Marion Cajori, Filmmaker Who Explored Artistic Process, 56

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Marion Cajori, an independent filmmaker who chronicled the creative
process in documentaries about artists, died on August 8, 2006, in
Manhattan, New York, having lived in Manhattan and Setauket, New York,
at the age of 56.

The cause was cancer, said Nicholas Quennell, a member of the board of
the Art Kaleidoscope Foundation, which produced her films.

Over her career, Ms. Cajori worked as a director, producer and writer.
She came by her interest in artists naturally, as the child of two New
York painters, Charles Cajori and Anne Child. Her parents separated
when she was young, and she grew up in art circles in New York and
Paris, France.

Ms. Cajori studied painting and filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts
in Manhattan, earning a B.F.A. in 1974. She was a member of the
feminist editorial collective Heresies in the early 1970's.

Her first film, "Sept. 11, 1972," was a Minimalist portrait of
sunlight in her studio, made with the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth.
She also collaborated with the video artist Joan Jonas and the director
Lizzie Borden. "White Lies," her narrative short-form film of 1981,
gave Willem Dafoe one of his first cinematic roles.

In 1990 she established the Art Kaleidoscope Foundation, which was
co-producer, with the independent filmmaker Christian Blackwood, of her
first widely known film, the award-winning 1992 documentary "Joan
Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter." The film presented an
unusually intimate view of this famously private, intractable painter,
whom Ms. Cajori first met when she was 9.

In 1998, PBS broadcast Ms. Cajori's Emmy-nominated special, "Chuck
Close: A Portrait in Progress." She recently completed a second
full-length feature about Mr. Close and the artists and curators whose
portraits he paints, which is to be released this year.

Since 1992, she had been working on a feature-length film about the
sculptor Louise Bourgeois with the art critic Amei Wallach. A segment
of "Louise Bourgeois: Art Is Sanity" was shown on "Art: 21" on
PBS in 2002. Ms. Wallach said she expected to complete the film by the
end of 2007.

Ms. Cajori was married to Paul Jay, but had been separated from him for
many years.

She is survived by her father; her brother, Lukas Weber of Portland,
Maine; and her daughter, Isabel Jay, and her son, Florian Jay, both of
New York, New York.

NY Times -- ROBERTA SMITH