CAA News Today

Herbert R. Hartel Jr. is adjunct associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.

Marlene Park (photograph provided by William Park)

Marlene Park, an art historian and professor who specialized in twentieth-century American art and public art, who worked to preserve America’s public art for future generations, and who became an accomplished photographer in her later years, died suddenly on July 10, 2010, at the age of 78.

Park was born in Los Angeles on December 1, 1931. Her father, Warren Shobert, was a lawyer who worked for Paramount Studios. He claimed that he had met Marlene Dietrich on a stage set, and that she asked him to name his child after her, which is how Marlene’s name was apparently chosen. Park graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1953 with a major in merchandising. Not long after, while working in New York, she took a course at Columbia University that inspired her to pursue graduate study in art history. She received her MA and PhD in art history from Columbia, where she specialized in medieval art and studied with Meyer Schapiro. Her dissertation was a study of the Crucifix of Fernando and Sancha, an ivory sculpture from 1063 that is in the National Archeological Museum in Madrid. In 1958, she married William Park, who later became a professor of English at Sarah Lawrence College, and together they had two children. She was a professor of art history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY), from 1968 until 2000, and served on the faculty in the PhD Program in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center for over twenty years.

Once at John Jay, Park took a path similar to Schapiro as her scholarly efforts shifted from medieval art to American art. A pioneering scholar of 1930s government-supported art and American public art, she coauthored two books with her John Jay colleague Gerald Markowitz: New Deal for Art: The Government Art Projects of the 1930s with Examples from New York City and State (1977) and Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal (1984). She also wrote numerous essays and articles on New York post-office murals, images of lynching in the 1930s, and artists Blanche Lazzell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. In the 1980s Park was president of the Public Art Preservation Committee, based in New York. In this capacity, she worked to preserve important examples of public art, including the murals at the Rincon Annex Post Office in San Francisco.

As a member of CUNY’s art-history faculty, Park taught courses on American art of the 1930s, American art between the World Wars, public art in the United States, and American women sculptors. She opened the eyes of many students, introducing them to wonderful but little-known artists who became exciting topics for research papers and dissertations. I was one of many to benefit from this inspiration and guidance, and the list of those who similarly benefited is impossibly long to enumerate. Park cultivated enthusiasm for American modernist art among her students with an uncommon sense of caring and nurturing; she adeptly led them to serious, respected, and useful scholarship. She knew how to encourage and guide her students, to make them scholars while caring about them as people. In turn, her students had the utmost appreciation and regard for her. She embodied the ideal that art history is a humanistic academic endeavor.

Years spent documenting public art across the United States initiated and developed Park’s interest in photography as an art form. Many of her photographs of public art transformed themselves from documentation to artistic statements in their own right, and did so in that quietly thoughtful way that was uniquely Marlene. Upon retiring she and her husband moved to Santa Cruz, where she continued to spend time with her children and grandchildren. Devoting herself to photography, she created beautiful works in which she observed and recorded everyday life, the landscape of northern-central California, wildlife, and mechanical forms. In her seventies she learned the complexities of digital photography. Her photographs have been exhibited at Sarah Lawrence College, the Santa Cruz Art League, and elsewhere, and can be seen at www.marlenepark.com. Park exhibited her work often and acquired an impressive reputation as a serious and talented photographer. She also became very active in the art scene in Santa Cruz. Park’s decade of retirement was a model of how one can be productive and creative in those later years. She proved that although we must get older, we do not have to become stale. On the day she died, she attended the opening of a juried exhibition that included one of her photographs. I think Marlene left us after what was a very good day for her, a day spent doing what she loved, and for that we should be grateful.

Park is survived by her husband William, her children Catharine and William, her stepsons Jonathan and Geoffrey, and nine grandchildren. She will truly be missed by family, friends, colleagues, and former students, but will live on in her family, scholarship, photography, and the new generations of art historians she educated.

Wendy Calman is associate professor and cohead of printmaking at the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Marvin Lowe (photograph provided by Wendy Calman)

Marvin Lowe, an artist, musician, and professor emeritus at Indiana University, died peacefully on April 28, 2010, in Tucson, Arizona. He was 87 years old.

Lowe was born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 19, 1922. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School, studying math and physics while cultivating an early love for music, particularly jazz. Joining the Navy during World War II, he played tenor saxophone in Artie Shaw’s navy band, and in the band on the battleship Arkansas. Home from war, Lowe played with big bands led by Raymond Scott, Woody Herman, and Bobby Sherwood. On tour in St. Louis, he met the Watkins Twins, Juel and June, a professional vaudeville act whose signature performance included dancing on point atop a bass drum. Lowe married Juel on April 1, 1949. Music and dance filled their life together. Their daughter Melissa, born in 1955, became a professional ballerina, and their granddaughter Claire is an accomplished dancer in her own right.

Lowe entered the Juilliard School to study musical composition, then received a BA in English literature from Brooklyn College in 1955, spending his free time visiting art museums. He also began to draw. Performing in nightclubs, Lowe became friends with the iconic artist Larry Rivers, who also played sax. Lowe showed him his drawings, and Rivers was encouraging. Tired of the distractions of life as a jazz musician, Lowe applied to the printmaking program at the University of Iowa, where under the direction of Mauricio Lasansky he spent the next four years developing as an artist. Playing jazz to support his family, Lowe also took a job in the Physics Department, reawakening a childhood interest in astronomy and cosmology, elements that would resurface frequently in his work.

Receiving his MFA in 1960, Lowe taught at Berea College in Kentucky and at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. At a workshop in Florence, Italy, he met the artist Rudy Pozzatti, and “the rest is history.” Lowe was hired at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1967, where he and Pozzatti worked together building the IU Printmaking Workshop’s outstanding reputation for teaching and research. Joined by Wendy Calman in 1976, they spent fifteen years creating one of the most successful and highest-ranked printmaking programs in the United States.

Marvin Lowe, Earth, 1995, acrylic and college on paper (artwork © Marvin Lowe; photograph provided by Wendy Calman)

Lowe’s works have been shown in over two hundred national and international exhibitions, and can be found in eighty permanent museum, university, and corporate collections, most notably the British Museum, the Japan Print Association (Tokyo), the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. He has had over fifty solo exhibitions and received more than thirty awards, among them a National Endowment for the Arts Artist’s Fellowship and a Ford Foundation grant.

Retired from teaching in 1991, Lowe created an extensive repertoire of works forging new directions. His mixed-media pieces, which include aspects of collage, painting, and printmaking, some over ten feet wide, incorporated figurative elements, astrological charts, and decorative ritual forms. Ideas about science, politics, history, and music resound throughout this period. Lowe continued to live and work in the studio built for him by his family in Tucson, Arizona, where he settled after his wife Juel died in 2002.

Writing about their friend and colleague, Pozzatti and Calman stated, “His most important contributions are the least tangible. His exciting intellect, his energy, his tenacity, his generosity, and his great sense of humor have given those of us fortunate enough to have worked with him a presence that will remain as an inspiration to us all.”

Lowe is survived by his daughter Melissa Lowe Hancock; son-in-law Jory Hancock; granddaughter Claire Elise Hancock; nieces and nephews Geoffrey, Greg, and Cynthia Cortelyou, and Wedge and Kelly Watkins; and extended family. The legacy of his life lives on through them and the many students whose lives he touched.

William A. Peniston is librarian at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey.

Karle Lunde

Karl Lunde, art historian and professor emeritus at William Paterson University, died peacefully at his home in New York City on December 27, 2009. He was 78.

He was born on Staten Island on November 1, 1931, to Karl and Elisa Lunde, who had emigrated to America from Norway in the 1920s. He was educated at Columbia University, where he received his BA in 1952 and MA in 1954, in the field of art history. From 1957 to 1970 he was an instructor in the School of General Studies at Columbia.

Lunde directed the Contemporaries, an art gallery on Madison Avenue devoted to modern painting and sculpture, from 1956 to 1965. While there, he was among the first to encourage the collecting and appreciation of modern fine prints and to introduce Americans to the work of Fernando Botero, Jose de Creeft, Antonio Music, and Ricardo Martinez. He was an early champion of several young American artists, now much celebrated, including Robert Kipniss, Richard Anuszkiewicz, and Lorrie Goulet.

In 1970 Lunde received his PhD in art history from Columbia University. His dissertation on Johan Christian Dahl was the first English-language study of this influential nineteenth-century Norwegian landscape painter. That same year, Lunde became a professor of art history at William Paterson University of New Jersey, where he taught until his retirement in 1996. Over the years, Lunde developed a wide-ranging repertoire of courses, including classes on American painting and sculpture, Asian art, prehistoric art, and European Neoclassicism and Romanticism. A mesmerizing lecturer, Lunde received a university award for teaching excellence. He also assembled an impressive collection of over 30,000 personally annotated color slides, which he used in teaching and which he later donated to Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library.

A frequent contributor to professional and scholarly journals, Lunde also wrote several books devoted to the works of twentieth-century American artists, including Isabel Bishop (1975), Anuszkiewicz (1977), Robert Kipniss: The Graphic Work (1980), and John Day (1984). He also amassed a large and important collection of rare books, art objects, and antiques and donated paintings to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Newark Museum.

Lunde was predeceased by his partner, the artist and arts administrator Roy Moyer, and is survived by his brother, Asbjorn Lunde of New York.