Artists and art world figures

Artists and art world figures

Philip Conisbee, 62; curator of European paintings at the National Gallery of Art and previously the L.A. County Museum of Art (Jan. 16)

Milford Zornes, 100; California artist best known for his watercolor landscapes (Feb. 24)

William Brice, 86; an artist best known for grand-scale abstract paintings that suggest fragments of ancient classical ruins, and an influential art teacher at UCLA for decades (March 3)

Eugenia P. Butler, 61; a formative figure in conceptual art who often incorporated the written or spoken word in spare exhibits that explored notions of time, space and thought (March 29)

Edward Den Lau, 80; owner of L.A.’s influential Space Gallery in the 1970s (April 13)

Robert Rauschenberg, 82; artist changed course of American and European art with his imaginative commitment to hybrid forms of painting and sculpture (May 12)

Alton Kelley, 67; San Francisco graphic artist whose work captured the mood and music of the psychedelic era (June 1)

Ralph Bacerra, 70; a Los Angeles ceramic artist who created teapots and other vessels adorned with geometric shapes and rich colors (June 10)

Raul Alarcon Sr., 82; a Cuban exile who built a Spanish-language communications and entertainment empire in the United States (June 11)

Bruce Conner, 74; a San Francisco artist known for his collages, black-and-white drawings and short films (July 7)

Sherman E. Lee, 90; a former longtime director of the Cleveland Museum of Art whose keen-eyed collecting of old European and Asian masterpieces gave it international prestige (July 9)

Perez Celis, 69; Argentine painter, sculptor and muralist whose highly visible work adorned buildings and products throughout South America (Aug. 2)

Tina Allen, 58; a Los Angeles sculptor who depicted such figures as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass in her works (Sept. 9)

Ruth Greenberg, 93; a sculptor and basket weaver who for more than two decades ran Malibu’s Tidepool Gallery (Oct. 18)

Patricia Faure, 80; a prominent Los Angeles art dealer who was a distinctive fixture in the L.A. art world for more than three decades (Oct. 21)

William Wharton, 82; an Expressionist painter who launched a new career as a novelist in his 50s and won an American Book Award for his first novel, “Birdy” (Oct. 29)

Walter Gabrielson, 73; an artist, teacher and writer who interpreted human behavior in lusciously colored paintings and poked fun at the art world with vivid wit (Nov. 12)

Grace Hartigan, 86; an abstract Expressionist painter once hailed as the leading female artist of her generation (Nov. 15)

Guy Peellaert, 74; a Belgian pop artist whose surreal pictures for the 1972 cult book “Rock Dreams” brought him worldwide attention and led him to design album covers for the Rolling Stones and David Bowie (Nov. 17)

Peggy Chun, 62; Honolulu artist known for her watercolor paintings of island life and Hawaiian-themed Christmas ornaments (Nov. 19)

Robert Graham, 70; Los Angeles sculptor with a towering public presence who designed major civic monuments across the nation (Dec. 27)