Books by Robert Storr
Alice Neel: Painted Truths
by Barry Walker, Jeremy Lewison, Robert Storr, Tamar Garb
Spanning nearly seven decades, a comprehensive consideration of the psychologically acute and surprisingly honest portraits of Alice Neel
Widely regarded as one of the most important American painters of the 20th century, Alice Neel is internationally recognized for her contributions to Abstract Expressionism, especially her perceptive portraiture. Neel (1900–1984) was a portrait painter at a time when this was traditionally the role of a male artist. After ascending to prominence in the 1960s as the feminist movement gained momentum, she has remained an iconic figure in the history of American painting.
A self-proclaimed “collector of souls,” Neel often painted friends and family, as well as the celebrated artists and writers of her day, such as Andy Warhol, Frank O’Hara, and Meyer Shapiro, delving into personalities and idiosyncrasies with a rare frankness. Alice Neel: Painted Truths brings together paintings that demonstrate Neel’s range and ability, along with insightful commentary from four leading art historians. Although the book focuses on her portraits, it also covers the artist’s early social realist paintings and cityscapes, tracing the evolution of Neel’s style and examining themes that she revisited throughout her career.
Published in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Exhibition Schedule:
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (March 21 – June 13, 2010)
Whitechapel Gallery, London (July 9 – September 19, 2010)
Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden (October 10, 2010 – January 2, 2011)
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Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (WALKER ART CENT)
by Kevin Young, Robert Storr, Thomas McEvilley, Philippe Vergne, Sander Gilman, Yasmil Raymond
Kara Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained international recognition for her room-sized tableaux, which depict historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence and subjugation and are made using the paradoxically genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the antebellum American South, Walker's compositions play off of stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses and slave men, women and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation. Over the years, the artist has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression and liberation. Her scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Deploying an acidic sense of humor, Walker examines the dialectics of pleasure and danger, guilt and fulfillment, desire and fear, race and class. This landmark publication, which is sure to win international design awards, accompanies Walker's first major American museum survey. It features critical essays by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr and Kevin Young, as well as an illustrated lexicon of recurring themes and motifs in the artist's most influential installations by Yasmil Raymond, more than 200 full-color images, an extensive exhibition history and bibliography, and a 36-page insert by the artist.
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Interviews on Art: By Robert Storr
by Robert Storr
Over the past three decades, Robert Storr has set the critical and curatorial standard for American art
As a museum curator, academic, editor and writer, Robert Storr has come into contact with the most important artists of our era. Over the years he has amassed a major body of interviews, collected here for the first time in a single volume. Interviews on Art includes over 60 fully illustrated discussions, conducted between 1981 and 2016, with some of the most renowned names in the art world.
Interviewees represented in this book include Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Richard Serra, Gabriel Orozco, Elizabeth Murray, Harald Szeemann and Mike Kelley (among many others), and each text is accompanied by relevant works and previously unpublished photographs of the artists. A number of the interviews are unpublished or appear in full for the first time, including those with Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober, Buckmister Fuller, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer and Kara Walker.
Refreshingly, Storr is as reflexive about his own work as a critic as he is about the artistic works up for discussion. The book is introduced with a conversation between Storr and curator and art historian Francesca Pietropaolo. The two carry on a wide-ranging discussion in which they dissect the interview as a medium: exploring the ethics involved, various techniques and approaches as well as the limitations and difficulties of the process.
Robert Storr (born 1949) is a renowned American art critic, curator and artist. Trained as a painter, he served as Curator and then Senior Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art for more than a decade. Equally distinguished as an academic, Storr led the Yale University School of Art as Dean from 2006 to 2016.
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Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting
by Robert Storr
Driven and consumed by art, Philip Guston painted and drew compulsively. This book takes the reader from his early social realist murals and easel paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, to the Abstract Expressionist works of the 1950s and early 1960s, and finally to the powerful new language of figurative painting, which he developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on more than thirty years of his own research, the critic and curator, Robert Storr, maps Guston's entire career in one definitive volume, providing a substantial, accessible, and revealing analysis of his work.
With more than 850 images, the book illustrates Guston's key works and includes many unpublished paintings and drawings. An extensive chronology, illustrated with photographs, letters, articles, publications, and other ephemera drawn from the artist's archives and other sources, contextualizes Guston's life and provides in-depth coverage of his life at home, his work in the studio, his relationship with fellow artists and his many exhibitions.
Guston was able to speak about art with unrivalled passion and fluency. In celebration of this, the book features Guston's own thoughts on his drawings and his great heroes of the Italian Renaissance.
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Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting
by Quincy Troupe, Robert Storr, Kathryn Kanjo
For five decades, New York-based artist Jack Whitten (born 1939) has explored the possibilities of paint, the role of the artist and the allure of materials. As a child of the segregated South, he bears witness to expressions of evil and the resilience of the human spirit. From his first spectral canvases to his recent mosaic canvases, Whitten's compelling compositions have spanned a half-century of artistic innovation. Showcasing approximately 60 canvases, this survey--the first substantial volume on the artist--reveals Whitten as an innovator who uses abstraction in its newest idioms to achieve an enduring gravitas. Whitten's abiding engagement with scientific systems (as structure), social issues (as evidence) and commitment to the power of visual expression (materiality) show him to be an artist both of his time and for the present.
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Modern Art Despite Modernism
by Henri Matisse, Gerhard Richter, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Robert Storr, Ben Shahn, Salvador Dali, Georgia O'Keeffe, Glenn Lowry, Balthus, Giorgio De Chirico, Max Beckmann, Francesco Clemente, George Grosz, Glenn D. Lowry
Throughout the twentieth century, the evolution of mainstream Modernism in the arts has been shadowed and made complex by alternative expressions of a seemingly retrograde type, art that appears to set back the clock or to redirect the stream of progress. Modern Art Despite Modernism explores the anti-Modernist impulse in painting and sculpture through socio-cultural conflicts of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Texts by Robert Storr advocate the strengths of this impulse in paintings and drawings by Otto Dix, Lucian Freud, Francesco Clemente and even Pablo Picasso--and note the enduring popularity of such artists as Pavel Tchelitchew, whose "Hide and Seek," along with Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World," remain among the public's favorite pictures. Storr also discusses taste and its implications, both part and present, for institutions like The Museum of Modern Art. This book was published as the second in a series of three titles, in conjunction with the millennial exhibitions schedule of MoMA2000 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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