The Brooklyn Rail

Nearly two decades after his death, William Rubin remains a towering figure in the story of American art—a testament to his driving character and monumental professional accomplishments. An aesthetic pantologist, Rubin taught, collected, exhibited, and wrote about art throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. But it was his position as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, from 1968 on, and his role as its Director of Painting and Sculpture (1973 to 1988), that he was able to fully manifest his visionary artistic zeal.

While Rubin was ambitious, and could be ruthlessly strategic, haughty, and prescriptive in his opinions and beliefs, his love of art was the lynchpin of his private life and public career, with every endeavor bent toward the elevation and public understanding of art and artists. In discussion with the writer Calvin Tomkins, Rubin once said that “If the work comes at you, it comes with everything it’s got, all at once.” It’s a phrase that might also describe the man himself. Rubin transformed MoMA’s collection by acquiring partial or entire bequests from important private collections, including those of John Hay Whitney and Peggy and David Rockefeller, as well as making purchases or trades of important pieces. He also received gifts, such as that of his friend, Pablo Picasso, who gave Rubin his Guitar (1914) for MoMA’s trove. Rubin organized groundbreaking exhibitions at MoMA including Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage (1968), Cézanne: The Late Work (1977–78), which attracted almost half a million visitors, breaking attendance records at the time, and Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective (1980), which achieved another first by filling the museum with the work of a single artist.

Rubin’s home and social lives were inextricable from his work. An immensely informed art collector in his own right, he bought from and befriended many leading artists of the day including Frank Stella, Richard Serra, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Barnett Newman. With his partner, and later wife, the writer and curator Phyllis Hattis, he made their three homes (a loft in Manhattan, a house in Westchester, and an idyllic compound in Le Plan-de-la-Tour, southeastern France) hubs of artistic discourse, salon-style gatherings of writers, curators, and artists, and exhibition spaces for his own acquisitions.

In 1984, Rubins organized “PRIMITIVISM” IN 20TH CENTURY ART: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. It’s purpose was to elucidate the influence of tribal and ritualistic artifacts from Oceania, Africa, and North America on the development of western art (principally Cubism), and draw parallels between them through the responses of artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Constantin Brâncuși, and Paul Klee, among others.

Nearly forty years later, Masterpieces from the William Rubin Collection: Dialogue of the Tribal and the Modern and its Heritage, authored by Hattis, takes that landmark exhibition as a blueprint, focusing on forty-eight works (paintings, sculptures, and drawings) to highlight Rubin’s passion for the parallels between tribal art and modern masters. This sumptuous tome includes remembrances by art world luminaries, colleagues, and Rubin’s family, giving an unusually candid insight into the man and what compelled him. The book is inventively and consummately designed, and is narrated throughout by Rubin’s own statements and reflections. Twenty-two artworks are organized into ten groups, each consisting of two or three works. The remaining twenty-four pieces are pictured alone in “Group Eleven: More Masterpieces.” The combinations are first shown as they are displayed in Rubin’s homes, often placed together. For example, “Group Two, Picasso and the Tribal: Gabon,” sets the leering visage of the artist’s Portrait of Nusch Éluard (1937) against the taut elegance of an Okuyi mask of the Punu/Lumbo People from the Mayumba region of Gabon (ca. 1800s). Then, several pages are devoted to each piece in the grouping, with increasing photographic detail, as though we are seeing the objects in-person and moving around them. The effect is surprisingly intimate and connective. The tribal masks are especially enigmatic, seeming to beckon us in closer to perceive every expression, carved mark, or time-worn patina.

This is strikingly evident in “Group Eight, Giacometti and the Tribal: Kenya,” wherein Giacometti’s painting is placed next to an almost five-foot high wooden sculpture, a memorial portrait figure by an artist from the Giryama people from Kenya’s eastern coastal region. The splits, weathering, and fading, seen from every angle with astounding pictorial clarity, are almost painful to witness, especially around the head where they read as wounds inflicted upon our mournful, totemic hero. “Group Six” is superlative in its pairing of Jean Dubuffet’s L’Oiseleur (1949) with a female finial figure from the Middle Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea (ca. 1900). The gravitas of the latter's wizened frame and baleful mien contrasts with the visual cacophony of Dubuffet’s corpulent, cartoonish, yet unnervingly transfixing character, with its schizophrenic countenance, bared teeth, and eyes that bore unflinchingly into us.

Elsewhere, two modernists might be placed in conversation. In “Group Five,” Matisse’s The Reflection (1935) is coupled with Andy Warhol’s Woman in Blue (After Matisse) (1985), although perhaps inevitably, our greater familiarity with these artists, and the works’ more straightforward comparisons, renders these couplings less dynamic.

The book provides a fascinating window into the rarified upper echelons of the art world through the life of a major player, his reverence for world cultures, and the collection he amassed. But, in our evolving society, it finds relevance beyond its immediate subject by raising unavoidable considerations. Chiefly, the unpaid debt that Western art owes to the craftsmanship and aesthetic achievements of Indigenous peoples—the progenitors of European and American art movements in the last hundred years.

This discomfiting but necessary awareness is heightened throughout the book, as we come to realize the vast familial and institutional wealth that Rubin possessed both as a collector and a curator (means far beyond the reach of most), and how such privilege and influence can become a liability. However, Rubin seemed to be cognizant of the inequity of his position, and the untenable nature of such power being vested in one titanic individual with so much say on which artists found their way to the world’s most prestigious stage. To this end, it is noteworthy that he elected to step down from his position at MoMA, making way for new generations of museum custodians and differing voices. This humble act ensured Rubin’s legacy, and suggested that a more democratized, inclusive art world, less centered on hierarchical, cultish, and egotistic status quos, would enable the meaning and messaging of art to be expanded and more fully accessible. That is a marvelous intention for the book to impart. Whether we heed that ideal or not, is up to us.