He also played college football and, after graduating, returned to work as a coaching assistant and to lead art history discussion sections for a year.

In 1987 he published a book about the French painter Gustave Caillebotte, which helped to initiate a revival of scholarly and public interest in that little-known Impressionist.

A 1982 exhibition Varnedoe curated, "Northern Light: Realism and Symbolism in Scandinavian Painting, 1880-1910" introduced American audiences to yet more unfamiliar artists.

A list of the exhibitions he brought to MoMA also indicates the breadth of his interests: "Vienna: 1900" in 1986, "High And Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" (co-curated with the writer Adam Gopnik) in 1990, retrospectives of the art of Cy Twombly (1995), Jasper Johns (1997), and Jackson Pollock (1999), and "Van Gogh's Postman: The Portraits of Joseph Roulin (2001).

That exhibition was an examination of the overlap between "high culture" (i.e., painting, art works created for display in galleries and museums) and popular culture (i.e., caricature, graffiti, advertising, comic books) that gave rise to the Cubism of Picasso, Kurt Schwitters' collages, Miró's surrealism, the Pop Art of Ed Ruscha and Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns' paint brushes and coffee cans, Robert Rauschenberg's Rebus, and late Philip Guston.

The value of the catalogue, then, was in its thoughtful essays which also discussed, and illustrated, the work of more recent artists whose roots were in pop culture: e.g., Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ashley Bickerton, Roger Brown, Peter Halley, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, Elizabeth Murray, David Salle, Peter Saul, Kenny Scharf, Cindy Sherman, among others.

He also acknowledged the gulf between those who revered the School of New York and those who embraced the un-painterly successors to Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, those artists who seemed to represent a repudiation of Abstract Expressionism.

Ultimately, he argued that Minimalism represented a profound gain, that it could be taken "both as a legitimate reflection of the way we think individually and as a valuable aspect of a liberal society.