Daniel Robbins (art historian)

Daniel Robbins (Jeremiah Drummer and George Gregory Dobbs, pseud.)[1] attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, receiving an A.B. in 1951 at age 19. He then attended Yale University receiving an M.A. in Art History in 1955. He had initially applied at Yale to study painting, but switched to art history when he realized the painting department was overshadowed by the painter Josef Albers.

After graduating from Yale in 1955 he taught at Indiana University for one academic year (1955–1956). He then began doctoral work at New York University Institute of Fine Arts. In 1958, at the instigation of his professor Robert Goldwater, Robbins began writing a PhD dissertation on the Cubist artist and theoretician Albert Gleizes. At the time when, writes art historian David Cottington, "the expansionary momentum both of the New York art market and of post-war art-historical scholarship in the USA were creating a favorable climate for the recovery of salon cubism."[6] The year before, a section of Gleizes' memoirs were published, offering insight into the artistic milieu of pre-1914 Paris.[6] One of the most characteristic features of the Salon Cubists who exhibited in the public salons (e.g., Salon d'Automne and Salon des Indépendants), unlike Picasso and Braque, was that they often worked on a large scale, and they had an interest in large "epic" subjects. Daniel Robbins had coined the term Epic Cubism to distinguish their work from the more intimate painting of Picasso and Braque.[5]

Robbins completed his course work for the degree in 1958 in the joint Certificate of Museology program under A. Hyatt Mayor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[1]

Robbins continued to paint, exhibiting under the pseudonym Jeremiah Drummer, and wrote art criticism for the Village Voice under the name of George Gregory Dobbs.[1]

Following a stay in Paris as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Paris in 1958, Robbins became research assistant to the Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1959, a position he would hold through 1961.[3]

Daniel Robbins, Albert Gleizes, 1881–1953, a Retrospective Exhibition, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, 1964. Published by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, in collaboration with Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris; Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund.

Robbins moved to New York City in 1961 and worked as a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. There he curated Albert Gleizes, 1881–1953: a Retrospective Exhibition and wrote a seminal text on the artist for the exhibition catalogue.[7][8] He left the Guggenheim to become Director of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum from 1965 to 1971. As director of The RISD Museum he curated shows of new art, notably one called Raid the Icebox, for which Andy Warhol participated in choosing works from the museum's collection.[4] At RISD, Robbins made exhibiting and collecting contemporary art a priority, something the Museum had not done for six decades.[1]

He then became director of the Fogg Museum at Harvard University. At Harvard he continued to champion modern art, including leading the restoration of the Mark Rothko murals in the penthouse of Harvard University's Holyoke Center. In the fall of 1972 he conducted a seminar on Jacques Villon, and collaborated with the students to organize the first major Villon retrospective held in the U.S. (at the Fogg Museum) from 17 January to 29 February 1976.[3]

After resigning from the directorship of the museum in 1974 he lectured in Fine art at Harvard, completed his dissertation (delayed due to professional demands and responsibilities), and in 1975 received his degree from New York University.[1]

Robbins held a professorship at Dartmouth College from 1975 to 1980 and became a Senior Fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities (1976). He lectured at a variety of institutions including Yale University (1977), Williams College (1978–79), Hunter College (1984), the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, and the University of Iowa (1985), where he co-authored a catalogue created for an exhibition of works by Cubist artist Jean Metzinger.[9]

In 1980 Robbins accepted a permanent position as the Baker Professor of the Arts at Union College, where he directed a catalogue raisonné on Albert Gleizes.[1][3]

Robbins had not contented himself to merely enrich the historical account of the beginnings of Cubism, as might have art historians John Golding (1929–2012) and Robert Rosenblum (1927–2006). He "challenged its very scope", writes David Cottington. In his PhD on Albert Gleizes, with access to the Gleizes published memoirs and unpublished papers, and following from personal interviews with the artists widow, Juliette Roche Gleizes, Robbins began to reveal an account of Cubism that pointed towards other influences within the burgeoning movement than those generally accepted. He boldly charged 'an historical tradition which regards the Demoiselles as the origin of cubism' to be unhistorical. As pointed out by Cottington, Robbins "insisted on both a distinct set of interests, and a separate artistic genealogy, for the group of artists within which Gleizes' work and ideas developed".

The lack of history consisted in the reductivism and exclusivism of a view that, placing Picasso's picture at the beginning of cubism's formal development, under-acknowledged or ignored the symbolists' interest in geometry, the particular structure and subject matter of neo-impressionism paintings and the parallel concerns of writers and social thinkers, and misread the relation of Braque's fauvism to his subsequent work. (Cottington, 219)[6]

The distinct interests of the artists of Gleizes's circle, writes Cottington, "were registered by the commonalities of subject matter that Robbins identified in their paintings".[6]

These involved the interaction of vast space with speed and action, with simultaneous work, commerce, sport and flight; with the modern city and the ancient country, with the river, the harbor and the bridge and above all, with time, for the sense of time—involving memory, tradition, and accumulated cultural thought—created the reality of the world. (Robbins, 1964)[6][10]

Robbins argued that such iconography partially explained why there was no period in the work of Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger or Henri Le Fauconnier closely corresponding to the analytic cubism of Picasso or Braque. It explained too, as Cottington points out, the move by Gleizes and Delaunay into abstraction, "and their sympathy with the theoretical motions of artists such as Kandinsky and Mondrian".[6] The parallel genealogy Robbins extracted from Gleizes's memoirs was the inspiration generated through post-symbolist literary activity around Alexandre Mercereau, Paul Fort's Parisian review Vers et Prose[11] and the Abbaye de Créteil. The 1964 Guggenheim essay on Gleizes developed these notions that Robbins summarized as:

A synthetic view of the universe, presenting the remarkable phenomena of time and space, multiplicity and diversity, at once was his painted equivalent to the ideals which were verbally realized in the Abbaye poetry. (Robbins, 1964)

Daniel Robbins, Joann Moser, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, 1985 (catalogue cover)

Capitalizing on the occasion presented by the first major retrospective of a prominent salon cubist, Robbins' Guggenheim essay greatly opened the field of Cubist studies to novel approaches, and, writes Cottington, his example was invaluable for a rising generation of historians of modernism.[6]

Notwithstanding, the impact of Robbins radical conclusions remained somewhat overshadowed by the work of other mainstream art historians, such as Douglas Cooper, whose Cubist Epoch exhibition and 1970 publication gained in both impact and authority. During the 1980s however, Robbins began a major essay for a retrospective of the work of another key salon cubist: Jean Metzinger. This gave him the opportunity to take his thesis beyond the broad generalizations of the Guggenheim text.[9] This text titled Metzinger, At the Center of Cubism, placed Metzinger at the intersection between the gallery cubists and the salon cubists. In a 1910 publication Note sur la peinture Metzinger explicitly relates, for the first time, the interest in representing objects as remembered from successive and subjective experiences within the context of both space and time. Metzinger's Note sur la peinture not only highlighted the works of Picasso and Braque, on the one hand, Le Fauconnier and Delaunay on the other, but it was also a tactical selection that highlighted the fact that only Metzinger himself was positioned to write about all four. Metzinger, uniquely, had been closely acquainted with the gallery cubists and the burgeoning salon cubists simultaneously.[12][13] Robbins focused on the question of Picasso and Braque's influence, if any, on the work of Gleizes, Metzinger, Le Fauconnier and Delaunay; the group first named as Cubists in 1911.

Robbins died on January 14, 1995, at the Dartmouth–Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, shortly before his sixty-third birthday. He was 62 and lived in Troy, New York, and Braintree, Vermont.[4]