MoMA still considers "Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective" one of the most important and successful exhibitions in its history. His other exhibitions included "Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism," "Frank Stella: Works From 1970 to 1987," "Henri Rousseau," "Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern," "Cezanne: The Late Work,"

I first became aware of Rubin through his seminal 1968 exhibition "Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage". It was really the first attempt to locate the creative impulse known as Dada into a historical context. Although later scholarship has found fault in his inclination to lump all of Dada as a precursor to Surrealism, he was the first to tackle this difficult subject with a rigorous art historical methodology in a museum setting.

As a curator, Rubin was tenacious in his pursuit of art he thought MoMA should own. He greatly expanded the museum's holdings in abstract expressionism with works such as Jackson Pollock's "One: Number 31, 1950" and Barnett Newman's 1950-51 "Vir Heroicus Sublimis,". His acquisitions MoMA also included Picasso's "Guitar," a metal construction sculpture from 1912-13 that the artist donated to the museum. His other major work Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern still influences contemporary art today.

Born in Brooklyn, Rubin earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in art history from Columbia University. During the 1950s and 1960s, he taught at Sarah Lawrence College and the City University of New York. He also worked as an editor for Art International. He entered Columbia University and, after interrupting his studies to serve in the American occupation forces in Europe, earned a bachelor's degree in Italian language and literature. He studied musicology at the University of Paris for a year with the thought of becoming a conductor. At its end, he set aside that ambition and returned to Columbia for graduate work in history. A course in medieval art taught by the legendary Meyer Schapiro, whose other big area of expertise was the New York School which inspired him to shift to art history.

John Elderfield, the current chief curator of the department of painting and sculpture, said Rubin built on the legacy of Alfred H. Barr Jr., yet Rubin "was the one who really brought to it the historical positivistic sense of order, and the notion of the great unrolling of the modern movement," Rubin might have contributed almost as much as Barr to building the Modern's unparalleled collection of early modernist works. He was known for his indefatigable energy in wooing collectors and negotiating with dealers once he had zeroed in on art that he felt the Modern should own. His acquisitions for the museum include emblematic works like Picasso's "Charnel House" (1944-45), Miro's Surrealist "Birth of the World" (1925) and two 1950s cutouts by Matisse, "Memory of Oceania" and "The Swimming Pool."

He gave the museum "Australia," a seminal 1951 sculpture by David Smith, from his own collection.. He also greatly expanded the museum's holdings in Abstract Expressionism, an area that Barr was sometimes thought to have neglected. Rubin continued the museum's practice of pruning weak or redundant works from its collection to help finance new acquisitions. In a move that raised some eyebrows in the art world, he instituted the practice of taking sealed bids from dealers when selling a work, which worked to the museum's advantage. His painting and sculpture installations were generally formalist and chronological, with an emphasis on masterpieces, great artists and the French. There are many critics, who faulted his exhibitions and research for only rarely venturing beyond the parameters established by Barr, suggesting that this had a chilling effect on his department's involvement with new art and often made the museum seem obsessed with its own history.

At the time of his death, Rubin was finishing a book on the art he acquired for the museum. He is survived by his wife, Phyllis Hattis, a daughter and two brothers.