Robert Rosenblum obit

This is close to home -- though I was not one of his students, many of my friends were. I was in New York for the tribute symposium in October; the turnout and the quality of the papers amply reflected Rosenblum's own wide contributions over many productive years:

Robert Rosenblum, an influential and irreverent art historian and museum curator known for his research on subjects ranging from Picasso to images of dogs, died on Wednesday at his home in Greenwich Village. He was 79. . .

For half a century, Mr. Rosenblum taught in the undergraduate and graduate art history divisions at New York University, where he occupied an endowed chair as professor of Modern European art starting in 1976. For the last decade he also served as curator of 20th-century art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Despite his illness, diagnosed in 2004, he continued his regimen of teaching, writing and lecturing until a few weeks ago. . .

Perhaps his most important book was “Transformations in Late 18th-Century Art” (1967), in which he argued that Modernism did not begin with the turn of the 20th century, as formalist critics saw it, but was a far more complex phenomenon that went back to 18th-century France, when attempts were first made to refresh Western visual culture. In 2003, the French government made Mr. Rosenblum a chevalier of the Legion of Honor for his scholarly devotion to that country’s art. But by then he had long since turned away from viewing the birth of Modern art as a strictly French phenomenon. On visits abroad, he had rediscovered the work of long-neglected artists like the German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916). . .

Still, his espousal of artists excluded from the art world A-list sometimes raised eyebrows. One controversial example was a 2001 exhibition at the Guggenheim devoted to the painter Norman Rockwell.

Posted by David on December 14, 2006 12:19 PM