Robert Rosenblum, who died Wednesday at 79, was a professor of fine arts at New York University and an associate curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where he helped organize the 2001 exhibit “Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People.”

Rehabilitating or recovering artists spurned or forgotten was a specialty of Rosenblum’s. His scholarly interests spanned the 18th and 19th centuries and ran right up to brash modern artists such as Jeff Koons and John Currin.

A prolific essayist, Rosenblum published 18 books, including “Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art” (1967) and “Nineteenth Century Art” (with H.W. Janson, 1984). He also published more specialized studies on individual artists, including Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and Mr. Koons, as well as the charmingly titled “The Dog in Art From Rococo to Post-Modernism” (1988).

For that book, Rosenblum considered art ranging back to a shaved, beribboned poodle by the 18th-century painter Jean-Jacques Bachelier and a statue of a defecating dog by the 19th-century Italian sculptor Adriano Cecioni, as well as more modern depictions by Edouard Manet and Alberto Giacometti.

Rosenblum was born in New York, the son of a Manhattan dentist. After studying at Queens College and Yale University, he earned a Ph.D. from New York University in 1956. In 1960, he published his first book, “Cubism and Twentieth Century Art.”

After teaching at Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and Yale, he joined NYU in 1967 as a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts. In 1976, he was appointed the Henry Ittleson Jr. professor of modern European art.

In 1996, Rosenblum became a curator at the Guggenheim, where he worked on such shows as “James Rosenquist, the Swimmer in the Econo-Mist” and “Picasso: The War Years, 1937–45.”

His exhibit “1900: Art at the Crossroads” made a splash in New York, appearing just a century after its subject year. The show included modernist heroes such as Cézanne and Gauguin and what Rosenblum dubbed “emerging avant-gardes,” including Picasso and Munch. But, typically for Rosenblum, interspersed with these were artists now largely forgotten but wildly popular in 1900, among them Adolphe-William Bouguereau, a French painter whose reputation Rosenblum helped restore.

For the Norman Rockwell exhibit, which opened just months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Rosenblum helped gather 70 paintings and all of Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers in a celebration of an American original.

“It was almost a way of discovering some simple truth, namely that these pictures were great to look at even though we had been brainwashed to think that they weren’t,” Rosenblum told CBS newsman Charles Osgood.

Far from being an uncritical celebrant of America, though, Rockwell was shown in the exhibit as a trenchant critic of civil rights in the South and also of the Vietnam War. Then there was Rockwell’s famous depiction of Rosie the Riveter, a muscular figure about to bite into a ham sandwich, against a backdrop of an American flag. It was entirely typical of Rosenblum’s approach that he pointed out to a television audience that Rockwell had borrowed her pose directly from Michelangelo’s painting of the prophet Isaiah in the Sistine Chapel.

Robert Harvey Rosenblum

Born in New York City on July 24, 1927; died December 6 at his Greenwich Village home of colon cancer; survived by his wife, Jane Kaplowitz, and children, Sophie and Theodore.