Robert Rosenblum, 79, Fine Arts Scholar
Hyfler/Rosner
BY STEPHEN MILLER - Staff Reporter of the Sun
December 8, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/44814
Robert Rosenblum, who died Wednesday at 79, was a professor
of fine arts at New York University and an associate curator
at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where he helped
organize the 2001 exhibit "Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the
American People."
Rehabilitating or recovering artists spurned or forgotten
was a specialty of Rosenblum's. His scholarly interests
spanned the 18th and 19th centuries and ran right up to
brash modern artists such as Jeff Koons and John Currin.
A prolific essayist, Rosenblum published 18 books, including
"Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art" (1967) and
"Nineteenth Century Art" (with H.W. Janson, 1984). He also
published more specialized studies on individual artists,
including Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and Mr. Koons, as well
as the charmingly titled "The Dog in Art From Rococo to
Post-Modernism" (1988).
For that book, Rosenblum considered art ranging back to a
shaved, beribboned poodle by the 18th-century painter
Jean-Jacques Bachelier and a statue of a defecating dog by
the 19th-century Italian sculptor Adriano Cecioni, as well
as more modern depictions by Edouard Manet and Alberto
Giacometti.
Rosenblum was born in New York, the son of a Manhattan
dentist. After studying at Queens College and Yale
University, he earned a Ph.D. from New York University in
1956. In 1960, he published his first book, "Cubism and
Twentieth Century Art."
After teaching at Princeton University, the University of
Michigan, and Yale, he joined NYU in 1967 as a professor at
the Institute of Fine Arts. In 1976, he was appointed the
Henry Ittleson Jr. professor of modern European art.
In 1996, Rosenblum became a curator at the Guggenheim, where
he worked on such shows as "James Rosenquist, the Swimmer in
the Econo-Mist" and "Picasso: The War Years, 1937-45."
His exhibit "1900: Art at the Crossroads" made a splash in
New York, appearing just a century after its subject year.
The show included modernist heroes such as Cézanne and
Gauguin and what Rosenblum dubbed "emerging avant-gardes,"
including Picasso and Munch. But, typically for Rosenblum,
interspersed with these were artists now largely forgotten
but wildly popular in 1900, among them Adolphe-William
Bouguereau, a French painter whose reputation Rosenblum
helped restore.
For the Norman Rockwell exhibit, which opened just months
after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Rosenblum helped
gather 70 paintings and all of Rockwell's Saturday Evening
Post covers in a celebration of an American original.
"It was almost a way of discovering some simple truth,
namely that these pictures were great to look at even though
we had been brainwashed to think that they weren't,"
Rosenblum told CBS newsman Charles Osgood.
Far from being an uncritical celebrant of America, though,
Rockwell was shown in the exhibit as a trenchant critic of
civil rights in the South and also of the Vietnam War. Then
there was Rockwell's famous depiction of Rosie the Riveter,
a muscular figure about to bite into a ham sandwich, against
a backdrop of an American flag. It was entirely typical of
Rosenblum's approach that he pointed out to a television
audience that Rockwell had borrowed her pose directly from
Michelangelo's painting of the prophet Isaiah in the Sistine
Chapel.
Robert Harvey Rosenblum
Born in New York City on July 24, 1927; died December 6 at
his Greenwich Village home of colon cancer; survived by his
wife, Jane Kaplowitz, and children, Sophie and Theodore.