Robert Rosenblum
Robert Rosenblum: The Permission Giver
by Michaël Amy
Inaugural Selection exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1959. Photo: Robert E. Mates © SRGF
The art historian and art critic Robert Rosenblum had extraordinarily wide-ranging taste and expertise covering a considerable swath of time and space, amounting collectively to more than 250 years, and covering both Western Europe and the United States. Such eclecticism may be deemed questionable, for how could any mortal both embrace and have something worthwhile to say about vastly divergent styles, visions, agendas, and periods in art? Furthermore, how could any person master a plurality of periods and styles when information was increasing exponentially in the wake of new priorities and methodologies?
It is worth recalling that when Rosenblum began his meteoric rise in the 1950’s, Erwin Panofsky, Richard Krautheimer, Rudolf Wittkower, Meyer Schapiro, and E. H. Gombrich, to name just five exceptional art historians, were producing highly original work in widely disparate areas of inquiry. There would be other comparably wide-ranging intellectuals belonging to Rosenblum’s and even subsequent generations—and there were such individuals prior to Panofsky’s era—but these scholars were exceptions to the rule.
In fact, most people limit themselves to a tightly circumscribed subject beyond which they will not venture, except to the extent that another field is connected to—or can be related to—the area they claim as their own. For example, in art history: Florentine sculpture of the 15th century, and the classical or medieval sources, visual and/or conceptual, which inform it.
Rosenblum, from the get-go, had no desire to limit himself in such a way. I imagine him wondering: “Now where is the fun in that?” His first article, published in Marsyas in 1953, was on the work of the 16th century French Mannerist painter Antoine Caron, and his earliest published reviews of the following year for Art Digest covered John Marin, the Church of the Ascension in New York City, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Impressionism, and this while he was hard at work on his doctoral dissertation on The International Style of 1800: A Study in Linear Abstraction.
Books by Robert Rosenblum
Rosenblum defended that dissertation in 1956, by which year the die was cast, as he had published over twenty book reviews, exhibition reviews, and articles combined, including on Dürer, the age of Mannerism, 17th century Dutch masters, Neo-Classicism, van Gogh, Roberto Matta, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Philip Pearlstein, before his dissertation advisor Walter Friedländer could congratulate him on a job well done.
The International Style was the root from which sprang Rosenblum’s highly acclaimed second book Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art, dedicated to the Medieval scholar Frances Godwin of Queens College, whose classes compelled the young Rosenblum to abandon musicology for art history before pursuing his masters in that field at Yale. Or was Transformations Rosenblum’s third book, as Rosenblum’s Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was likewise published in 1967? Rosenblum’s first book, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art, which its author later considered too indebted to the influential views of Clement Greenberg, had appeared in 1960.
It is worth underscoring that New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts (NYU, IFA), where Rosenblum studied toward his PhD, compelled its graduate students to study the art and/or architecture of widely different periods before focusing upon one area. The merits of such cultural breadth, embodied by, say, Panofsky and Krautheimer, who were among the superlative scholars then teaching at the IFA, was not lost on Rosenblum. He learned from these models the importance of getting one’s meticulously researched and thought-out work out into the wider world if one wanted a career in higher education. Exhibition and book reviews were obviously a good way of learning the craft of writing clearly and succinctly and having one’s work come out expeditiously.
This strategy worked, as following a teaching stint at the University of Michigan, Rosenblum joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1956 as Associate Professor, and then went on to accept an appointment as Professor at New York University in 1966, where he would hold an endowed professorship from 1976 onward. Rosenblum’s full-time employment and paid freelance gigs—his articles and his essays for books and exhibition catalogues were in high demand, and he delivered many guest lectures, some or many of which were remunerated—provided him with the financial independence to write almost exclusively about the subjects he really cared about, unlike so many writers who are forced to bend backwards to make ends meet.
Rosenblum wrote on and off about contemporary art for over half a century, from 1954 until his passing in December 2006, while remaining among the leading authorities on the art of the late 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It’s as if he thought: “How can one possibly claim to understand the art and culture of an earlier period, if one cannot come to grips with what is of consequence in the art and culture of the age we live in?” Experts on the art of earlier periods who wrote perceptively about the art of their time are, however, rare. Leo Steinberg and Linda Nochlin, who likewise studied at the IFA, belong to this small group. Such individuals are permission-givers, as they show us that it is possible to travel through time and space within the history of art—that in fact, it may be particularly productive to do so, as such a conceptual back-and-forth enables one to consider both old and new problems from different perspectives. Rosenblum repeatedly looks at art through the lens provided by earlier works, while stating that the earlier works do not sit still, as they keep on changing as they are being reassessed through later works.
Books by Robert Rosenblum
Rosenblum’s article on “Sturtevant” (1987) opens with:
The art of the present has always made the art of the past look different. These days, the late twentieth century has stirred up endless reshufflings and disclosures about how what used to look bad can suddenly look good (as in the new enthusiasm for the later work of Picasso, de Chirico, or Picabia), or about how individual artists who once appeared peripheral and singular may now seem voices in the wilderness, announcing artistic events to come. I can think of no more startling example of the phenomenon of a newly discovered prophet than the case of Sturtevant. Between 1965 and 1975… she raised a storm of controversy by re-creating exactly, down to their very dimensions, paintings and objects by not only Duchamp, that old master of confounding original and reproduction, but also, still more bewilderingly, a roster of her contemporaries--Johns, Stella, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Oldenburg, Beuys. For some her work was outrageous plagiarism. But for others her role in the art world was distinctly disturbing, far more than an abstruse meditation on questions of artistic originality.
Some will claim that Rosenblum had it made, as he was in the right place at the right time. The persecution of Jews and intellectuals in Hitler’s Germany led to an exodus of scholars to the United States, including outstanding art historians who hastened the development of the history of art in this country and brought it to an unusually high level of sophistication. Additionally, World War II led to the flight of artists and writers from Europe to New York City, including the Surrealists, whose ideas and practices led to the blossoming of Abstract Expressionist painting, which confirmed the emergence of New York City as the center of the contemporary art world at the expense of Paris.
Significantly, because of the rise of the New York School in the late forties, Rosenblum’s attention veered from Europe to New York and remained almost exclusively there as far as the artistic developments of the remainder of the century and the beginning of the next century were concerned. Almost all of Rosenblum’s responses to developments in Western and Central Europe were reserved for artists who emerged between ca. 1750 and 1930. As Rosenblum was almost constantly in New York where so many artistic revolutions were occurring, why bother with recent developments in Europe, or elsewhere, however remarkable?
Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People at the Guggenheim Museum, November 3, 2001–March 3, 2002
Rosenblum published in a wide variety of magazines and journals, instead of being closely associated with one or two organs, as so many other critics were. Not only could his productivity and eclecticism not be accommodated in a mere handful of journals, but Rosenblum clearly wanted to reach as wide an audience as possible by publishing in magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Architectural Digest as well as art journals. His writing is clear and straightforward, jargon free, and free of obfuscations serving to hide that one may not have much new to say, which was never true of Rosenblum.
Academics are expected to be more discriminating, both as far as their choice of subjects, and their choice of venues (i.e. their public) are concerned. Rosenblum brushed off such narrow-mindedness, for shouldn’t educators seek to explain challenging phenomena, as clearly as possible, to all people who wish to understand them? If constricting standards of professional decorum were expected, Rosenblum would circumvent these as so many of the norm-shattering artists he admired had done. He was anti-elitist, although he taught at prestigious institutions, admired artists who had served elites, and was on excellent terms with many of the powerbrokers in the New York art world, and beyond, as well as high society. Rosenblum had great wit and charm. That too, besides his voracious eye and expansive mind, helped oil the gears, thereby facilitating his ascent.
Rosenblum, who took great pleasure in refusing to conform, did not embrace theory, which became all the rage circa 1980, and did not stick to any one methodology. Instead, he applied the methods that were best suited to the questions he addressed. He did not propound a political or ideological position through his scholarship--doctrine was not his bag. The individual work of art was this object-oriented art historian’s point of departure and point of return. Whatever pertinent visual or factual evidence could be found was used to explain the work of art, including its origin, style, and meaning. I should add that Rosenblum was always very good, in all his endeavors, at giving credit to other scholars where credit was due.
Rosenblum did his best to avoid associating closely with any one group, be it scholarly or artistic, for doing so would be restrictive. For example, he wrote exceedingly well about both abstraction and figuration, championing the Abstract Expressionists in a series of brilliant essays, and then Jasper Johns, and then the Pop artists. Next thing you know, he could embrace allegedly low brow Andrew Wyeth, or worse, Norman Rockwell. That is exactly what he did with an essay written in 1987 on Wyeth (which was published twelve years later in the anthology of his writings mentioned below) and by bringing the traveling exhibition Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People to the Guggenheim Museum (which was founded as an institution dedicated to the display and study of non-objective art) in 2001. On top of his many other professional activities, Rosenblum was a curator of 20th century art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from 1996 until his passing ten years later.
Books by Robert Rosenblum
Almost all the 20th century artists mentioned or alluded to in the previous paragraph are white and male. While Rosenblum mentioned women artists infrequently in his writings, and almost never devoted entire articles to them—Louise Nevelson (1959) and Sturtevant (1987) are exceptions—artists of color are practically non-existent as far as his publication record is concerned. This may say more about the state of the New York art world than it does about Rosenblum. Since his passing in 2006, exhibitions featuring works by women and people of color increased exponentially.
Happily, Rosenblum’s close friend Linda Nochlin did crucial work in bringing women artists into the limelight, as did other, mostly female, feminist scholars. Somewhat earlier, Rosenblum had brought many little known or entirely forgotten white male artists back from semi or complete oblivion through his deep dive into the history of late 18th and 19th century Western and Central European painting. Previously overlooked regions, including mid 18th century England and late 18th and 19th century Central Europe, were placed back on the map. These efforts required, among other things, numerous visits to public and private collections, and storerooms, to resurrect pictures that had fallen out of favor. Additionally, Rosenblum played an important role in drawing attention to the genesis of mature bodies of work by examining their authors’ often ignored formative struggles; witness his essay on "Rothko’s Surrealist Years" (1981).
Rosenblum’s reshuffling of the cards through his ongoing reappraisal of both academic and modernist painting was the leap that influenced the curatorial approach at the Musée d’Orsay, which opened in Paris in December 1986, and aimed to give a fleshed-out account of the gamut of artistic production in the 19th century. Rosenblum published Paintings in the Musée d’Orsay in 1989, five years after he and his colleague at NYU, H. W. Janson published their survey of 19th-Century Art, Rosenblum overseeing painting, and Janson sculpture.
The gathering of conservative (once popular) and progressive (once controversial) works of art at Orsay almost certainly inspired Rosenblum to mount 1900, Art at the Crossroads at the Guggenheim Museum in 2000, featuring both old-fashioned and cutting-edge works—varying enormously in quality, in the estimation of many critics—by more than 190 artists that were exhibited at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris.
Rosenblum wrote chiefly about painting, which may explain why he gave little attention in his publications to Minimal art, beyond the work of the proto-Minimalist painter Frank Stella, and the sculptor Dan Flavin, and even less to the Post-Minimalist and Conceptual artists—excepting Sol LeWitt—who emerged in the late Sixties. As new paintings were shown less frequently during the Seventies, Rosenblum returned to studying earlier artistic developments. He published Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (1975)—the premise of which was outlined in “The Abstract Sublime,” his article of 1961 for ARTnews—and co-curated the exhibition French Painting 1774-1830: The Age of Revolution, which was featured in 1974-1975 in Paris, Detroit, and New York.
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Robert Rosenblum from the series Art World, 1982, Gelatin silver print, 13 5/8 × 10 3/8 inches, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Neil E. Kelley, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
With the return of painting circa 1980, Rosenblum reentered the late 20th century, as it were, by writing about Eric Fischl (1984) and
David Salle (1985), while bypassing the excesses of Neo-Expressionism. However, the biggest revelation of the go-go Eighties, as far as Rosenblum was concerned, was neo-Conceptual artist Jeff Koons, then working chiefly in sculpture. Koons’s supremely tacky, immaculately executed works caused outrage by upsetting prevailing standards of taste, which was right up the distinguished art critic’s alley, as Rosenblum championed artifice, exaggeration, theatricality, and stylization from an early age—witness his International Style of 1956—and cherished most affronts to cultural status quos.
It is worth underscoring that Rosenblum recognized Koons’s importance early on, though first in an essay published in 1992 in The Jeff Koons Handbook. Rosenblum’s early appraisals of Johns (January 1958, September 1960) and Lichtenstein (February 1954, April 1963) were likewise prescient. Like Koons, these artists went on to build seminal, internationally (although not universally) esteemed bodies of work.
I should like to conclude with passages from two early texts by Rosenblum.
In 1958, Rosenblum published an outstanding article on “American Painting Since the Second World War,” thus declaring early on where his interests in art after 1945 lay. That article was published in French in the magazine Aujourd’hui: Art et architecture based in Paris, thereby proving Rosenblum’s zeal in explaining the most recent developments in avant-garde art to an audience situated way beyond our shores. This article first reached a wider public when it was published in English four decades later in On Modern American Art: Selected Essays by Robert Rosenblum (New York, 1999). I relied heavily on this book in finding my way through Rosenblum’s prodigious output (the quotes in the present essay are drawn from articles gathered in that anthology).
In "American Painting", Rosenblum states from the outset that:
From its seventeenth-century beginnings through the Second World War, America produced no artist of sufficiently high stature to affect profoundly, in respect to quality or to historical innovation, the course of Western painting. Even the possible exceptions to this statement––Benjamin West and James Abbott McNeill Whistler––worked in a European and not an American milieu, so that the phenomenon of the last decade, in which American painting abruptly emerged as a school of major international importance, appears all the more startling, both to Europeans and Americans.
Rosenblum notes that:
The upheaving cultural migrations from Europe to America [caused by the Nazi terror, brought about a] traumatic reversal of America’s earlier artistic provincialism…. But of perhaps even greater impetus were the activities of American museums. In particular, the Museum of Modern Art provided … the richest and most diverse selection of contemporary European art to be seen in a public collection anywhere in the world….
Nevertheless, the first tremors of new life appear to have been felt in the geographical and artistic periphery of America, the Northwest Pacific Coast. There, facing the Orient and contemplating the remote, untrammeled landscape of pine, rock, and sea, Mark Tobey … evolved a most personal style that already prophesied the Eastern developments to follow…. Meditative and miniaturist, it seems like a minor extension of Klee’s precious and intimate sensibilities rather than a direct forerunner of the raw violence and extroverted, heroic scale that soon erupted in and around New York.
The key insight, so evident that we overlook it, is that:
Courageous … artists … like Pollock or Kline … [explore] the effect of reducing a pictorial vocabulary to a minimal statement, as a result of which each artist has been readily identified with a single, irreducible style. For example, the work of Philip Guston … appears to be an excerpt from a Monet enlarged to disarming proportions; and its enjoyment depends upon the most refined perception of exquisite modulations of color and brushwork that weave out a quivering mesh of paint which, like an Impressionist canvas, glitters and vibrates rather than delineating ordered relationships in depth. In so concentrating on the drama of a sensuous expanse of paint, Guston, like other Americans, has helped to reverse previously negative critical attitudes toward the late Monet as well as the late Turner, whose works, judged by eyes accustomed to Cubism, may seem defectively vaporous and undisciplined, stressing surface rather than spatial structure.
For another outstanding formulation of this insight into Abstract Expressionist method, see the opening paragraph of Rosenblum’s exhibition review Morris Louis at the Guggenheim Museum (1963).
Rosenblum also had extraordinary perceptions into the work of the Pop artists, witness this passage from Pop Art and Non-Pop Art (1965):
If Pop art is to mean anything at all, it must have something to do not only with what is painted, but also with the way it is painted; otherwise, Manet’s ale bottles, van Gogh’s flags, and Balla’s automobiles would qualify as Pop art. The authentic Pop artist offers a coincidence of style and subject, that is, he represents mass-produced images and objects by using a style that is also based upon the visual vocabulary of mass production. With such a criterion, the number of artists properly aligned with the movement dwindles rapidly.
Rosenblum’s many accomplishments are remarkable and warrant a book-length study. The world is a smaller place without him.
Michaël Amy is a critic and art historian with a Ph.D. from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. He is a Distinguished Professor of the History of Art in the College of Art and Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology, working in Renaissance, Baroque, modern and contemporary art.
Michaël Amy