Daniel Robbins: Contemporary Collections

With the arrival of Daniel Robbins at the Museum in May 1965, the Museum entered the world of contemporary art in full force. Robbins started important new collections of modern art and presented Providence with a galaxy of contemporary exhibitions and events that brought new vitality to Museum offerings.

It was traditional for the Museum to build solid, coherent collections: witness the Bates bequest, the Pendleton Collection, the Huard wallpapers, the Harold Brown collection, the Radeke and Danforth 19th-century French paintings and drawings, to name a few. Robbins was able to open a new collection in a little more than a year after his arrival: the Nancy Sayles Day Collection of Latin American Art, whose opening exhibit and catalogue appeared in the fall of 1966. Latin American art was of great interest to Robbins, and as he stated in the catalogue, "The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, has been presented with a unique opportunity to form a collection in this new and adventurous area. We owe this opportunity to the children of Nancy Sayles Day, who suggested and made possible the beginning of this contemporary Latin American Collection. They believed that this is the type of exciting, creative project that she would have enjoyed and have taken pleasure in sharing with Providence-- her birthplace...The Nancy Sayles Day Collection gives the Museum of Art achance to take a chance...to participate vigorously in what is happening now..." The collection came eventually to include many media and artists, and continues to grow today.

Another special opportunity presented itself when Selma Pilavin established in 1967 the Albert Pilavin Memorial Collection of Twentieth-century American Art, in memory of her husband, "whose progressive ideas...would be sympathetic to these first acquisitions." Collecting contemporary art had been a tradition at the Museum from the start; the purchase of Winslow Homer's On a Lee Shore was just the beginning, and Isaac Bates contributed substantially to the contemporary American holdings of his time. Yet there had been a lull in the collecting of American art following World War II, and the Pilavin Collection gave new impetus and direction, reviving what was in many ways a basic Museum practice. Running the gamut of styles, including major compositions by Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly, Wayne Thiebaud's popular teaser Wimbledon Cup, and the forceful lead sculptures by Robert Wilson, The Stalin Chairs, the collection has become an essential part of the fabric of taste and thought of the Rhode Island museum public. Selma Pilavin Robinson's dedication to this ideal inspired the Museum--and other collectors--ever since.

In the area of graphics, the 20th century received further emphasis from the Robbins era through the present, particularly with gifts from Mr. and Mrs. Bayard Ewing and their endowment of the Twentieth Century Graphics Fund. The Ewings and many other donors also purchased a large painting by Mark Rothko in honor of Daniel Robbins in September 1971. The graphics collection was been enriched by the generosity of the Ewings with works by Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella.

Exhibits during Robbins's tenure also focused heavily on the contemporary area. In 1964, Paintings and Constructions of the 1960s from the Richard Brown Baker Collection presented the second selection from this great collection. The 1966 retrospective of Walter Murch, the showing of the Roy Neuberger Collection and The Jazz Age in 1968, followed by Contemporary BlackArtists in 1969 and Joaquín Torres-Garcia (who is richly represented in the Nancy Sayles Day Collection) in 1970, are good examples. Perhaps the best remembered show, also in 1970, was Raid the Icebox,, when Andy Warhol pulled works from the Museum's storage for exhibition, from Romanesque stone columns to French shoes to American hatboxes.

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