ROBERT ROSENBLUM, 1927–2006

Art historian and Artforum contributing editor Robert Rosenblum died at home yesterday after an extended illness. Mariët Westermann, director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where Rosenblum taught for forty years, said, “We lose in Robert Rosenblum a brilliant art historian, a generous teacher, a warm and witty colleague, and a dear, dear friend. . . . Robert’s dissertation motivated his landmark book Transformations in Late Eighteenth-Century Art (1967), which set the stage for an outstanding and productive scholarly career that tackled major artists from Ingres to Picasso to Warhol, but that also recuperated the forgotten and the neglected, from Salon painters to Norman Rockwell. Robert had an uncanny ability to make telling comparisons between seemingly incommensurate paintings—juxtapositions that illuminated the special interests of each picture in the pairing.” More at the New York Times.