OCTOBER 18, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 15

Milestones
By HANNAH BEECH

DIED. BERNARD BUFFET, 71, prolific French painter who rebelled against the popular abstract school and filled his 8,000-plus canvases with bold lines and somber subjects; by committing suicide, in Tourtour, France. Although neglected by the French art establishment, Buffet earned praise abroad for his graphic existentialism, best expressed in his bleak landscapes and melancholy clowns.

DIED. ALASTAIR HETHERINGTON, 79, doughty former editor of British newspaper The Guardian who saved the broadsheet from merger mania and helped it find its authoritative liberal voice; in Sterling, Scotland. After taking the helm of the provincial Manchester Guardian in 1956, Hetherington steered the paper to national prominence and moved its headquarters to London, where he attracted young and female readers with cutting-edge cultural coverage and left-leaning columns.

DIED. EMIL SCHUMACHER, 87, dynamic German abstract expressionist who pioneered the "informal art" style, which glorified workmanship and paint application as the image itself; at his vacation home in Ibiza, Spain. In the 1950s, Schumacher discarded his draftsmanship training to focus on completely abstract images, piling on thick swirls of industrial paint and drips of tar so that the encrusted mass resembled molten lava or a frenzied whirlpool.

DIED. ALEX LOWE, 40, tenacious American alpinist whose enormous strength and stamina allowed him to tackle the earth's most formidable mountains, after an avalanche buried him and cameraman David Bridges; on the upper slopes of the world's 14th-highest peak, Tibet's Shishapangma. Considered by many mountaineers as the world's best climber, Lowe was known less for a drive to conquer peaks than for a pure love of vertiginous exhilaration while scaling Pakistan's Great Trango Tower or lofty Mount Everest.

SENTENCED DINKO SAKIC, 78, the last known living World War II concentration camp commander, to 20 years' imprisonment for running the Jasenovac camp in Croatia; in Zagreb. Sakic fled to Argentina at the end of the war and was extradited last year to his homeland. Although skeptics wondered whether Croatia's current nationalist government would try Sakic fairly for running Jasenovac--considered the worst of more than 20 camps operated by the country's pro-Nazi puppet government--the court handed down the maximum sentence for his war crimes.

ARRESTED. AMANULLAH KHAN, 65, determined chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, by Pakistani police who stopped his pro-independence activists from marching into Indian-held Kashmir; near the heavily fortified Line of Control dividing the contested Himalayan region between India and Pakistan. Although the South Asian neighbors have both claimed Kashmir since 1947, Khan is fighting for an independent Kashmir homeland.