Milestones, Jul. 28, 1958

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Died. Guy Pène du Bois, 74, Brooklyn-born Greenwich Village painter, art critic, autobiographer (Artists Say the Silliest Things), father of Painter Yvonne Pène du Bois and Writer-Illustrator William Pène du Bois, uncle of Broadway set and costume Designer Raoul Pène du Bois; of cancer; in Boston. With George Luks, John Sloan, William Glackens, Du Bois was an honor student in Robert Henri's pre-World War I Ashcan School of American art, i.e., realists. With his richly colored, firmly fleshed figures (Bal des Quatre Arts, Carnival Interlude), Du Bois—whose work is represented in Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art—bucked the march toward abstraction, wrote that "the vast majority of today's painters, like victims of battle trauma huddled in dark and silent rooms, shun the real life that flows around them. They seem almost to have become terror-stricken of it—proof, perhaps, of T. S. Eliot's gloomy prediction that the world will not end 'with a bang but a whimper.' "

Died. Henry Farman, 84, Englishman who became one of the first flying Frenchmen (99 ft. in 1907), champion cyclist, auto racer, painter, planemaker, first man to fly a heavier-than-air machine over New York City (1908); of a heart ailment; in Paris. In 1908 Farman won the 50,000-franc Deutsch-Archdeacon Prize by flying (in a closed circle) the first kilometer-in-air over Europe, nine months later made the first city-to-city flight, a hop of 17 miles from Chålons-sur-Marne to Reims. One of the first designers to utilize such basic devices as the aileron and floats for hydroplanes, he set up his own factories before World War I. In 1917 he built the Goliath, prototype of big passenger airliners and inaugurator of cross-Channel commercial service; by 1932 he had built a monoplane hermetically sealed for the stratosphere.

Died. Richard G. Herndon, 85, theatrical producer (first try: 1914's The Lady in Red), impresario who introduced Anna Pavlova and Waslaw Nijinsky to U.S. balletomanes, managed concert tours for Enrico Caruso, Mischa Elman, Jacques Thibaud; in Philadelphia.

Died. Fred T. Ley, 86, president of Fred T. Ley & Co., Manhattan real estate management firm, builder of the 1,046-ft., 77-story Chrysler Building, world's second tallest skyscraper; in Manhattan.

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