C12 The Boston Globe FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2019
Obituaries
By Amy Qin
NEW YORK TIMES
BEIJING — His portraits
were among the most recogniz-
able in the world, rivaling the
Mona Lisa.
But few have heard of Wang
Guodong, the Chinese artist
who for years was responsible
for painting the enormous por-
trait of Mao Zedong — replaced
annually — that gazes down on
Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Mr. Wang, who was 88 when
he died Friday at a hospital in
Beijing, was chosen in 1964to
be the official painter of the 15-
by-20-foot oil portrait of Mao
that hangs steps from the par-
ty’s central seat of power, at the
Gate of Heavenly Peace. Por-
traits of Mao have been in-
stalled there since 1949, when
the Communists took power in
China; they are frequently re-
placed because they are ex-
posed to the elements. (A por-
trait of Chiang Kai-shek, the
Nationalist leader who lost the
civil war to Mao’s Communists,
had hung there previously.)
The job was one of the high-
est — and most intimidating —
honors available to a painter in
China. In a sign of Mr. Wang’s
stature in Communist Party cir-
cles, a funeral was held for him
Sunday at Babaoshan, the cem-
etery in Beijing reserved for
party elite, Beijing Youth Daily
reported. Mao Xinyu, Mao’s
grandson, was said to have sent
a wreath.
Over the years, Mao’s ap-
pearance evolved as portraits
were swapped out. At one point
he was depicted wearing an oc-
tagonal cap and a coarse wool-
en jacket. But even after Mr.
Wang stepped down as official
portrait maker in 1976, his suc-
cessors continued to paint iden-
tical portraits based on Mr.
Wang’s design, showing a rosy-
cheeked, grim-looking Mao
with his trademark chin mole.
But despite the portrait’s
prominence, the artist is little
known.
“Nobody is allowed to put
their names on that painting,”
Mr. Wang explained in an inter-
view with The Los Angeles
Times in 2006. “It’s that way be-
fore, and it’s that way now.”
Mr. Wang appeared not to
mind. For him, anonymity
came with the job of creating
what one prominent art histori-
an called “the most important
painting in China.”
But like many who lived
through the turbulence of
Mao’s totalitarian rule, Mr.
Wang was not always in such
good standing with the party.
During the Cultural Revolu-
tion, the decadelong period of
political tumult that convulsed
the country from 1966 to 1976,
Mao’s image was prominently
displayed in millions of homes,
schools, factories, and govern-
ment buildings across the coun-
try. As the leader’s personality
cult grew, Mr. Wang found him-self under attack by the student
militants known as Red
Guards, who persecuted any-
one they considered ideologi-
cally impure or insufficiently
devoted to Mao.
They called Mr. Wang a capi-
talist because of his family
background, and they criticized
him for painting Mao from an
angle that showed only one ear.
This, they said, implied that
Mao was listening to only a se-
lect few, not the masses.
“How many ears I painted
was not up to me,” Wang later
explained. “It was decided by
the central government.” He
said all of the artists who paint-
ed Mao did so based on a gov-
ernment-issued photo and were
instructed not to deviate from
it.
Nevertheless, Mr. Wang was
subjected to a so-called struggle
session, in which he was
brought onto a stage and pub-
licly humiliated. Mosquitoes
were swarming around him,
but “I didn’t even dare to swat
them away,” he recalled in a
2004 interview with a Chinese
magazine.
As punishment, Mr. Wang
was sent by authorities to work
asacarpenterinaframingfac-
tory for two years. But he was al-
lowed to keep his title, and he
continued to paint the official
portrait, this time with two ears.
In the 1970s, Mr. Wang se-
lected 10 Beijing art students as
apprentices. They werescreened first for their political
reliability and second for their
artistic ability. They were
taught the basics of portrait
painting and learned how to
stay within the boundaries of
political acceptability.
Wang Guodong was born
June 25, 1931, in Beijing. Little
could be determined about his
youth or his family life. His
death was reported by Chinese
state media. His survivors in-
clude two sons.
The Mao portraits, still
based on a version designed by
Mr. Wang, have varied little in
recent decades. Each is seen by
millions of tourists every year
as they visit Tiananmen Square
and the Palace Museum.
The portraits have been van-
dalized several times, including
during the pro-democracy pro-
tests in Tiananmen Square in
1989, when three young dem-
onstrators pelted one with ink-
filledeggs.Hourslater,thede-
faced portrait was taken down
and replaced with a spare. The
protesters served lengthy pris-
on sentences.
“It’s a very complex image,”
Wu Hung, an art historian at
the University of Chicago, said
of the painting in a 2006 New
York Times article. “It has dif-
ferent meanings to different
people. To the party, it symbol-
izes the party and the nation’s
founding. But to a lot of people
it symbolizes China, or it has
very personal memories.”WangGuodong,88,painterofMao’sofficialportrait
NG HAN GUAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS/FILEMr. Wang painted the Mao portrait in Tiananmen Square from 1964 to 1976. His successors painted identical portraits.
By Harrison Smith
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON — Dawda
Jawara, a veterinary surgeon
who treated cattle in Gambia
before helping his tiny West Af-
rican nation achieve indepen-
dence from Britain, then pre-
sided over its pro-Western, mul-
tiparty democracy for 24 years
as the country’s first president,
died Aug. 27 near Banjul, the
capital. He was 95.
His death was confirmed by
President Adama Barrow, who
said that Dr. Jawara made
Gambia ‘‘a champion of inter-
national peace, justice, and hu-
man rights.’’ Local media re-
ported that he died at his home
in the coastal suburb of Fajara.
Dr. Jawara was considered
the founding father of Gambia,
a narrow country of 2 million
dominated by the Gambia River
and surrounded on three sides
by Senegal. Modest and self-
deprecating, he was raised in
the nation’s rugged interior and
went on to survive a bloody re-
bellion before being deposed by
another coup in 1994.
For seven years, he watched
from exile in London as his suc-
cessor, Yahya Jammeh, steered
the country toward the strong-
man-style rule that Dr. Jawara
had rejected for so long. He was
eventually allowed to come
home, where he settled with his
two wives — legally recognized
in Gambia — into a role as an
elder statesman and national
icon, celebrating Gambia’s 50th
anniversary and the recent re-
turn to democracy.
The Scottish-educated Dr.
Jawara was said to be Gambia’s
only veterinarian when he be-
gan working in the mid-1950s
for the British colonial govern-
ment.‘‘There’snotacowinthe
Gambia that doesn’t know me
personally,’’ he once said. That
connection to the countryside,
and to the civil servants labor-
ing alongside him, helped
launch his political career just
as independence movements
were taking hold across the
continent.
Dr. Jawara became a leader
of the People’s Progressive Par-
ty, was elected to Gambia’s
House of Representatives in
1960, and became prime minis-
ter and head of government
two years later. He was instru-
mental in negotiating the coun-
try’s 1965 independence, a
milestone he celebrated with a
mansa bengo — a traditional
‘‘gathering of kings’’ — that in-
cluded the Duke and Duchess
of Kent, guests from some 30
nations, and a coterie of ‘‘sooth-sayers and standard bearers,’’
according to the BBC.
His efforts earned him a
knighthood from Queen Eliza-
beth II, the country’s head of
state until a referendum made
Gambia a republic and Dr.
Jawara its first president in- He won handily in subse-
quent elections and generally
drew high marks for overseeing
an open political culture and
free press, with Washington
Post journalist Leon Dash writ-
ing in 1980 that Gambia was
‘‘the only West African nation
to combine unruffled indepen-
dence with genuine, multiparty
democratic government.’’
But Dr. Jawara also strug-
gled with droughts that devas-
tated the country’s agricultural,
peanut-driven economy, and
with intermittent reports of
corruption and nepotism.
Those charges contributed to a
1981 coup, led by a 27-year-old
Marxist revolutionary who an-
nounced he was installing a
‘‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’’
Dr. Jawara was visiting Lon-
don at the time, attending
Prince Charles’s wedding to La-
dy Diana Spencer, and relied on
the Senegalese army — Gambia
did not have a military — to
drive the rebels out of the capi-
tal. One of his wives and several
of his children were reportedly
seized as hostages, and when
hostilities ended after one
week, officials put the death toll
at 500. Unofficial estimates
rose as high as 2,000.
The incident spurred the
creation of Senegambia, a loose
confederation between Senegal
and Gambia that lasted for
eight years. Jarawa eventually
turned toward Nigeria for mili-
tary support.
He was driven from office in
July 1994, when disgruntled
soldiers loyal to Jammeh —
then a 29-year-old army lieu-
tenant — staged a bloodless re-
volt. Dr. Jawara escaped the
country aboard a US Navy war-
ship, fortuitously anchored off
Banjul for military exercises,
and unsuccessfully called on
Britain and the United States to
return democracy to Gambia.
Dawda Kairaba Jawara was
borninthecentralGambian
town of Barajally on May 16, - His father was variously
described as a prosperous trad-
er and a farmer, who selected
Dawda out of his six sons to re-
ceive schooling in the capital,
then known as Bathurst. Dr.
Jawara studied veterinary med-
icine at the University of Glas-
gow, graduating in 1953, and
returned to Gambia.
DawdaJawara,Gambian
foundingfatherwholed
countryfor24years;at95
By Dylan Loeb McClain
NEW YORK TIMES
NEW YORK — Ann Nelson,
a theoretical physicist who
helped plug holes and solve
contradictions in the Standard
Model, the template that forms
the backbone of our under-
standing of fundamental parti-
cles and the universe, died Aug.
4 in the Alpine Lakes Wilder-
ness in Washington state. She
was 61.
She died in a hiking acci-
dent, said her husband, David
Kaplan, who is also a physicist.
He said the two of them were
trekking with friends when Ms.
Nelson slipped and fell into a
gully.
Dr. Nelson stood out in the
world of physics not only be-
cause she was a woman, but al-
so because of her brilliance.
Howard Georgi, a Harvard
professor who was Dr. Nelson’s
doctoral adviser and is consid-
ered one of the leading theoreti-
cians in particle physics, wrote
on a eulogy page on the website
of the magazine Physics Today:
“I have had many fabulous stu-
dents who are better than I am
at many things. Ann was the on-
ly student I ever had who was
better than I am at what I do
best, and I learned more from
her than she learned from me.”
In 2018 Dr. Nelson was
jointly awarded, with Michael
Dine of the University of Cali-
fornia Santa Cruz, the J.J. Saku-
rai Prize, considered the high-
est prize in particle physics out-
side the Nobel.
She also received a Guggen-
heim Fellowship in 2004 and
was elected to the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences
in 2011.
Particle physics focuses on
the basic building blocks of ev-
erything in the universe. The
fundamental particles that have
so far been identified have been
given esoteric names like
quarks, leptons, muons, and
taus. Electrons, the negatively
charged particles that circle the
nuclei of atoms, are leptons,
while protons and neutrons,
which form the nuclei of atoms
and therefore make up most of
the visible mass in the universe,
are each composed of three
quarks.
Together, all those particles
form the Standard Model of
particle physics, the creation of
which is one of the signature ac-
complishments of physicists in
the 20th century and underlies
the field of quantum physics.
Though the Standard Model
has proved to be consistent in
predicting experimental re-
sults, it falls short of providing
a complete explanation of inter-
actions among particles, and of
how the universe works. Some
of those shortcomings were
what Ms. Nelson addressed.
One problem she tackled
was explaining why there
seems to be so much more mat-
ter than antimatter in the uni-
verse, a violation of a basic prin-
ciple in physics called symme-
try. According to physics
computations and theories,they should exist in equal
amounts. To account for the
discrepancy, Dr. Nelson and
others came up with a rigorous
mathematical and theoretical
model that allowed for a viola-
tion of the symmetry rule dur-
ing the time that the universe
was expanding and matter and
antimatter were being created.
She also worked on theories
to extend the Standard Model
to include super particles that
would be a combination of fer-
mions (quarks and leptons) and
bosons (particles that, like pho-
tons, carry forces). Physicists
have been anticipating their
discovery for decades and
working on experiments to find
them.
Ann Nelson was born in Ba-
ton Rouge, La., on April 29,
1958, the oldest of three daugh-
ters of Howard and Dorothy
Ann Nelson. Her father was a
vice president at Kaiser Alumi-
num; her mother was a docent
at the M.H. de Young Memorial
Museum in San Francisco after
the family moved to the Bay Ar-
ea when Ann was young.
Ann attended Stanford Uni-
versity. It was there, during a
freshman year advanced phys-
ics class, that she met David Ka-
plan, a fellow student.
She worked for a summer at
the European Organization for
Nuclear Research in Geneva,
known as CERN, the world’s
largest nuclear accelerator, be-
fore graduating from Stanford
in 1980. She continued at Har-
vard, earning her PhD in 1984.Before receiving her doctorate,
she published her first paper,
without any co-authors — rare
even for established theorists.
After teaching at other uni-
versities, she and Kaplan, who
were married in 1987, ended
up at the University of Wash-
ington in 1994. That was where
she was working when she
died. Her accident was unusual,
Kaplan said, as they hiked regu-
larly and had taken on far more
dangerous passages than the
one on which she fell. She was a
moderator of the Washington
Hikers and Climbers Facebookpage, which has nearly 120,000
members.
While at the University of
Washington, Dr. Nelson be-
came well known for champi-
oning diversity and social jus-
tice in the sciences and particu-
larly for mentoring students
from nontraditional back-
grounds. As part of her efforts
to reach more diverse students,
she had been giving lectures in
the Palestinian territories.
In particle physics, it is often
difficult to create the models to
explain how particles interact,
partly because the results canbe strange, even unsettling. Dr.
Nelson knew and accepted this.
“Ann told me,” Chanda
Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmolo-
gist based at the University of
New Hampshire who worked
under Dr. Nelson at the Univer-
sity of Washington, wrote in
Quanta magazine after her
death, “that to be happy as a
model builder in particle phys-
ics, I had to be OK with some-
thing like mounting a moose
head on a wall and putting a
purple scarf on it and not wor-
rying about why it was wearing
a purple scarf.”AnnNelson;physicistcastlightonconundrumswithinbasicbuildingblocksoflife
DAVID KAPLAN
Dr. Nelson, shown climbing Cannon Mountain in Washington, died in a hiking accident.