PASSINGS: Johnny Sellers, Wu Guanzhong, Louis Moyroud, Jack Sydow

Johnny Sellers

Hall of Fame jockey

Johnny Sellers, 72, a hall of fame jockey who rode Carry Back to victory in the 1961 Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, died Friday at a nursing home in Arkansas, his son Mark told the Daily Racing Form.

A Los Angeles native who grew up in Oklahoma, Sellers also won the 1965 Belmont Stakes with Hail to All. He was the leading thoroughbred jockey in 1961 and finished his riding career in 1977 with 2,787 victories.

Sellers later became a bloodstock agent.

Wu Guanzhong

Leading Chinese modernist painter

Wu Guanzhong, 90, known as one of the fathers of modern Chinese art for combining Western and Chinese elements in black-and-white oil paintings, died June 25 in Beijing. The cause was not announced.

“He was an inspiration for many Chinese artists, even to this day, and one of the most important forces in modern Chinese art,” said Tan Ping, vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

Born in China’s eastern province of Jiangsu in 1919, Wu left to study Western painting at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-arts in Paris in 1947. He returned to China in 1950 to teach at Tsinghua University and the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s, he was sent to an agricultural labor camp and forbidden to paint. He returned to Beijing in 1973 and eventually was allowed to return to his artwork.

He became known for integrating traditional Chinese ink brush techniques with a contemporary Western flair in both ink and oil paintings of landscapes, architecture, animals and people.

Wu’s works have become valuable in recent years. Earlier this month, his oil painting from 1974 depicting the Yangtze River sold for $8.4 million at a Beijing auction.

Internationally, Wu gained attention in 1992 by becoming the first living Chinese artist to exhibit at the British Museum.

Louis Moyroud

Co-invented process of phototypesetting

Louis Moyroud, 96, co-inventor of the process of phototypesetting, which revolutionized the printing process, died June 28 at his home in Delray Beach, Fla., said his son Patrick. The cause was not given.

Louis Moyroud and Rene Higonnet developed the first practical phototypesetting machine, named the Photon. They first demonstrated the process in 1946. Typists would copy material into a machine. It used photography to generate sheets of paper that could be used to make plates for offset printing.

The process eventually replaced the use of metal type on printers.

Moyroud was born in Moirans, France, in 1914. He immigrated to the United States in the late 1940s after World War II.

Jack Sydow, who was nominated for a Tony Award for directing the 1966 Broadway revival of “Annie Get Your Gun” starring Ethel Merman and who taught drama for many years at the University of Washington, died May 28 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after a brief illness. Sydow, who had supporting acting roles at South Coast Repertory and on TV after moving to Los Angeles in the late 1980s, was 88.

— Times staff and wire reports

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