Pearlstein, bodies are shapes in space. I don’t know how Pearlstein viewed the human body, or even if he theorized what he painted. Nor do I believe a body can be ideologically neutral—people as subjects mean something to artists and viewers. But perhaps more than any other painter, Pearlstein suppressed this aspect of the human body.
Claes Oldenburg (January 28, 1929 – July 18, 2022). A pop artist who is best known for his mock-monumental sculptures of ordinary objects and things taken from pop culture. Both the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Menil Collection have a lot of two dimensional Oldenburg work in their collections, and there are two large Oldenburg sculptures that I know of here in Houston. The MFAH has Giant Soft Fan–Ghost Version on view in the Kinder building, and Geometric Mouse, Scale X has lived outside the downtown public library for decades.
Lee Bontecou (January 15, 1931 – November 8, 2022). To be totally honest, I know almost nothing about Lee Bontecou except to say that I have loved her artwork whenever I’ve seen it. I’m not totally sure how to describe it—wall sculpture? Her works often remind me of roses just before they bloom, made of sailcloth and steel. She is best known for her work in the 1960s, and her work doesn’t fit into any of the stylistic narratives of the era. At this point, I think this is one of the things I find interesting about Bontecou. You can see one of her works now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
Loretta Lynn (April 14, 1932 – October 4, 2022). I will admit that compared to other country singers, my knowledge of Loretta Lynn and her music is shallow. It can’t be denied that she produced a large number of totally classic country songs throughout the 60s and 70s, she came from a legendarily hard-scrabble childhood, and came from a musically gifted family (Crystal Gayle is her younger sister).
Raymond Briggs (18 January 1934 – 9 August 2022). Briggs was an English book illustrator who specialized in children’s books for most of his career. I think he would have been a well-respected illustrator if that was all he had done, but in the mid-80s, he produced a book called When the Wind Blows, in which a elderly married couple (based on Brigg’s own parents) try to survive a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union by following the instructions on a civil defense pamphlet. Briggs was apparently appalled that these utterly inadequate civil defense instructions were being supplied to the British public. His subsequent work was much more political and serious (and aimed at grownups). The book Briggs did that I loved most was his emotional biography of his parents, Ethel & Ernest. His actual parents were two working class folks who lived in London through the blitz in World War II (Briggs himself was evacuated to the countryside after their home was damaged by bombing), and who age as Britain struggles to recover from the war in the 1950s. It powerfully tells the story of ordinary people living through times over which they have no control. I find it hard to read Ethel & Ernest without becoming emotional.
Paula Rego (26 January 1935 – 8 June 2022). Of all the artists on my death list, I am least familiar with Rego. I have never seen one of her paintings in person; as far as I know, none of her works are in any public collection here in Houston. A contemporary of David Hockney, Frank Auerbach, and others in the London Group, her paintings have a magical feeling, dealing a lot with Portuguese folklore. I long to see them in person.
Jerry Lee Lewis (September 29, 1935 – October 28, 2022). Jerry Lee Lewis had a nice long life and sang a number of absolutely classic rock songs.
Angelo Badalamenti (March 22, 1937 – December 11, 2022). I know almost nothing of Badalamenti’s life except that his moody music was used in almost all of David Lynch’s film projects. (He had a cameo appearance in Mulholland Drive.) I loved his theme for Twin Peaks, enough that when I rewatched it on streaming video, I never skipped the title sequence. I wanted to hear it again and again. One might think of his work as quiet and atmospheric, but in the nightclub scene in Fire Walk With Me, he produced an ominous bit of rock and roll which has always stuck with me.
S. Clay Wilson (July 25, 1941 – February 7, 2021). A lot of great underground comics artists died this year. S. Clay Wilson had been hanging on for years after being assaulted coming home from a bar before he finally died of his injuries. I recognize his importance, but I never loved his art. It seemed busy and unfocused, the shocking bits were heavy handed and obvious, etc. His importance is that he freed other underground cartoonists to release their misogyny. His influence was baleful. I met him once at a small press festival in New York City. He was there with his wife and mother-in-law, a poet who had published a small collection of poems that were, I recall, excellent. Wilson was jovial and good-natured—he seemed utterly unlike his comix work.
Justin Green (July 25, 1945 – April 23, 2022). Of all the underground cartoonists on my list this year, Green is my favorite. His masterpiece is Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, in which he incorrectly self-diagnosed his OCD as a kind of religious mania. He was one of the very first autobiographical cartoonists, revealing embarrassing details about himself. This kind of self-revelation gave his peers and cartoonists who followed him permission to tell these kinds of stories about themselves—he gave birth to a whole genre of comics, autobiography. Robert Crumb, one of my favorite cartoonists, had been given permission to indulge his misogyny by S. Clay Wilson, but then the influence on his work by Green and Aline Kominsky-Crumb (who also died this year) lead him to produce his finest comics. For that alone, Green should be honored. But his work was great in its own right!
Gal Costa (26 September 1945 – 9 November 2022). Costa died on November 9 and was the subject of a post I wrote the day she died.
Mike Davis (March 10, 1946 – October 25, 2022). When I lived in Los Angeles in the mid 90s, I made a point of reading as much about the city as possible—lots of Raymond Chandler, John Fante, James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, etc. One book I read that made a big impression on me was City of Quartz by Mike Davis. This nonfiction book examined Los Angeles’s history and the chthonic forces that affect the city—which seemed related in a way to the noirish Los Angeles literature that I was also reading. There was a part of Los Angeles that everyone knew—beaches, Hollywood, etc.—and a hidden Los Angeles of racial oppression, money, and cops. Davis helped me see that. I later read Ecology of Fear which felt like Davis was reaching a little. But he was an important thinker about one of America’s most important places. (I wish there were a City of Quartz about Houston.)
Diane Noomin (May 13, 1947 – September 1, 2022). Diane Noomin, like Aline-Kominsky Crumb, has been criticized for riding the coattails of her more famous husband (Bill Griffith, in this case). To say that this is unfair criticism is an understatement. Without knowing anything about the couple’s private life, one can see why they would be attracted to one another artistically—both are social satirists. I never loved Noomin’s cartooning, but as an editor she was exceptional (another quality she shared with Griffith)—her two Twisted Sisters anthology books were eye-opening anthologies, and the recent Drawing Power: Women's Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival is excellent, and her 1978 classic of suburban discomfort, Lemme Outa Here, is a masterpiece.
Aline Kominsky-Crumb (August 1, 1948 – November 29, 2022). Like Diane Noomin, Kominsky-Crumb’s reputation was harmed by her marriage to Robert Crumb. But she had her own approach. Like Justin Green, she was one of the pioneers of autobiographical comics, and she undoubtedly influenced Robert Crumb’s work. In fact, the two collaborated on several comics and a series of stories published in The New Yorker. She also collaborated with Diane Noomin in their Twisted Sisters comic book. Kominsky-Crumb became the editor of Weirdo, the comics anthology magazine started by Robert Crumb, later edited by Peter Bagge, and finally edited by Kominsky Crumb; her run as editor is memorable. I met her once when we put on a huge exhibit of alternative comics in an art space in Seattle called CoCA, but I’m pretty sure she saw me as a pesky fanboy.
Kevin O’Niell (22 August 1953 – 3 November 2022). I wrote an account of O’Neil and his work when he died earlier this year. He was 69 years old when he died of cancer.
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