William Stanley Rubin (August 11, 1927January 22, 2006) was an American art scholar, a distinguished curator, critic, collector, art historian and teacher of modern art.
From 1968 to 1988, Rubin was a curator at The Museum of Modern Art located in New York City and, from 1973 to 1988, he served as director of the Painting and Sculpture Department. He played a key role in building the museum's collection, in particular acquiring work of abstract expressionism, and organized many groundbreaking exhibitions (see below). His younger brother Lawrence Rubin (1933-2018) was an art dealer in NYC and in Europe.
Biography
Background and education
William S. Rubin was born in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest of three children. His father was a textile merchant who owned several factories. Rubin was educated in public schools in Brooklyn before the family moved to Riverdale, New York, where he attended the Fieldston School. There he took an art course with Victor D’Amico, who was also director of education at the Museum of Modern Art. At the time, Rubin was not interested in pursuing a career in the visual arts, for he aspired to become an orchestra conductor. Upon graduation from high school, he went to Columbia University, ostensibly to study music. His studies were interrupted by a stint in the army. While stationed in Rome, Italy, he played the clarinet in a marching band. When the war ended, he returned to New York and resumed his studies at Columbia University. There he enrolled in classes taught by the distinguished art historian, Meyer Shapiro, who specialized in both modern and medieval art. Rubin consequently became interested in both fields and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Church of Assy in the French Alps with an interior that was decorated by modern artists in the years after World War II: Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Rouault, Marc Chagall, Jean Lurçat, and others. Rubin graduated from Columbia College in 1949 with a bachelor's degree in Italian language and literature. He studied musicology at the University of Paris for a year before returning to Columbia, earning a Ph.D. in art history and archeology in 1959.
Career
In 1952, Rubin began teaching art history at Sarah Lawrence College and at Hunter College of the City University of New York. In the mid-1950s, he was introduced to Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, who invited him to lecture at the museum and eventually to serve as curator of a show on the surrealist painter Roberto Matta. In the mid-1960s, Rubin began writing a book on Dada and Surrealism; upon hearing of this project, Barr invited him to organize a show on the subject for the museum. While preparing that show, Rubin joined the museum's staff as permanent curator. In 1968, he organized and wrote the catalog for Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage for the Museum of Modern Art and, in the same year, Rubin's Dada & Surrealist Art, a 525-page survey on the subject, was published by Harry N. Abrams, New York. Throughout his years at the museum, Rubin acquired works with the dedication and passion of a private collector (which he also was). Almost immediately upon being hired by the museum, he persuaded the art dealer Sidney Janis and his wife Harriet to donate their formidable collection of modern art to the museum, one of many collections that he would secure during his twenty-year tenure there. Others include works from the collections of William S. Paley, Nina and Gordon Bunshaft, Wolfgang and Florene May Schoenborn, John Hay Whitney, Peggy and David Rockefeller, Mary Sisler, Richard S. Zeisler, and others. From collectors such as these, or through direct purchases by the museum, Rubin managed to acquire some of the most important works of art in the museum's collection: Marcel Duchamp, The Bicycle Wheel (1913/51), Constantin Brâncuși, The Endless Column (1918), Pablo Picasso, Charnel House (1944–45), Henri Matisse, Memory of Oceana (1952–53) and The Swimming Pool (1952), Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31 (1950). He even gave the museum David Smith's Australia (1951) from his own private collection. Through his position at the museum, he was able to meet and befriend Picasso at his home in the south of France. In 1971, the artist gave him for the museum's collection his Cubist Guitar (1914), an iconic metal and wire sculpture and, over the years, Rubin was instrumental in acquiring many other important works by the artist for the museum.