Robert Rosenblum: 79, Curator and Art Historian, Dies
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.
He died from complications of colon cancer, said his wife, the artist Jane Kaplowitz.
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.
Equipped with a traditional art historian’s education, including a Ph.D. earned at the Institute of Fine Art at N.Y.U. in 1956, Mr. Rosenblum initially made his mark in the history of 18th- and 19th-century French art. In 1974 he was one of the organizers of the landmark show “French Painting, 1774-1830: The Age of Revolution” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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.
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He died from complications of colon cancer, said his wife, the artist Jane Kaplowitz.
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.
Equipped with a traditional art historian’s education, including a Ph.D. earned at the Institute of Fine Art at N.Y.U. in 1956, Mr. Rosenblum initially made his mark in the history of 18th- and 19th-century French art. In 1974 he was one of the organizers of the landmark show “French Painting, 1774-1830: The Age of Revolution” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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.