In Memoriam is published every Wednesday afternoon and honors those we recently lost in the art world.
Doris F. Fisher (1931–2026)
Arts patron
The co-founder of clothing retail company The Gap, she, and her husband, Don, amassed one of the country’s largest modern and contemporary art collections. The couple pledged more than 1,000 works to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2009. A portion of that collection consiting of nearly 250 works by 35 artists is currently on view at the museum, including exhibitions on Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Alexander Calder, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, and others.
Stephanie Chernikowski (1941–2026)
Photographer of punks and stars
Living in an Andy Warhol-owned loft on the Bowery in Lower Manhattan in the 1970s, she captured a burgeoning New Wave movement in the historic rock club CBGB across the street with her camera. She also photographed the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, and Run-DMC for magazines like the Village Voice and the New York Times, and her works were shown in institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum.
Georg Baselitz (1938–2026)
German Neo-Expressionist painter
The influential German painter was known for his robust, often violent, Neo-Expressionist paintings, as well as for his controversial belief that women could not be great painters. In his works, he often explored Germany’s culpability in World War II and the nation’s postwar identity, alongside formal experiments as seen in his upside-down pieces and late works exploring the desolation of old age.
George Herms (1935–2026)
Titan of West Coast assemblage
One of the founding members of the West Coast Assemblage movement, he transformed found materials and cast-off debris into poetic representations of impermanence, suffused with pathos and humor. He was included in the influential exhibition The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961, and created iconic public artworks in Los Angeles.
José María Cruz Novillo (1936–2026)
Artist of post-Franco Spain
He created the aesthetic identity of Spain in the 1970s and ’80s, designing the logo for the railway Renfe, the energy company Repsol, the postal service Correos, and more. He was also a painter, sculptor, and film poster designer, and won Spain’s National Design Award in 1997, the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 2012, and the Laus de Honor in 2023.
Dan Fontes (1958–2026)
Bay Area muralist
One of the most celebrated muralists of Oakland, California, he was renowned for murals of wildlife under freeway underpasses, among dozens of other public artworks around the area. He served on the board of directors of the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda, which housed many of his smaller murals.
Nicole Hollander (1939–2026)
Feminist cartoonist
She was the force behind Sylvia (1980–2012), a brazenly feminist cartoon about a cigarette- and cat-loving feminist, a comic strip syndicated in newspapers like the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and Tribune Media Services. Earlier in her career, she also worked as a graphic artist, redesigning the feminist Chicago newsletter The Spokeswoman into a magazine and creating the comic strip Feminist Funnies.
Timm Ulrichs (1940–2026)
German conceptual artist
He dubbed himself a “total artist,” renaming his home and studio the “Werbezentrale für Totalkunst & Banalismus” (“Advertising agency for total art, banalism, and extemporism”). He taught sculpture at the Kunstakademie Münster in Germany from the 1970s to 2000s, and his work was included in Documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977 and various solo exhibitions around the nation.
