Dan Robbins, the artist who created paint-by-numbers idea in Detroit, dies at 93

Family members say Robbins, an artist who created the first paint-by-numbers pictures and helped turn the kits into an American sensation during the 1950s has died. Dan Robbins, whose works were dismissed by some critics but later celebrated by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, died Monday in Sylvania, Ohio, said his son, Larry Robbins. Critics came to view the paint-by-numbers kits as a metaphor for a commercialized, cookie-cutter culture and fretted that they far outnumbered the original works of art hanging in American homes, said William Lawrence Bird Jr., curator of the 2001 exhibition at the National Museum of American History.

Source: www.detroitnews.com