India, Oct. 17 -- Peter Nagy, the American artist and gallerist who founded Nature Morte, died on October 13 after a long illness. He was 67, and had lived in Delhi for over three decades.

I met Peter somewhere in the late 1980s in New York. I was in my 20s, assisting photographers in studios in the days of film, and doing the rounds of the city. The East Village was still a little dangerous after sundown, but it had St Marks Place and the music, and further east Alphabet City, where they said Avenues A, B, C, and D stood for adventurous, brave, crazy, and dead. It was where anyone young and curious about art, or about the underbelly of the city, wanted to be. For many of us, the West Village was Disneyland, with its fancy bars, overpric...