Robert Rosenblum: Iconoclastic Art Historian, Seeing the Old in the New
It was the Summer of Love. The carnival capers of the flower children could not have seemed more distant from the neo-Classical world of late-18th-century European art. Yet that same year — 1967 — saw the publication of a book that collapsed the distance of two centuries into the twinkling of an educated eye.
The book was “Transformations in Late 18th Century Art.” Its author was Robert Rosenblum, a young professor of art history. The book, Mr. Rosenblum’s first, has been a staple ever since. And Mr. Rosenblum, who died in December at 79, went on to become the most consistently edifying art historian of his generation. With a combination of iconoclasm, faultless lucidity and wit, he smashed aesthetic prejudices the way physicists smash atoms. There ought to be a Nobel Prize for that sort of achievement.
Mr. Rosenblum’s life and work are to be honored today at a memorial program at the Guggenheim Museum, where he had been a curator since 1996. But I suspect I’m not the only critic who remembers Mr. Rosenblum almost every time he or she sits down to write. Sometimes I go back to the books. Sometimes their insights fly into my head unbidden, accompanied by images of the work they illuminated.
Here comes “Selling of Cupids,” for example, a 1763 painting by Joseph-Marie Vien. The first illustration in Mr. Rosenblum’s first book, it depicts a Roman lady hawking living love charms out of a basket, as if the winged babes were puppies. Miss! Oh, Miss! I’ll take one!
What kind of man would open his career in the stuffy field of art history with such a picture? But Mr. Rosenblum’s writing gave no indication that this was possibly a campy debut. The voice was terse, the academic tone anchored by copious footnotes throughout. The thinking was directed more toward the form of the images than to their particular content. Line, surface, depth and other elements of composition were the subjects at hand. Mr. Rosenblum builds his discussion from the “primitive austerity” of Vien’s style, the “clean geometric divisions of wall plane and furniture,” and the picture’s “simplified, unbroken contours.”
Read entire article at NYT
The book was “Transformations in Late 18th Century Art.” Its author was Robert Rosenblum, a young professor of art history. The book, Mr. Rosenblum’s first, has been a staple ever since. And Mr. Rosenblum, who died in December at 79, went on to become the most consistently edifying art historian of his generation. With a combination of iconoclasm, faultless lucidity and wit, he smashed aesthetic prejudices the way physicists smash atoms. There ought to be a Nobel Prize for that sort of achievement.
Mr. Rosenblum’s life and work are to be honored today at a memorial program at the Guggenheim Museum, where he had been a curator since 1996. But I suspect I’m not the only critic who remembers Mr. Rosenblum almost every time he or she sits down to write. Sometimes I go back to the books. Sometimes their insights fly into my head unbidden, accompanied by images of the work they illuminated.
Here comes “Selling of Cupids,” for example, a 1763 painting by Joseph-Marie Vien. The first illustration in Mr. Rosenblum’s first book, it depicts a Roman lady hawking living love charms out of a basket, as if the winged babes were puppies. Miss! Oh, Miss! I’ll take one!
What kind of man would open his career in the stuffy field of art history with such a picture? But Mr. Rosenblum’s writing gave no indication that this was possibly a campy debut. The voice was terse, the academic tone anchored by copious footnotes throughout. The thinking was directed more toward the form of the images than to their particular content. Line, surface, depth and other elements of composition were the subjects at hand. Mr. Rosenblum builds his discussion from the “primitive austerity” of Vien’s style, the “clean geometric divisions of wall plane and furniture,” and the picture’s “simplified, unbroken contours.”