Robbins Begins as Fogg Director

The Fogg Art Museum went through an extensive housecleaning this summer: Along with newly painted walls, freshly waxed floors, and rearrangement of paintings, it has an energetic new director, Daniel Robbins.

Robbins, formerly director of the Museum of Art at Rhode Island School of Design, replaces Agnes Mongan, who retired as Fogg director last summer and remains on the Fogg staff as Curator of Drawings.

"A museum is a place to discover things in," Robbins said yesterday. "The Fogg's responsibility is to make everybody realize that David, Delacroix, Botticelli, and such artists in the museum are fabulous."

A specialist in Cubism and in late 19th and early 20th century art of France, Robbins said, "I think a museum, especially a university museum, should link present to past, not turn into a Museum of Modern Art, but be in the broad spectrum of activities without being doctrinaire. Art comes out of other art, out of the recent and the remote past."

The Fogg is currently sponsoring three shows which will run until mid-October: Drawings Into Prints, which juxtaposes original sketches with final graphic representations; Some Recent Art, which assembles six American artists of the late 1960's; and Contemporary Photographs II.

Robbins will teach a course this spring in early 20th-century art