Divorced. Barbara Walters, 44, co-host of NBC's Today show and Not for Women Only; and Broadway Producer Lee Guber, 54, partner in one of the nation's largest chains of musical theaters; after 13 years of marriage, one adopted daughter; in Manhattan.

Died. Walter Jodok Kohler Jr., 71. three-term Republican Governor of Wisconsin (1951-56); of heart disease; in Sheboygan, Wis. The son of a former Wisconsin Governor and a member of the family that owns Kohler Co., one of the nation's largest manufacturers of plumbing equipment, Kohler was a solid backer of the Eisenhower Administration. His political career ended when he lost to liberal Democrat William Proxmire in the 1957 race for the Senate seat left vacant by the sudden death of Joseph R. McCarthy.

Died. Stuart Cloete, 78, prolific South African writer of short stories, essays and more than 20 novels; of a heart attack; in Cape Town. Though he was born in Paris and educated in England, Cloete felt most at home in the land of his Boer ancestors. His first novel, The Turning Wheels, about pioneering Afrikaners, published in 1937, was a bestseller in Britain and the U.S. But it was banned for 37 years in South Africa, perhaps because it described interracial love affairs. Cloete was blunt in assessing the movement toward independence in black nations. "I had thought that the white man was the black man's problem," he wrote. "I was wrong. The African's problem is to get on without him."

Died. Josef Albers, 88, abstract painter and influential art teacher at Black Mountain College and Yale; of heart disease; in New Haven, Conn. The German-born son of a house painter, Albers studied and taught--along with Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky--at Weimar's Bauhaus, the renowned laboratory-workshop of craft and design. When Hitler closed the Bauhaus in 1933, Albers came to the U.S., where he meticulously painted geometric patterns, notably squares within squares, and taught his students to see the ways colors interact. "His criticism was so devastating that I wouldn't ask for it," says Pop Painter Robert Rauschenberg, a former student. "But 21 years later, I'm still learning what he taught me."

Died. Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, 88, Britain's most celebrated and controversial military leader during World War II, who in 1942 led his countrymen to their initial victory over the Germans at El Alamein in northern Egypt; at Isington Mill, Hampshire (see THE WORLD).

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