William Rubin, an art historian and curator who, as director of the
Museum of Modern Art's prestigious department of painting and
sculpture, played a crucial role in defining the museum's character,
collections and exhibitions in the 1970's and 80's, died on Sunday at
his weekend home in Pound Ridge, N.Y., the museum said. He was 78 and
lived in Manhattan.
He had been in declining health for several years, said his wife, Phyllis Hattis.
An
imposing man with a barrel chest, roughly chiseled features and a
booming voice, Mr. Rubin was tenacious as both a scholar and a
personality, and at the height of his power more or less spoke for the
Modern. Above all, he played a central role in championing the
historical narrative of modernism that MoMA came to be identified with
and is now seeking to move beyond.
He brought to his mission an
art historian's training and experience as a private collector of
Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist art, which he installed and
reinstalled in a loft he lived in decades ago on lower Broadway.
John Elderfield, the current chief curator of the department of
painting and sculpture, said that Mr. Rubin built on the legacy of
Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum's first director, who famously
diagrammed the evolution of modern art starting with Neo-Impressionism.
But Mr. Rubin "was the one who really brought to it the historical
positivistic sense of order, and the notion of the great unrolling of
the modern movement," Mr. Elderfield said.
His legacy is a complex one. Mr. Rubin might have contributed
almost as much as Barr to building the Modern's unparalleled collection
of early modernist works. He was known for his indefatigable energy in
wooing collectors and negotiating with dealers once he had zeroed in on
art that he felt the Modern should own. His acquisitions for the museum
include emblematic works like Picasso's
"Charnel House" (1944-45), Miró's Surrealist "Birth of the World"
(1925) and two 1950's cutouts by Matisse, "Memory of Oceania" and "The
Swimming Pool."
He gave the museum "Australia," a seminal 1951
sculpture by David Smith from his own collection. But he was probably
proudest of landing Picasso's "Guitar," a groundbreaking
metal-construction sculpture from 1912-13 that the artist handed over
to him on a sunny winter day in the south of France. (Mr. Rubin had
offered to trade a small Cézanne painting in MoMA's collection for it,
but Picasso donated the sculpture instead.)
He also greatly
expanded the museum's holdings in Abstract Expressionism, an area that
Barr was sometimes thought to have neglected, with major works like
Pollock's "One: Number 31, 1950" and Barnett Newman's 1950-51 "Vir
Heroicus Sublimis," and opened it up to Color Field painting and the
work of contemporary artists like Anthony Caro and Frank Stella.
Mr.
Rubin continued the museum's practice of pruning weak or redundant
works from its collection - by dead artists only - to help finance new
acquisitions. In a move that raised some eyebrows in the art world, he
instituted the practice of taking sealed bids from dealers when selling
a work, which worked to the museum's advantage.
And he organized
many influential exhibitions, starting with "Dada, Surrealism and Their
Heritage," in 1968, and including shows of late Cézanne, two surveys of
Mr. Stella's work and a parade of Picasso shows.
Among these
were an enormous 1980 Picasso retrospective that filled the entire
museum; "Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism" of 1989, with its vivid
sense of two competitive innovators working side by side; and, eight
years after Mr. Rubin's retirement in 1988, an exhibition of Picasso's
portraits that was criticized by some art historians for being
organized by the artist's successive relationships with women.
Some
critics faulted Mr. Rubin's exhibitions and research for only rarely
venturing beyond the parameters established by Barr, suggesting that
this had a chilling effect on his department's involvement with new art
and often made the museum seem obsessed with its own history. His
painting and sculpture installations were generally formalist and
chronological, with an emphasis on masterpieces, great artists and the
French.
Yet Mr. Rubin's painstakingly worked-out presentations,
especially those prepared after the Modern's 1984 expansion, told its
version of modernism with a clarity and level of detail that many
curators still consider unmatched.
[>snip!<]
In the 1980's, the aura of infallibility that had surrounded Mr.
Rubin began to dissipate. He came to feel that the museum's inattention
to new art was a "failing," as he told The New York Times in 1985, and
began a search for a younger curator more in touch with the times.
Still,
some of the most vociferous criticism was drawn by a 1984 exhibition -
"Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the
Modern," organized with J. Kirk Varnedoe, the art historian whom he
selected as his successor. (Mr. Varnedoe died in 2003.) Some art
critics complained that this show, pairing works by modern masters with
examples of the African and Oceanic art that had influenced them, took
a purely formalist approach that stripped the non-Western works of
their original contexts, meanings and purposes. A sharply critical
review in Artforum set off an exchange between Mr. Rubin and its
author, Thomas McEvilley, that stretched into two issues.
As
Mr. Rubin explained later to Mr. Tomkins: "The notion that you can look
at a work of art as pure form strikes me as idiocy. If the work comes
at you, it comes with everything it's got, all at once."
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