Vita Petersen, 1915-2011

Vita Petersen, German-born abstract artist, died Oct. 22 in New York, age 96. Petersen painted abstract, colorful forms characterized by rigorous, quiet gestures, often in pastel on paper. She showed with Betty Parsons Gallery in the 1960s, during which time she moved towards figuration, painting figures in a crowd or still lifes, but she returned to abstraction thereafter. Her paintings are in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Weatherspoon Art Museum.
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Werner Muensterberger: 1913-2011

Werner Muensterberger, psychoanalyst, art historian, author and collector of African art, died Mar. 6 at his home in New York. He was just shy of 98.

His 1994 book Collecting, an Unruly Passion examines collectors through a psychoanalytic lens, and has become a classic in the field, illuminating the motivation that drives collectors, and the childhood experiences behind their sometimes illogical behavior, e.g., collecting as an exercise in self-soothing, a way to cope with childhood anxiety or trauma. In the aftermath of its publication, various collectors signed up to be his patients, joining a long line of luminaries that had spent time on his couch since the 1950s, which included Danny Kaye, Laurence Olivier, James Dean and Marlon Brando. Some of them had been referred to Muensterberger by his colleague Erich Fromm, who was treating the same patients on the West Coast. His near-century-long life included exchanges with personalities like Thomas Mann, Mary Wigman, Pablo Picasso, Sigmund Freud, Constantin Brancusi, Walt Disney, Albert Einstein and Robert Rosenblum. 
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