I was surprised to find news of Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s death in the listing of worldwide news on the front page of yesterday’s issue of The Wall Street Journal Europe, which I picked up this morning on the plane from Ljubljana to London. The Austrian painter suffered a heart attack on board the Queen Elizabeth II after he boarded in Auckland, New Zealand. He was seventy-one. I imagined him younger, perhaps because he was the first artist Lauren had introduced me to just after we met. She took me to his exhibition in Boston, and she told me many anecdotes about his ideas about art, the very day we promised ourselves to each other. The news thus stung me in a way I had not expected.