William Rubin; important MOMA curator
Hyfler/Rosner
William Rubin, 78, Curator Who Transformed MoMA, Dies
By ROBERTA SMITH NY Times
William Rubin, an art historian and curator who, as director
of the Museum of Modern Art's prestigious department of
painting and sculpture, played a crucial role in defining
the museum's character, collections and exhibitions in the
1970's and 80's, died on Sunday at his weekend home in Pound
Ridge, N.Y., the museum said. He was 78 and lived in
Manhattan.
He had been in declining health for several years, said his
wife, Phyllis Hattis.
An imposing man with a barrel chest, roughly chiseled
features and a booming voice, Mr. Rubin was tenacious as
both a scholar and a personality, and at the height of his
power more or less spoke for the Modern. Above all, he
played a central role in championing the historical
narrative of modernism that MoMA came to be identified with
and is now seeking to move beyond.
He brought to his mission an art historian's training and
experience as a private collector of Surrealist and Abstract
Expressionist art, which he installed and reinstalled in a
loft he lived in decades ago on lower Broadway.
John Elderfield, the current chief curator of the department
of painting and sculpture, said that Mr. Rubin built on the
legacy of Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum's first director,
who famously diagrammed the evolution of modern art starting
with Neo-Impressionism.
But Mr. Rubin "was the one who really brought to it the
historical positivistic sense of order, and the notion of
the great unrolling of the modern movement," Mr. Elderfield
said.
His legacy is a complex one. Mr. Rubin might have
contributed almost as much as Barr to building the Modern's
unparalleled collection of early modernist works. He was
known for his indefatigable energy in wooing collectors and
negotiating with dealers once he had zeroed in on art that
he felt the Modern should own. His acquisitions for the
museum include emblematic works like Picasso's "Charnel
House" (1944-45), Miró's Surrealist "Birth of the World"
(1925) and two 1950's cutouts by Matisse, "Memory of
Oceania" and "The Swimming Pool."
He gave the museum "Australia," a seminal 1951 sculpture by
David Smith from his own collection. But he was probably
proudest of landing Picasso's "Guitar," a groundbreaking
metal-construction sculpture from 1912-13 that the artist
handed over to him on a sunny winter day in the south of
France. (Mr. Rubin had offered to trade a small Cézanne
painting in MoMA's collection for it, but Picasso donated
the sculpture instead.)
He also greatly expanded the museum's holdings in Abstract
Expressionism, an area that Barr was sometimes thought to
have neglected, with major works like Pollock's "One: Number
31, 1950" and Barnett Newman's 1950-51 "Vir Heroicus
Sublimis," and opened it up to Color Field painting and the
work of contemporary artists like Anthony Caro and Frank
Stella.
Mr. Rubin continued the museum's practice of pruning weak or
redundant works from its collection - by dead artists only -
to help finance new acquisitions. In a move that raised some
eyebrows in the art world, he instituted the practice of
taking sealed bids from dealers when selling a work, which
worked to the museum's advantage.
And he organized many influential exhibitions, starting with
"Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage," in 1968, and
including shows of late Cézanne, two surveys of Mr. Stella's
work and a parade of Picasso shows.
Among these were an enormous 1980 Picasso retrospective that
filled the entire museum; "Picasso and Braque: Pioneering
Cubism" of 1989, with its vivid sense of two competitive
innovators working side by side; and, eight years after Mr.
Rubin's retirement in 1988, an exhibition of Picasso's
portraits that was criticized by some art historians for
being organized by the artist's successive relationships
with women.
Some critics faulted Mr. Rubin's exhibitions and research
for only rarely venturing beyond the parameters established
by Barr, suggesting that this had a chilling effect on his
department's involvement with new art and often made the
museum seem obsessed with its own history. His painting and
sculpture installations were generally formalist and
chronological, with an emphasis on masterpieces, great
artists and the French.
Yet Mr. Rubin's painstakingly worked-out presentations,
especially those prepared after the Modern's 1984 expansion,
told its version of modernism with a clarity and level of
detail that many curators still consider unmatched.
He emerged in an age when the heads of the museum's
departments ruled their individual fiefs like titans, but
his fief was the biggest, and so, perhaps, was his ego.
According to a 1985 New Yorker profile by Calvin Tomkins, he
once complained to John Hightower, then the museum's
director: "I'm sick of the prima donnas in this place. I'm a
prima donna, but I deserve to be one." He sounded much like
the orchestra conductor he had once hoped to be.
William Stanley Rubin was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 11, 1927,
the eldest of three sons of Mack and Beatrice Rubin. His
father, the son of immigrants, was a textile merchant who
began with a pushcart and ended up owning several factories,
and eventually moved his family to Riverdale in the Bronx.
Mr. Rubin and his brothers attended the Fieldston School,
each of them serving as captain of the football team in his
senior year.
While at Fieldston, Mr. Rubin became close with one of his
teachers, Victor D'Amico, who was the director of education
at the Museum of Modern Art. He began spending much of his
free time at the museum working on special projects with Mr.
D'Amico.
He entered Columbia University and, after interrupting his
studies to serve in the American occupation forces in
Europe, earned a bachelor's degree in Italian language and
literature. He studied musicology at the University of Paris
for a year with the thought of becoming a conductor. At its
end, he set aside that ambition and returned to Columbia for
graduate work in history. A course in medieval art taught by
Meyer Schapiro, a popular teacher whose other big area of
expertise was the New York School, inspired him to shift to
art history.
During the 1950's and 60's, Mr. Rubin taught art history at
Sarah Lawrence and City University of New York, worked as an
editor for Art International and became a busy collector of
postwar art. He bought works by many of the Abstract
Expressionist painters and by younger artists like Jasper
Johns and Mr. Stella, but he later said that once he began
working on MoMA's collection he lost interest in collecting
for himself. At the time of his death, he was completing a
book on the works he acquired for the museum.
Mr. Rubin, whose first three marriages ended in divorce, is
survived by his wife and their daughter Beata; and his
brothers, Richard of Purchase, N.Y., and Lawrence of Milan.
Mr. Rubin became friendly with Alfred Barr in the late
1950's and 60's, frequently inviting the curator to lecture
his classes at Sarah Lawrence, and taking his students on
field trips to the Modern. In 1957, Barr invited Mr. Rubin
to organize a small exhibition of the work of André Masson
at the Modern; in the mid-1960's, he asked him to oversee
the Modern's big Dada and Surrealism survey in 1968.
Mr. Rubin joined the museum's painting and sculpture staff
as curator in 1967 and immediately made an impact by
persuading the art dealer Sidney Janis and his wife,
Harriet, to donate their collection, with its five
Mondrians, to the Modern. He was named chief curator of
painting and sculpture in 1969, and director of the
department in 1973.
In the 1980's, the aura of infallibility that had surrounded
Mr. Rubin began to dissipate. He came to feel that the
museum's inattention to new art was a "failing," as he told
The New York Times in 1985, and began a search for a younger
curator more in touch with the times.
Still, some of the most vociferous criticism was drawn by a
1984 exhibition - "Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity
of the Tribal and the Modern," organized with J. Kirk
Varnedoe, the art historian whom he selected as his
successor. (Mr. Varnedoe died in 2003.) Some art critics
complained that this show, pairing works by modern masters
with examples of the African and Oceanic art that had
influenced them, took a purely formalist approach that
stripped the non-Western works of their original contexts,
meanings and purposes. A sharply critical review in Artforum
set off an exchange between Mr. Rubin and its author, Thomas
McEvilley, that stretched into two issues.
As Mr. Rubin explained later to Mr. Tomkins: "The notion
that you can look at a work of art as pure form strikes me
as idiocy. If the work comes at you, it comes with
everything it's got, all at once."