Starving Artist Knifed to Death in Village Room… Famous Artist Dies Penniless and All Alone… Deep in the archives of The Metropolitan Museum of Art are two strange scrapbooks packed with century-old newspaper obituaries of painters, illustrators, sculptors, and photographers, famous and forgotten alike. Somber death notices of luminaries like Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin are preserved on their crumbling pages, side by side with tragic and often grisly stories of obscure artists who met their demise as victims of accident, murder, poverty, and disease. Compiled from 1906 to 1929, the scrapbooks not only memorialize the subjects of these obituaries: they also record graphic and sensationalized news reporting from the heyday of yellow journalism.
Who collected the artists’ obituaries? What was their purpose for the Met Museum? Were the scrapbooks assembled in a nod to Giorgio Vasari’s bestselling sixteenth-century magnum opus,
