Obituaries : Carroll Cloar; Painter Helped Commemorate Clinton Inauguration

Carroll Cloar, 80, a Southern painter whose work helped commemorate President Bill Clinton’s inauguration last January. Cloar’s 1968 painting of schoolchildren holding an American flag was one of six works selected for Clinton inaugural posters. A native of Earle, Ark., Cloar studied at the Memphis Academy of Arts, where he later taught, and Southwestern College in Memphis, and served in the Air Force during World War II. His paintings, chiefly of the South, were displayed in such institutions as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, and at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. He had been suffering from cancer. On Saturday in Memphis of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.