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Robert M. Murdock, Curator and Scholar, Dies at 67

Robert M. Murdock, an art historian and curator of 20th-century and contemporary art who organized some notable exhibitions, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 67.

The cause was cancer, said his wife, Dez Ryan.

Mr. Murdock’s career spanned more than three decades and several important American museums, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center.

Born on Dec. 18. 1941, he earned a B.A. from Trinity College in Hartford in 1963 and an M.A. in art history from Yale in 1965. That year he became the first intern named to the Ford Foundation museum curatorial training program at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the starting point of the museum’s reputation as an important training ground for young curators.

In 1970, after three years as a curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, he became the first curator of contemporary art at the Dallas Museum of Art. There his exhibitions included the first one-person museum show of Richard Tuttle’s work (1971); “Poets of the City: New York and San Francisco” (1974); and “Jess: Translations Salvages Paste-Ups” and “Berlin/Hanover: The 1920s” (both 1977)...
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