Ronald Feldman
Ronald Feldman, who for nearly 50 years oversaw one of New York’s most consistently political, forward-looking art galleries, died on Dec. 20 at his home in Chappaqua, NY. He was 84.
Trained as a lawyer and deeply interested in politics, Mr. Feldman, at his Ronald Feldman Gallery in SoHo, exhibited artists who pushed boundaries with work that almost always had a political slant, including themes focused on women’s rights, the environment, totalitarianism, identity and war.
Warhol was a frequent visitor, often asking Mr. Feldman a question: “Do you have an idea for me?” Mr. Feldman eventually came up with an idea that appealed to Warhol, resulting in “Ten Jews of the 20th Century,” silk-screen portraits published in 1980 and first exhibited at Manhattan’s Jewish Museum.
Henry Grossman
Henry Grossman, a photographer who was best known for his formal portraits of celebrities and public figures, and who also immortalized the Beatles in thousands of unscripted antics, died on Nov. 27 in Englewood, NY. He was 86.
Mr. Grossman produced portraits of Eleanor Roosevelt, Richard M. Nixon, Elizabeth Taylor, Martha Graham, Leontyne Price, Leonard Bernstein and Nelson Mandela. His archive of Beatles photos, includes intimate moments at home, at private parties, and during overnight recording sessions — more images of the band taken over a longer period than any other photographer. Kaleidoscope Eyes, released by Curvebender Publishing, documents the archive.
“I think I got the pictures I got because I wasn’t asking or expecting anything from them. And I wasn’t posing them.” Mr. Grossman said. “I wasn’t injecting myself into the scene as a participant. I was just watching. I got what was there.”
Dick Savitt
Dick Savitt, the tennis Hall of Famer, who won the men’s singles championships at the 1951 Australian and Wimbledon Grand Slam tournaments, died on Jan. 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.
Savitt became the second American to win both the Australian and Wimbledon’s men’s major titles in a calendar year. Don Budge had accomplished the feat in 1938. Only Jimmy Connors (1974) and Pete Sampras (1994 and 1997) have matched them.
Savitt was ranked among the top 10 American players six times in the 1950s and among the world’s top 10 four times. He was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1976.
Rabbi Shimon Baadani
Orthodox Jews attend the funeral of Rabbi Shimon Baadani at a cemetery in Bnei Brak, Israel, on Jan. 11. Rabbi Baadani, who was 94, was the president of the Shas party’s “Council of Torah Sages,” a group of rabbis that provides spiritual guidance and sets policies for the ultra-Orthodox party’s political leadership. AP/Oded Balilty
Owen Roizman
Owen Roizman, a cinematographer who shot many of the premier films of a generation, has died. He was 86. [No further details of his death are available at this time.]
He was nominated for an Oscar five times — for “The French Connection,” “The Exorcist,” “Network,” “Tootsie,” and “Wyatt Earp.”
In 2017, he was honored with an honorary Academy Award for his contributions to the medium. In addition to his Oscar nominations, Roizman was nominated for an Emmy for cinematography (using film, not videotape) of the 1972 Liza Minnelli variety special “Liza With a Z,” directed by Bob Fosse. He received the American Society of Cinematographers’ lifetime achievement award in 1997. In 2001, Roizman won a lifetime achievement award from the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography Camerimage, held in Poland.
Naomi Replansky
Naomi Replansky, a self-taught American poet, whose work portrayed a world of labor, oppression and struggle, died on Jan. 7 at her home in Manhattan. She was 104.
She wrote of subjects seemingly unfit for poetry, in plainspoken language and songlike cadences. “Poetry for me,” she told the Jewish feminist journal Bridges in 2002, “is a way of mastering the world.”
Adolfo Kaminsky
Adolfo Kaminsky’s talent for forging realistic documents helped children, their parents and others escape deportation to concentration camps during WWII. His expertise enabled him to erase Jewish-sounding
names like Abraham or Isaac from ID and food ration cards, and substitute gentile-sounding names. He died Jan. 9 at his home in Paris. He was 97.
He continued to forge documents for three decades after the war, aiding insurgents in British-mandate Palestine, French Algeria, South Africa and Latin America. He finally gave up the forger’s life in the early 1970s, and went on to earn a living as a photographer, shooting evocative scenes like rain-slicked cobblestones and nighttime lovers on a bench far removed from the tumult of war.

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