Pedro Friedeberg, the Mexico-based artist and designer famed for his iconic Mano Silla (Hand Chair) created in 1962, has died at age 90. A key figure in 20th-century Mexican art, his singular work blended intricate, fantastical architecture with ornament and irony, creating a unique visual universe that defied easy categorization within movements like Surrealism or geometric abstraction.
Sylvain Amic, an art historian who became director of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris just 16 months ago, died suddenly at age 58 on Sunday in southern France due to heart failure. His death has shocked the French and international art world. Amic previously led the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, oversaw a consortium of 11 museums in Rouen, and served as an adviser to former French culture minister Rima Abdul Malak. He was in the midst of planning a permanent collection rehang and a new research center at the Orsay, and had recently organized a traveling exhibition of masterworks that visited Shanghai's Pudong Art Museum.
Georg Baselitz, the German painter and sculptor known for his provocative confrontations with Nazi history, has died. Born in 1938, he was one of the last living artists with direct childhood memories of the Third Reich. His early works, such as *Die große Nacht im Eimer* (1961) and his upside-down German eagles, deliberately shocked postwar West Germany by depicting obscene, shameful images of a society trying to forget the Holocaust. He famously exhibited a zombie Hitler woodcarving at the 1980 Venice Biennale alongside Anselm Kiefer, insisting on confronting rather than ignoring the Nazi heritage of the German Pavilion.
Sylvain Amic, the director of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, has died suddenly at age 58. His death was announced by French Culture Minister Rachida Dati, with President Emmanuel Macron expressing shock. Amic died of natural causes while on holiday in southern France. He had been appointed to lead the museum in 2024, fulfilling a long-held dream, but had not yet completed his main mission of rehanging the collection after renovations.
Dilys Blum, the longtime curator of fashion and textiles at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, has died at age 77. She retired last summer after 38 years at the museum, where she served as head of the costumes and textiles department, overseeing the care and interpretation of historic clothing and fabric-based art. Blum began her career at the Museum of London, later working at the Brooklyn Museum and the Chicago Conservation Center before joining the Philadelphia Museum in 1987. She curated notable exhibitions including "Off the Wall" (2019) and "BOOM: Art and Design of the 1940s" (2025), and authored several books on fashion history, including works on Elsa Schiaparelli, Roberto Capucci, and Patrick Kelly.
EL LEGADO PÚBLICO DE GONZALO DÍAZ
A collaborative research project, the Gonzalo Díaz Archive, was presented at the National Museum of Fine Arts in early 2025, focusing on the late artist's five-decade connection to the University of Chile. Just before his death in December 2025, Díaz publicly called for the university to safeguard a substantial part of his prolific work, and he was posthumously awarded the university's Rector Juvenal Hernández Jaque Medal. His widow, artist Nury González, will lead a funded project to transform his decades of preparatory notes and sketches into a new artist's book.