Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,403

This is the grave of Warren Robbins.

Born in 1923 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Robbins grew up in a Jewish immigrant family. His parents immigrated from what is today Ukraine. He was a good student, though without the money to go to the very best schools, so he went to the University of New Hampshire, graduating in 1945. He then did a master’s in history at the University of Michigan, finishing that in 1949. He taught high school for a bit, but then got a job with the State Department.

In the 50s, Robbins was stationed in Bonn for awhile. Once, at least they way he told it, while walking with the weirdo future California senator S.I. Hayakawa, he randomly stopped in a shop selling African masks. He bought one, a Yoruban one. He got into it. When back in Germany, this time in Hamburg, the next year, he spent $1,000 on masks. A collection was born.

Robbins moved back to Washington, bought a house, decorated it in African themes, and displayed his masks as something of a museum. Even in the 60s, a lot of people thought this was icky, a white man appropriating African art. He rejected those claims, saying his interests were entirely about the artistic magnitude of the works. That may be true, but then creating a semi-jungle in your house to display them all “Africany” is still a bit well……People started showing up at his house though. And he welcomed that. Knock on the door, Robbins would give you a tour. It became a thing.

In any case, Robbins was very serious about his new obsession and there’s no question it added a lot to understanding of African art in the United States. He bought a home once owned by Frederick Douglass and used it for his growing collection, making it the first museum dedicated explicitly to African art in the United States. This was in 1964. By 1966, the museum had become the Frederick Douglass Institute of Negro Arts and History and had incorporated other collections as well. Then later, it became the Museum of African Art.

Robbins didn’t even visit Africa until 1973, when he went on his first collected expedition there. His collection was already huge by this time and he had a staff of twenty workers, so people were into it. Despite the cultural appropriation accusations tossed at him, having this collection at the moment when Black Power had reached its peak drove a lot of visitors to it, even if it was owned by a white guy. He also became more sensitive to cultural issues over time. In 1966, a sacred object was stolen from the Kom, who live in Cameroon. Robbins had nothing to do with this. But he found the object on display in a Manhattan gallery. Robbins bought it and took it with him to return to the Kom on his 1973 trip. So good for him, wish more museum people and collectors took this seriously without the governments of other nations having to hold them accountable, which as anyone who follows the art/archeology world knows, is happening more often these days.

While Robbins defended his whiteness against arguments about appropriation, he also saw his work as moving forward dialogue on racial understanding. He was an ardent supporter of the civil rights movement. He said of his collection, “I had the feeling that if the public knew what the specialist knew, it could become a foundation for equal regard, for white people to have respect for a significant black people’s culture.”

Robbins knew that he could not do this himself forever. He wanted the Smithsonian to take over his museum. That august institution didn’t have an African art museum after all. The government agreed that this would add to the Smithsonian and so this happened in 1983. Robbins oversaw the movement of his museum to the National Mall, which was completed in 1987 as the National Museum of African Art.

Robbins lived at his home until just before his death in 2008, at the age of 85. Complications from a fall, which at that age I assume is the ol’ broken hip that you don’t recover from, though this is pointless speculation.

Warren Robbins is buried in Congressional Cemetery, Washington, D.C.

If you would like this series to visit other art collectors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, who left huge collections to the Met, is in Brooklyn and William Copley, the painter and collector, is in Key West, Florida. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.