In Passing

Paris

Heinz Berggruen, Picasso collector

Heinz Berggruen, an influential collector of Pablo Picasso’s artworks and longtime friend of the artist, has died in France.

Berggruen, 93, died Feb. 23 at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just west of Paris. The cause of his death was not revealed.

Berggruen, whose Picasso collection was one of the world’s biggest with more than 130 works, made significant gifts of modern art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Berggruen was born in Berlin on Jan. 5, 1914. Of Jewish background, he had to leave Germany during the Third Reich. He studied in Germany and France before leaving for the United States in 1936, where he became a U.S. citizen and worked as a freelance art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. After World War II, he settled in Paris and dedicated himself to collecting art.

Tacoma

Ben Gilbert, journalist

Ben Gilbert, a reporter and editor at the Washington Post for nearly 30 years who later became a government official in Washington state and an advocate for the hard-of-hearing, died Feb.28 at Hospice House near his home in Tacoma. He was 89 and had been battling breast cancer that had migrated to his lungs.

A strong-willed city editor and later a deputy managing editor and associate editor of the editorial page, Gilbert had a reputation as a tough and exacting newsman who was extremely knowledgeable about the city and dedicated to journalism’s role as an agent of change in the community.

As city editor, he pushed to expand the newspaper’s coverage of race relations, and in 1968 he helped direct coverage of riots in the city after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis.

“He was a hard man to love, but he was a hell of a newspaperman,” said Benjamin C. Bradlee, managing editor of the Post during Gilbert’s final five years at the paper. “He got things done.”

Henderson, Nev.

Hal Rothman, Las Vegas historian

Hal Rothman, a widely quoted writer, historian and expert on modern Las Vegas who brought an academic approach to a bastion of popular culture, died Feb. 25 at his home in Henderson, Nev. He was 48.

Rothman had battled amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The chairman of the history department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, from 2002 to 2005, Rothman wrote or edited more than a dozen books on the American West, including “Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West” (1998), “The Grit Beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas” (2002, edited with Mike Davis) and “Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century” (2002).

At the beginning of his academic career, Rothman focused on environmental history and the National Park Service. But after arriving at UNLV in 1992, he began studying the impact of tourism on the economy, society, culture and environment of the booming desert metropolis that attracted an estimated 38.9 million visitors last year.