Daniel Robbins

Daniel J. Robbins (pseudonyms, Jeremiah Drummer and George Gregory Dobbs; His writings centered on the importance of artists such as Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier and Jacques Villon. He was a specialist in early Modernism, writing on Salon Cubists (the Section d'Or group) and championed contemporaries such as Louise Bourgeois and the Color Field painters. Art historian Peter Brooke referred to Robbins as "the great pioneer of the broader history of Cubism".

Biography

Education and career Daniel Robbins 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." The year before, a section of Gleizes' memoirs were published, offering insight into the artistic milieu of pre-1914 Paris. 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.

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.

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". 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)

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. 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. His death was caused by cancer.

Selected publications Cézanne and structure in modern painting, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1963, ASIN: B0007EMAQQ 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. The Genealogy of the Section d'Or, in Albert Gleizes and the Section D'Or. Exhibition 28 October – 5 December 1964; Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York, William A. Camfield, Daniel Robbins, Leonard Hutton Galleries (New York, NY), 1964 Fernando Botero, Galerie Buchholz, 1966 Gilbert Stuart: Portraitist of the Young Republic, 1755–1828, National Gallery of Art, John Walker, Daniel Robbins, Edgar Preston Richardson, Rhode Island School of Design. Museum of Art, 1967 The Neuberger Collection-an American Collection: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture, Rhode Island School of Design; Smithsonian Institution, 1968, ASIN: B0013GHXTQ The George Waterman Collection: Exhibition, October 22–November 23, 1969, Daniel Robbins, George Waterman, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1969, ASIN: B0012HPQFY Beyond Minimalism, George Waterman Collection, Rhode Island School of Design, Museum of Art, Oct 1, 1969 Joaquin Torres-Garcia, 1874–1949, Museum of Art, June 1970, , Jacques Callot 1592–1635, Daniel Robbins, Juergen Schulz, Department of Art, Brown University, 1970, ASIN: B007KIZX70 The World Between the Ox and the Swine: Dada Drawings by Hans Richter, Volume 57, Issues 3–4 of Bulletin of Rhode Island School of Design, 1971 New American Graphic Art: Exhibition September 12–October 28, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass, Colles Baxter, Daniel Robbins, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1973 The Formation and Maturity of Albert Gleizes: A Biographical and Critical Study; 1881 Through 1920, Ph.D. diss. New York University, 1975 Jaques Villon, 1976, Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, First Edition, 1976, ASIN: B009Z329 km Folk Sculpture USA: [Exhibition ... the Brooklyn Museum, March 6–May 31, 1976, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, July 4–August 29, 1976], Universe Books, May 1976, , André Lhote, 1885–1962: Cubism, [exhibition] October 16 Through December 18, 1976, Leonard Hutton Galleries, 1976 Jacques Villon, Sixty Drawings and Watercolors 1894–1954, Lucien Goldschmidt Inc. New York, 1979 Picasso's Vollard suite: from the collection of Dartmouth College Museum & Galleries, Hanover, New Hampshire, Issue 2, Dartmouth College. Museum & Galleries, Daniel Robbins, Trustees of the Dartmouth College, 1980 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: A selection of works from the Art Institute of Chicago, Medaenas monographs on the arts, Pennsylvania State University, Art Institute of Chicago, 1980, ASIN: B0006YXHEG Medaenas Toulouse-Lautrec, The Art of Oral Contraception, A Selection of Works from The Art Institute of Chicago, 1980, Daniel Robbins, Eugenia S. Robbins Préface, in Du "Cubisme", by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, 1912, 9–16, Sisteron: Edition Présence, 1980 Sources of Cubism and Futurism, Art Journal, Vol. 41, No. 4, (Winter 1981): pp. 324–27, Published by College Art Association Edward Koren, prints and drawings, 1959–1981, Volume 1982, Part 1, Art Gallery, University of California, University Art Gallery, State University of New York at Albany, 1982 Cubist drawings, 1907–1929. Exhibition at the Janie C. Gallery; November 1982–January 1983, by Daniel Robbins, Margit Rowell, The Gallery, 1983, ASIN: B0006EDZQQ Jean Metzinger: At the Center of Cubism, in Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, Joann Moser, Daniel Robbins, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, J. Paul Getty Trust, University of Washington Press, December 1985, , Walter Murch, paintings and drawings, Judy Collischan, Paul Cummings, Daniel Robbins, Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, Hillwood Art Gallery, Long Island University, Jun 1, 1986 An Abbreviated Historiography of Cubism. Art Journal 47, Winter 1988, 277–83 Cubism: Le Fauconnier, Gleizes, Kupka, Marcoussis, Metzinger ... [et Al.]: February 10 to March 11, 1989, James Goodman Gallery, The Gallery, 1989 The Complete Graphic Legacy of Fernand Leger: The Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Milton and Sally Avery Center for the Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York : September 3–November 19, 1989 Die Entstehung des Kubismus: eine Neubewertung. Frankfurt: R. G. Fischer, 1990 Henri Le Fauconnier's Mountaineers Attacked by Bears, Rhode Island School of Design: Museum Notes, 1996, 24–53 Albert Gleizes: Période impressionniste avant 1907, Somogy, 1998 Albert Gleizes: catalogue raisonné. 1898–1927, Volume 1, Fondation Albert Gleizes, Daniel Robbins, Pierre Georgel, Anne Varichon, Somogy, 1998 Albert Gleizes: Abstraction création 1928–1933, Somogy, 1998