Mel Bochner, an artist who produced often witty work, exploring the boundaries of art and the power of language in drawings, painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, books, installations and public art — new ideas in conceptional art —  died on Feb. 12 in Manhattan. He was 84.

“In 1970, I wrote on a gallery wall, ‘Language Is Not Transparent,’” Mr. Bochner told curators at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022, when the museum held a retrospective of his work. It was a statement that all language has hidden agendas and motives. The first thing that power corrupts is language…My work doesn’t address political issues directly. But at the same time, I do agree with Charlie Chaplin: ‘If it isn’t funny, it isn’t art.’”

Marshall Rose, a real estate developer who was instrumental in reviving the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and transforming the adjacent Bryant Park from a mecca for drug dealers into a verdant Midtown oasis, died on Feb. 15 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.

A chairman of the library’s board of trustees from 1990 to 1995, Mr. Rose, along with his predecessor, Andrew Heiskell, and Vartan Gregorian, the library’s longtime president, engineered the resurgence of the Beaux-Arts landmark on Fifth Avenue and the derelict greensward just to its west.

“He was an unstoppable force of nature when it came to protecting and building what the public needed from its library,” said Anthony Marx, who in 2011 succeeded Paul LeClerc as the library’s president.

Ken Rosenthal, who opened a bakery café near St. Louis, with sourdough bread as its star, and built it into a small chain that would become Panera Bread, died on Feb. 14 at his home in Scottsdale, AZ. He was 81.

Mr. Rosenthal’s detour from selling women’s dresses to selling baked goods proved a smart one. From 1987 to 1993, he and his three partners expanded the first café into a chain of 20 stores in Missouri and Atlanta. In 1995, the cafés were bought by Au Bon Pain, which changed the corporate name to Panera Bread. Panera currently has 2,230 restaurants in the United States.

Mr. Rosenthal explained his operating style when he talked to The Post-Dispatch in 1997. “I’ve always been best when I’m completely challenged,” he said. “When things get to be routine with me, I suppose I lose a little interest. I’m not a great operator. I’m a better pioneer than I am anything else.”

Linda Lavin, the Tony Award-winning Broadway actress known also for starring as a waitress and single mom in the long-running TV sitcom “Alice,” died Dec. 29 in Los Angeles. She was 87.

Between 1962 and 1973, Ms. Lavin performed I eight Broadway productions, including the lead role in Neil Simon’s “Last of the Red Hot Lovers.” On TV, “Alice” ran from 1976 to 1985 and earned Ms. Lavin two Golden Globe Awards and an Emmy nomination. When the show ended, she returned to the New York stage and in 1987 won the Tony Award for best actress for her role as Kate Jerome in Mr. Simon’s “Broadway Bound.”

Throughout her career, she received five more Tony nominations, and starred in Hollywood and TV movies, and several TV series.

Richard Foreman, the avant-garde playwright and impresario who founded the Ontological Hysteric Theater, won a bookshelf of Obie Awards, and received a MacArthur fellowship in his late 50s, died on Jan 4 in Manhattan. He was 87.

Mr. Foreman established his company in 1968 and went on to present more than 50 of his own plays. The company name refers to the metaphysical study of the nature of existence and to Mr. Foreman’s conviction that the situations he worked with were, as he told John Rockwell of The New York Times in 1976, “basically hysteric — repressed passions emerging as philosophical interactions.”

Richard M. Cohen, an outspoken and award-winning television news producer whose career was eventually derailed by the ravages of multiple sclerosis, which he wrote about in a best-selling memoir, died on Dec. 24 in Westchester County. He was 76.

Mr. Cohen spent more than 20 years in the news business, working with luminaries like Ted Koppel at ABC and Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather at CBS. But his memoir, Blindsided: Lifting A Life Above Illness, and articles for HuffPost, The New York Times and other publications dealt with M.S., a degenerative disease of the central nervous system. In spite of compromised body functions, he worked into the mid-1990s as a producer for CBS News, CNN, PBS and FX.

Mr. Cohen was married to Meredith Vieira, a former “Today Show” host.

Seymour P. Lachman, a former New York State senator who quit the Legislature in disgust with the political shenanigans in Albany in the 1990s, and wrote two books that helped spur reforms, died on Jan. 2 at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.

The book told of the corrupting power of money, the outsize influence of lobbyists, and public authorities’ lack of accountability. At his death, Mr. Lachman was director emeritus of the Hugh L. Carey Institute For Government Reform, which he founded in 2008 at Wagner College on Staten Island.