Artlyst looks back on the innovators who passed away in 2015. These are the people who have made an outstanding contribution to our industry, in the many layers of the art world, whether it be as a painter, sculptor, designer, photographer, art critic, curator or collector.
January 2015
Charlie Hebdo staff, cartoonists and colmunists: Cabu, Elsa Cayat, Charb (editor in chief), Philippe Honore, Bernard Maris, Mustapha Ourrad, Michel Renaud, tignous, Georges Wolinski who were all killed in an horrific terrorist attack in Paris Read More
Ivor Abrahams RA, painter and sculptor best known for his stylized prints of gardens and monumental sculptures of owls
February
Sheila Girling, Modernist painter of intense colours and wife of Anthony Caro Read More
John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins was one of the best-known counterculture figures of London in the 1960s, as both a photographer and journalist and political activist
March
Albert Irvin RA, prolific abstract artist best known for his brightly coloured paintings, watercolours, screenprints and gouaches Read More
William Bowyer RA, traditional landscape and portrait painter, Hon Secretary of the New English Art Club
Michael Graves, American Post-Modernist architect and designer, member of the New York Five, Memphis Group and best known for his designs for Alessi Read More
Robert Clatworthy RA sculptor known for his bronzes of stylized animals
April
Alfred Taubman, self-made billionaire, developer of the modern shopping centre and disgraced owner of Sotheby’s Read More
Sargy Mann, painter whose problems with his vision affected his work and enabled him to use colour more daringly
Moira Gemmill, Director of capital programmes at the Royal Collections Trust and former Head of Design at the V&A killed in a cycling accident Read More
Jack Knox, Scottish painter and former head of painting at the Glasgow School of Art
May
Chris Burden, performance artist who took this new art form to its extreme in the 1970s addressing political, environmental and technological change Read More
June
Alan Bond, Australian Art collector famed for paying the record price at the time for Van Gogh’s Irises Read More
July
Jules Wright, founder of the wapping project, Read More
Elena Khudiakova, Russian artist and fashion designer Read More
August
Charles Goldstein, nazi-looted art restitution expert, Read More
David Michie, Scottish painter and former Head of Painting and Drawing at Edinburgh College of Art
Irving Harper, designer of the Marshmallow sofa and sunburst clock
September
Brian Sewell, Art Critic for the Evening Standard known for his outspoken and controversial views on Modern and contemporary art Read More
Ionel Talpazan, outsider artist whose brightly coloured pictures of UFOs were inspired by a boyhood encounter in his native Romania
Roland Collinns, British watercolourist who found fame in later life and who exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy Summer exhibition
Jonathan Woolf, modernist architect of private houses influenced by Mies van der Rohe
John Perreault, art critic for Artnews, Soho news and the Village Voice Read More
October
Hila Becher, German artist and photographer who with her husband photographed vanishing industrial structures Read More
Dora Holzhandler, naïve painter of domestic and religious live
Bruce Mozert, pioneer of underwater photography
Wojciech Fangor, Polish pioneer of op art Read More
Paul Reed, last living member of the washington colour school Read More
November
Holly Woodlawn, performer and iconic transgender Warhol superstar Read More
Anita Besson, founder of Galerie Besson specialising in studio ceramics
December
Leslie Waddington, legendery art dealer who exhibited and dealt work by many of the greatest artists of the 20th century, from Picasso, Matisse, Baselitz, Morandi, Flanagan, Arp to Laurens, Leger, Miró, Tápies and Dubuffet. Read More
Ellsworth Kelly – leading American Abstract Expressionist painter and one of the last remaining abstract artists who helped shape American painting Read More
Compiled by: Sara Faith Artlyst 2016