Adrian Dannatt has been hand-crafting obituaries for over twenty-five years for everyone from the Independent and Guardian to the Daily Telegraph, The Times and the Art Newspaper.
His subjects have largely lingered in the creative arena, whether artists such as Dash Snow, Ray Johnson and Dorothea Tanning or filmmakers such as Sandy Whitelaw and Gian Luigi Polidoro. He documented the premature demise of novelist Robert Bingham as well as a scattering of dangerous poets, including Rene Ricard, Gellu Naum and Bernard Heidsieck and even the world’s most famous lighting designer Abe Feder. Other celebrated lives have included fashion photographer David Seidner, actor Lance Loud, Warhol superstar Ultra Violet, and various religious cases from guru Michel de Salzmann to avant-garde Rabbi Lionel Ziprin and even leading French anti-semite Henry Coston.
A volume of some of his most improbable obituaries, entitled “Doomed & Famous”, is forthcoming from Sequence Press in New York.
Dannatt is author of several books on art and architecture including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (Phaidon) and Wim Delvoye (Yale University Press), curator of numerous exhibitions, and an occasional actor in everything from underground shorts to the TV series Just William (1977-78).