Robert Rosenblum; Independent obit (art historian)
Hyfler/Rosner
Art historian and Guggenheim Museum curator celebrated for
his contrariness
The Independent
21 December 2006
Charles Darwent
It was typical of Robert Rosenblum that he was curating
exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic at the time of his
death; Rosenblum's energy was undiminished even in his 80th
year and stricken with colon cancer. The shows, in Paris and
Houston, reflect the extent to which the Manhattan dentist's
son had stormed the barricades of European art history.
(Rosenblum's 1967 masterpiece Transformations in Late 18th
Century Art remains the most important work on French
Revolutionary painting.) But they also hint at another
Rosenblumian trait, namely his impishness.
The first show, "Portraits Publics, Portraits Privés", at
the Grand Palais, is the sort of exhibition you'd expect
from a historian of Rosenblum's stature: a scholarly, if
slightly dull, romp through portraiture from 1770 to 1830.
(This will move to the Royal Academy in London in February
under the name "Citizens and Kings".) The second, at
Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, is not. Called "Best in
Show", its subject is the dog in art from Jacopo Bassano to
Jeff Koons, via Titian, Gerrit Dou and Sir Edwin Landseer.
Its breadth of period and air of whimsy - Rosenblum was
notoriously devoted to a pet bulldog called Archie - is the
kind of thing to make serious art curators curl their toes.
Yet, as often in his career, it is this apparently shallower
work that is the more interesting and, perhaps, more
important.
Although he questioned the term, Rosenblum was a
postmodernist. Schooled at Yale in the art-historical rules
of genre and period, he delighted in breaking both.
Transformations wasn't just about the late 18th century: its
real interest lay in the birth of modernist painting a
hundred years later.
His biggest recent show in London, the Royal Academy's
"1900: art at the crossroads" (2000), looked sideways rather
than forwards and back. The notion that modernism was a
French invention that developed outside the art-historical
mainstream was knocked on the head: Scott Tuke bathers were
hung next to baigneuses by Cézanne, Alma-Tadema nudes side
by side with Degas'. Speaking at a recent symposium to
honour Rosenblum, a colleague remarked that "thanks to Bob,
art history has become a smorgasbord . . . rather than the
table d'hôte of strictly Gallic dishes it had been for
generations". Apparently oblivious to this, the French
government appointed him to the Légion d'honneur in 2003.
There is little doubt that Rosenblum's insistent eclecticism
changed the face of late 20th-century curating. His
reshuffling of the art-historical pack was echoed in the
anti-chronological hangs at the Musée d'Orsay and Tate
Modern. Like those hangs, Rosenblum's brand of relativism
had its detractors. Reviewing "1900" during its run at the
Guggenheim, the New York Times critic huffed that it was
"hard to remember the last time so many bad pictures were in
one place at one time," adding, viperishly, "unless you
consider eBay to be a place". To get what Rosenblum was up
to in a show, you had to understand the rules he was
breaking. This was fine for his fellow art historians, but
could leave non-expert visitors with the sense of having
wandered into a souk.
But Rosenblum was secure in his own world view, and so none
of this bothered him much. In a field where specialisation
tends to be ever more narrowly focused, he refused to be
tied to a period or place. After the triumph of
Transformations, he confounded colleagues at New York
University, where he taught until his death, by deserting
French art for German. His Modern Painting and the Northern
Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (1975) repeated the
success of the first book by forging an improbable link
between two artists working a century apart.
Occasionally, Rosenblum's fondness for rocking the boat
could be mistaken for grandstanding. In 2001, he co-curated
an exhibition at the Guggenheim of the work of Norman
Rockwell - an illustrator whose anodyne, Evening Post images
of America made "Best in Show" 's pooches look positively
dry. ("If I can enjoy Frank Capra, why can't I enjoy Norman
Rockwell?" reasoned Rosenblum.)
Even friends described this "as the crowning achievement of
Rosenblumian contrariness", although his public reviling of
Edward Hopper may have run it a close second. His taste for
what he called "the messy mix" of High and Low extended
beyond the realms of art. "Bob could be discussing some fine
point in Picasso's development and then turn to a topic like
airline menus, in which he had a great interest," recalls a
colleague.
At best, this breadth of vision produced extraordinary
results: Rosenblum's book Introducing Gilbert & George
(2004) is as full of insight as his works on Friedrich or
the French Revolution. The stable of his students is
legendary, both in its size and its range of interests:
Rosenblum described himself as a "soup-to-nuts" teacher,
which, for 40 years, he was.
This description also gives an idea of life at the Greenwich
Village house he shared with his wife, the artist Jane
Kaplowitz. Furnished with a dazzling mix of great art and
junk, the Rosenblum household was endlessly convivial. As
with his writing, you might find yourself there in the
presence of a great artist or of a nobody to whom Rosenblum
had taken a shine, both of them treated with equal respect.
Charles Darwent
Robert Rosenblum, art historian and curator: born New York
24 July 1927; Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton
University 1956-66; Professor of Fine Arts, New York
University 1967-2006; Slade Professor of Fine Art, Oxford
University 1971-72; Curator, Guggenheim Museum 1996-2006;
married 1977 Jane Kaplowitz (one son, one daughter); died
New York 6 December 2006.