1966 deaths

Célestin Freinet ([seləsˈtɛ̃ fʀeˈnɛ], 15 October 1896 in Gars, Alpes-Maritimes – 8 October 1966 in Vence) was a noted French pedagogue and educational reformer.

Tristan Klingsor, birth name (Arthur Justin) Léon Leclère (born Lachapelle-aux-Pots, Oise department, 8 August 1874; died Nogent-sur-Marne, 3 August 1966), was a French poet, musician, painter and art critic, best known for his artistic association with the composer Maurice Ravel.
His pseudonym, combining the names of Wagner's hero Tristan (from Tristan und Isolde) and his (Wagner's) villain Klingsor (from Parsifal), indicates one aspect of his artistic interests, though he said that he chose the names because he liked the "sounds" they made, the associations with Arthurian and Breton legends he had read as a child, and that there were already too many literary men in Paris with the surname Leclère. Some of his "orientalist" poems are addressed to a mysterious "jeune étranger," possibly symbolising his gay orientation, although he did marry in 1903, and had a daughter two years later. His first collection, Filles-fleurs (1895), was in eleven-syllable verse. After this he often used a personal form of free verse. He was a member of the Fantaisiste group of French poets. Certain of his poems were set to music by composers including Charles Koechlin, Georges Hüe and Georges Migot, and he is best remembered as providing the texts for Ravel’s song cycle Shéhérazade (1903). He and Ravel belonged to the Paris avant-garde artistic group known as Les Apaches for whose meetings he was sometimes the host. He recorded his long acquaintance with the composer in an essay, "L'Époque Ravel". Ravel dedicated the first of his Trois Chansons to him in 1915.
Klingsor was also a painter (exhibiting from 1905 at the Salon d'Automne and being awarded the Prix Puvis de Chavannes in 1952). His visual art was reviewed twice by Guillaume Apollinaire: In 1906, he called Klingsor's attempts "Merde!" but in 1908, he was kinder, stating: "Klingsor animates his painting with the same sentimental delicacy that gives his poetry its somewhat contrived, dated charm. For my part, I prefer the poet to the painter.” He was also the author of several studies on art, and a composer in his own right, with several collections of melodies, four-part songs, and piano music.

Elio Vittorini (Italian: [ˈɛːljo vittoˈriːni] ; 23 July 1908 – 12 February 1966) was an Italian writer and novelist. He was a contemporary of Cesare Pavese and an influential voice in the modernist school of novel writing. His best-known work, in English speaking countries, is the anti-fascist novel Conversations in Sicily, for which he was jailed when it was published in 1941. The first U.S. edition of the novel, published in 1949, included an introduction from Ernest Hemingway, whose style influenced Vittorini and that novel in particular.

Robert Graf (November 18, 1923 – February 4, 1966) was a German actor who played the role of Werner, "The Ferret" in the 1963 movie The Great Escape. Graf was born in Witten, Germany in 1923.
In 1942, after completing his Abitur, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and sent to the Eastern Front. He was wounded in 1944, and assigned to war production duties in Munich, where he began his study of theater. In 1952, Graf married the actress Selma Urfer and had three children. He was the father of the director Dominik Graf. Robert Graf died of cancer in Munich in 1966 at age 42.

Enrico Musy, better known as Enrico Glori (3 August 1901 – 22 April 1966) was an Italian actor.

Alfred Helmut Naujocks (20 September 1911 – 4 April 1966), alias Hans Müller, Alfred Bonsen, and Rudolf Möbert, was a German SS functionary during the Third Reich. He took part in the staged Gleiwitz incident, a false flag intended to provide the justification for the attack on Poland by Nazi Germany, which ultimately culminated in starting World War II.

Battista "Pinin" Farina (later Battista Pininfarina; 2 November 1893 – 3 April 1966) was an Italian automobile designer and the founder of the Carrozzeria Pininfarina coachbuilding company, a name associated with many well known postwar cars.

Amédée Ozenfant (15 April 1886 – 4 May 1966) was a French cubist painter and writer. Together with Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (later known as Le Corbusier) he founded the Purist movement.

Luitzen Egbertus Jan "Bertus" Brouwer (27 February 1881 – 2 December 1966) was a Dutch mathematician and philosopher who worked in topology, set theory, measure theory and complex analysis. He is seen as one of the founders of modern topology, in particular through his establishing the fixed-point theorem and the topological invariance of dimension.Brouwer also became a major figure in the philosophy of intuitionism, a constructivist school of mathematics which argues that math is a cognitive construct rather than a type of objective truth. This position led to the Brouwer–Hilbert controversy, in which Brouwer sparred with his formalist colleague David Hilbert. Brouwer's ideas were subsequently taken up by his student Arend Heyting and Hilbert's former student Hermann Weyl. In addition to his mathematical work, Brouwer also published the short philosophical tract Life, Art, and Mysticism (1905).