Robert Rosenblum, 1927-2006: Clown Prince of Art Scholarship

A serious and wide-ranging art history scholar with a mischievous disregard of artworld orthodoxies, Robert Rosenblum will be greatly missed. I owe directly to him a punning phrase that I used (uncredited) in a recent post. Many years ago, when I interviewed him on a topic I can no longer recall, he ended our discussion with the encouraging exhortation, "Write On!"

His online profile as a professor of NYU's Institute of Fine Arts shows you the breadth of his intellectual curiousity: "Research Interests---Western Art, 1750 to the present."

At the time of his death, he was also curator of 20-century art at the Guggenheim Museum and co-curator of the show "Citizens and Kings: Portraits in the Age of Revolution, 1760-1830," now at the Grand Palais, Paris, and traveling to the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and to the Guggenheim, New York (opening May 18).

For a NY Times article last July about the proliferation of skulls as fashion statements, he provided this quote:

The vanitas includes the skull as a reminder that death is everywhere, as a cutting edge to too much contentment with the here and now.

UPDATE: For a much more eloquent and detailed appreciation of Rosenblum, read this tribute by Mariët Westermann, director of NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, in the Art History Newsletter. (Thanks to Modern Kicks for this link.)