'Giacometti was a Swiss who lived in Paris in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties, so during and after the Second World War. He says it's Walking Man, not that it's a Holocaust figure; he doesn't need to. It's somebody devastated, withered away.The surface is so frightening, and those staring eyes, that small head, the very thick feet going into the base so he can barely walk. It's a great image of the devastation, of terrible things that happened, then and now. Even a great work of art that's against life can enhance life, and this is an example.'
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His first museum directorship came in 1976, at Williams; from there he went to the Rhode Island School of Design, then to Cornell. "I love the variety," he says of his job. "You're there for everybody. One minute you're talking to somebody about the leak in the roof, the next you're talking to an architect about the new wing, the next you're talking to a reporter, the next you're talking to a curator about acquiring a Tang Dynasty bowl. In comes a kindergarten kid who's learning about shapes and colors, and it's wonderful. In the next gallery there's a group of Alzheimer's patients and their caregivers, then in comes an engineering student who wants to know about contemporary art. Then you're talking with a major donor with hair as white as mine, and she wants to help you buy a work or endow a position. You have this whole range of things."
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In addition to the art itself, Robinson revels in how a museum can act as a great equalizer. "Our society has exploded," he says. "There's so little common ground, so little glue, so few places where we all come together. Well, a museum is one of those places. In our case, close to 100,000 visitors a year come in and they're rubbing shoulders independent of level of education, income, age, even independent of interests; some people come in just for the view." And as a university museum, he says, the Johnson can help instill a love of art in the next generation. "Half of our visitors are Cornell students," Robinson says. "They're coming to look at the views, or on a date, or to show their parents around—but also they're coming to look at the art. Somewhere inside them they know this is their museum. They can come on impulse, an extra hour at lunch time. It's something for the rest of their lives, and that's what we're here for—to enhance people's lives."
When the Johnson opened in 1973, its I. M. Pei-designed glass-and-concrete structure housed 9,000 objects; that number has since grown to 32,000. Current gallery space allows for the display of about 765 pieces, or 2.5 percent of the collection. "That's another reason why we had to grow," says Robinson, noting that the museum first started contemplating an expansion in the Nineties. "We were bursting at the seams." Once construction is completed, the number will increase to 2,000. (About 20,000 items in the collection are works on paper that, for preservation reasons, can't be displayed regularly.) "The greatest work of art we have is our building," Robinson says. "It's beautiful, and it embodies the two ideals of a museum. On the one hand, preservation and protection. There are these massive concrete walls; what could be more powerful? At the same time it's public, and the whole point is to be open—and we have all that glass, the sculpture court, the skylights, wonderful views out long windows on all four sides. So the balance of openness and protection is wonderful."
'It's a lovely work, imperial—from Rome itself, not just from the Roman Empire. It's a child, and you can see the baby fat. Wonderful hair. The whole thing is a beautiful conception, a vision of youth. It's in great condition, except for the nose. It has lost its nose, as they always do; it was almost certainly buried at some point. It's a portrait, probably part of a series on an affluent family at the time of the Emperor Antoninus Pius.'
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