Robert Storr

Zhang Huan has emerged as one of the most important artists of the past decade, a fearless explorer of the limits of the human body and a key figure in the flourishing Chinese art scene. His earliest performances, including 12 Square Meters, 65 Kilograms, and To Raise the Water-Level in a Fishpond, subjected his body to grueling tests of endurance while addressing the relationship between physical endurance and spiritual tranquility. Zhang 's move to New York in 1998 contributed to establish himself as a widely recognized figure in the international contemporary art world, staging performances in several cities around the globe, including Sydney, Rome, Shanghai and Hamburg where he reflected on his experiences in the cities he visited and his ethnic identity in a foreign land. In 2006 Zhang established a studio in Shanghai, where he began to seek a greater connection to Chinese heritage and history. This marked a new direction in his work, as he turned from performance to sculpture, painting, and installation. Through creating large-scale sculpture in diverse media, such as ash from local Buddhist temples, and with found objects, such as doors from the Chinese countryside homes, Zhang Huan continues to explore new ways to render his interest in the body and its language.A significant aspect of Zhang's new work revolves around his interest in Buddhism. Although Buddhist themes figured indirectly into his early work, they took on a more prominent role after a visit to Tibet in 2005. There, Zhang began to collect fragments of Buddhist sculptures, which he then used as models for massive copper figures. Upon his return to Shanghai, Zhang Huan began to collect ash from local Buddhist temples for use in sculptures and paintings. The use of burnt incense, the product of religious offerings, strengthens the link between his art and Buddhist practices.

How can we interpret the work of contemporary artists? First released in 2024, Focal Points is a book series of essays, articles and reviews by acclaimed curator and critic Robert Storr. Expertly edited by art historian and curator Francesca Pietropaolo, and richly illustrated, it lends Storr’s illuminating insights into an artist’s practice and way of thinking across recent decades. Brilliantly scholarly, accessible and engaging, Focal Points offers fresh interpretations of the varied territory of modern and contemporary art. This volume gathers, for the first time, Storr’s writings on the work of American painter Jasper Johns (b.1930). An artist internationally recognised for his encaustic paintings of flags, targets and maps, Johns’s ‘Neo-Dada’ works helped to formalise a shift in postwar American art, moving away from Abstract Expressionism and towards Pop art. Storr’s essays and articles provide a unique look at Johns’s practice and its continuing relevance. As Pietropaolo notes in her introduction, ‘Together, these writings … encapsulate Storr’s process of close looking at and prolonged thinking about Johns’s art, the result of a longstanding engagement that started back in the late 1960s … when he first met the artist in New York.’

Starving Artist Knifed to Death in Village Room… Famous Artist Dies Penniless and All Alone… Deep in the archives of The Metropolitan Museum of Art are two strange scrapbooks packed with century-old newspaper obituaries of painters, illustrators, sculptors, and photographers, famous and forgotten alike. Somber death notices of luminaries like Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin are preserved on their crumbling pages, side by side with tragic and often grisly stories of obscure artists who met their demise as victims of accident, murder, poverty, and disease. Compiled from 1906 to 1929, the scrapbooks not only memorialize the subjects of these obituaries: they also record graphic and sensationalized news reporting from the heyday of yellow journalism. Who collected the artists’ obituaries? What was their purpose for the Met Museum? Were the scrapbooks assembled in a nod to Giorgio Vasari’s bestselling sixteenth-century magnum opus, Lives of the Artists, with its hundreds of gossipy artist biographies? When Met Museum archivist Jim Moske chanced upon these fascinating relics forgotten in museum storage, he set out to unravel the mystery of their creation.Delving into Met employee records, Moske discovered the story of Arthur D'Hervilly, an ex-convict and aspiring artist who was hired in 1894 as a museum guard. By the twilight of his museum career, D’Hervilly had risen to assistant curator of paintings. Occasionally, he was also called upon to serve as the Met media officer. It was apparently in this capacity that in the summer of 1906, he decided to order the National Press Intelligence clipping service to send him any and all U.S. newspaper stories about the deaths of artists. By the time he died thirteen years later, he had assembled a massive chronicle of reportage. D’Hervilly’s colleagues dutifully carried on adding to the scrapbooks until 1929, leaving behind more than three hundred pages crammed with thousands of obituaries.Deaths of Artists intertwines D'Hervilly's peculiar biography with heart-wrenching, bizarre, outlandish, and darkly comic stories of artists, both successful and abject. Moske's meticulously researched narrative is illustrated with full-page images of scrapbook pages, details of shocking obituary headlines, paintings and sculptures by the artist-subjects, and unique documents from the Met archives. The deaths of artists, seen in the light of their uncommon lives, add up to much more than just a litany of sad endings. This eerie glimpse into a dark side of art history and creative practice illuminates the unique challenges artists face, exceptional risks they take, and the cruel turns of fate that often thwart their efforts.

Focal Points is a new book series of essays, articles and reviews, by acclaimed curator and critic Robert Storr. Expertly edited by art historian and curator Francesca Pietropaolo, and richly illustrated, it lends Storr’s illuminating insights into some of the critical themes across recent decades that are of timely urgency. Brilliantly scholarly, accessible and engaging, Focal Points offers fresh interpretations of the varied territory of modern and contemporary art. This volume grapples with one of the most critical topics at the heart of culture in the United States: racial division. In the essay, originally produced in 1994 when Storr lived in the diverse neighborhood of Flatbush, Brooklyn and worked as a curator in the then predominantly white, male world of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the author vividly describes the role of the modern art museum and multiculturalism, and analyses issues of identity and representation explored in the works of a range of artists including David Hammons, Byron Kim, Glenn Ligon and Adrian Piper, among others.

How can we interpret the work of contemporary artists? Focal Points is a new book series of essays, articles and reviews by acclaimed curator and critic Robert Storr. Expertly edited by art historian and curator Francesca Pietropaolo, and richly illustrated, it lends Storr’s illuminating insights into an artist’s practice and way of thinking across recent decades. Brilliantly scholarly, accessible and engaging, Focal Points offers fresh interpretations of the varied territory of modern and contemporary art. Through a selection of texts spanning from 1986 to 2016, volume one brings together thirty years of Storr’s writings on American artist Bruce Nauman (b.1941) whose practice encompasses sculpture, photography, neon, drawing, printmaking and performance. Much of Nauman’s work makes use of language games and visual puns, influenced by the linguistic theories of twentieth-century thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein and by the work of writer, poet and playwright Samuel Beckett. Describing his work in 1970, Nauman said: ‘Sometimes the activity involves making something, and sometimes the activity is the piece.’

How can we interpret the work of contemporary artists? Focal Points is a new book series of essays, articles and reviews by acclaimed curator and critic Robert Storr. Expertly edited by art historian and curator Francesca Pietropaolo, and richly illustrated, it lends Storr’s illuminating insights into an artist’s practice and way of thinking across recent decades. Brilliantly scholarly, accessible and engaging, Focal Points offers fresh interpretations of the varied territory of modern and contemporary art. This volume considers the work of American abstract painter Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967). Active in New York for over three decades, Reinhardt was part of the group of artists who became known as Abstract Expressionists, and he made work that would prove influential to the younger generation of Minimal and Conceptual artists. He believed in a philosophy of what he called ‘art-as-art’ and used his writing and satirical cartoons to advocate for abstract art. As he famously wrote in 1962: ‘Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else.’ In this volume, Storr discusses Reinhardt’s painting, his comics, and his slide lecture series or ‘non-happenings,’ as the artist called them.

Die Cage Bilder German edition. Gerhard Richters rigorous exploration of the medium of painting makes him one of the most important artists of our time. The Cage Paintings, a cycle of six, large-format paintings from 2006, are named after the composer John Cage. They were exhibited for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and mark Richters current artistic position within more than 40 years of work. Robert Storr skillfully guides the reader through the art of Gerhard Richter in three detailed chapters. German text.

In the 1950s, American painter Philip Pearlstein completed his MA thesis, ‘The Paintings of Francis Picabia 1908–1930’. When his research coincided with Picabia’s death in 1953, Pearlstein became the authority on the work of Picabia and his influence in European modernism that set the stage for modern art in America. Of course, it is impossible to discuss Picabia without also considering the work of Marcel Duchamp. At different intervals in his career, Pearlstein wrote three subsequent essays on Picabia for major arts journals: ‘The Symbolic Language of Francis Picabia’ for Arts magazine, 1956; ‘Hello & Goodbye, Francis Picabia’ for Art News, 1970, and ‘When the Dada Daddies Got Real; Or, How I Turned Picabia Inside Out’ for Brooklyn Rail, 2017. Pearlstein’s articles present a fascinating comparison between Picabia, Duchamp and Pearlstein himself. Picabia Inside Out brings together Pearlstein’s articles in full, published in an illustrated paperback book with a facsimile of the 1955 MA thesis presented as an historical document showing all the nuances of his typewriter. A foreword by Robert Storr highlights the broader art historical context and Pearlstein’s importance as a precursor to what became known as postmodernism.

Following the success of Writings on Art 1980–2005, HENI presents the highly anticipated final volume to complete a two-volume collection of writings on art by Robert Storr, one of the world’s leading art critics and curators. Featuring the best of Storr’s criticism – reviews, essays, articles, many of which previously unpublished – from 2006 to the present day, the book includes his texts on artists such as Gego, Carrie Mae Weems, David Hammons, Jenny Holzer, Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, El Anatsui and Francesco Clemente. Written with his signature intellect and wit, his writings range from essays on performances of femininity in Cindy Sherman’s photographic oeuvre to dialectics of race in the work of Kara Walker. Expertly curated from his prolific output, and illustrated with 175 images to accompany 51 texts, Writings on Art is the definitive collection of Storr’s multi-faceted writing with his finger on the pulse of contemporary art – a must-read for curators and students, artists, exhibition-goers and all those interested in the art and culture of today.

R. Crumb’s obsessions—from sex to the Bible, music, politics, and the vicissitudes and obscenities of daily life—are chronicled in this comprehensive book of work by the illustrious American comic artist.Instrumental in the formation of the underground comics scene in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s, Crumb has ruptured and expanded the boundaries of the graphic arts, redefining comics and cartoons as countercultural art forms. Presenting a slice of Crumb’s unique universe, this book features a wide array of printed matter culled from the artist’s five-decade career—tear sheets of drawings and comics taken directly from the publications where the works first appeared, magazine and album covers, broadsides from the 1960s and 1970s, tabloids from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, Oakland, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and other counterculture enclaves, as well as exhibition ephemera. Complementing this volume are historical works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that have inspired Crumb and pages from his rarely seen sketchbooks from the 1970s and 1980s that reveal his exemplary skill as a draftsman. Documenting the critically acclaimed exhibition Drawing for Print: Mind Fucks, Kultur Klashes, Pulp Fiction & Pulp Fact by the Illustrious R. Crumb at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, curated by Robert Storr, this publication offers an opportunity to immerse oneself in Crumb’s singular mind. In the accompanying text, Storr explores the challenging nature of some of Crumb’s work and the importance of artists who take on the status quo.

From essays on gender in the work of Louise Bourgeois to a review of Art Spiegelman's comix memoir Maus, Writings on Art is expertly curated from his prolific output and illustrated with 175 images to accompany the texts. Written with Storr's signature intellect and wit, the book is the definitive collection of his multi-faceted writing and features the best of Storr's criticism, reviews, essays, and other writings from the 1980s to the mid 2000s. A must read for curators, students, artists, exhibition-goers and all those interested in the art and culture of today.

An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the life and work of the visionary and influential painter Philip Guston.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.

The groundbreaking sculptor's most comprehensive monograph to date Jean-Michel Othoniel is an artist who creates sculptures that explore themes of fragility, transformation, and ephemerality. Using the repetition of such modular elements as bricks or beads, his work deploys various strategies that hint at loss and despair – cracks in his objects' perfect surfaces, negative spaces and, early in his career, transient materials such as sulfur. The most authoritative study of the artist's work to date, it includes intimate gallery pieces as well as monumental public commissions around the world.

The first comprehensive monograph on painter and poet Robert De Niro, Sr. (1922-1993), a major contributor to postwar American art, known for his unique, bold style of painterly representation. De Niro was a visionary artist in the early days of Abstract Expressionism and a celebrated member of the New York School of painters, along with Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. Over the course of his fifty-year career, he painted portraits, still lifes, the female nude, and interiors with a signature gestural painting style and brilliant color, which bear the influence of Henri Matisse as well as his teacher, Hans Hofmann. During the height of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art in the 1960s, De Niro remained faithful to his own vision in his paintings and poetry; today his powerful figural works are ripe for rediscovery. This lavishly illustrated book brings together De Niro s paintings, prints, and drawings as well as a never-before-published selection of his writings and poetry. Featuring essays by noted scholars and an illustrated biography including many unpublished photographs and ephemera, this seminal volume explores the depth and breadth of De Niro s oeuvre.

Known for her intricate and dynamic wire sculptures, the American sculptor, educator and arts activist Ruth Asawa challenged conventional notions of material and form through her emphasis on lightness and transparency.Asawa began her now iconic looped-wire works in the late 1940s while still a student at Black Mountain College. Their unique structure was inspired by a 1947 trip to Mexico, during which local craftsmen taught her how to create baskets out of wire. While seemingly unrelated to the lessons of color and composition taught in Josef Albers' legendary Basic Design course, these works, as she explained, are firmly grounded in his teachings in their use of unexpected materials and their elision of figure and ground.Presenting an important and timely overview of the artist's work, this monograph brings together a broad selection of her sculptures, works on paper and more. Together they demonstrate the centrality of Asawa's innovative practice to the art-historical legacy of the 20th century. In addition to an incredible group of photographs of the artist and her work by Imogen Cunningham, a selection of rare archival materials illustrates a chronology of the artist's life and work. Also featured is an extensive text by Tiffany Bell that explores the artist's influences, history, and, most importantly, the work itself, as well as a significant essay by Robert Storr discussing Asawa's work in relation to mid-20th century art history, culture and scientific theory.Born in Norwalk, California, to Japanese immigrants, Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) enrolled in Milwaukee State Teachers College in 1943, but was unable to receive her degree due to continued hostility against Japanese Americans. In 1946, Asawa began to study at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she absorbed the vital teachings and influences of Josef and Anni Albers, Buckminster Fuller and Merce Cunningham, among others, and embraced her own vocation as an artist. Asawa died in August 2013, at the age of 87, at her home in San Francisco.

With vivid memories of his first visit to the Scottish National Gallery in the 1970s and his initial encounter with Hugo van der Goes' The Trinity Altarpiece, Rembrandt's A Woman in Bed, Velazquez's An Old Woman Cooking Eggs and Degas' Diego Martelli, Robert Storr discusses the shifting balance of museum collections from historically 'certified' classics to art whose status and significance remains in active contention and from singular 'treasures' to ensembles that speak to the larger scope of an artist's endeavour. Also Available: Unfinished Paintings: Narratives of the Non-Finito Watson Gordon Lecture 2014 (ISBN 9781906270919), 'The Hardest Kind of Archetype': Reflections on Roy Lichtenstein The Watson Gordon Lecture 2010 (ISBN 9781906270384), Picasso's 'Toys for Adults' Cubism as Surrealism: The Watson Gordon Lecture 2008 (ISBN 9781906270261), Sound, Silence, and Modernity in Dutch Pictures of Manners The Watson Gordon Lecture 2007 (ISBN 9781906270254), Roger Fry's Journey From the Primitives to the Post-Impressionists: Watson Gordon Lecture 2006 (ISBN 9781906270117).

A must-have for the core contemporary art audience: Robert Storr's singular and long-awaited book is unprecedented in treating the full range of Louise Bourgeois's artistic achievement. In a career spanning nearly 75 years, Louise Bourgeois created a vast body of work that enriched the formal language of modern art while it expressed her intense inner struggles with unprecedented candor and unpredictable invention. Her solo 1982 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art launched an extraordinarily productive late career, making her a much-honored and vivid presence on the international art scene until her death in 2010 at the age of 98. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Bourgeois embraced sculpture as her primary medium and experimented with a range of materials over the years, including marble, plaster, bronze, wood, and latex. Bourgeois contributed significantly to Surrealism, Postminimalist, and installation art, but her work always remained fiercely independent of style or movement. With more than 1000 illustrations, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois comprehensively surveys her immense oeuvre in unmatched depth. Writing from a uniquely intimate perspective, as a close personal friend of Bourgeois, and drawing on decades of research, Robert Storr critically evaluates her achievements and reveals the complexity and passion of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

Louise Bourgeois was a prolific artist known for her highly personal body of work consisting of sculptures, installations, drawing and prints that deal with themes of memory, trauma, fear and hidden emotion. With a discussion of ideas, emotions and experiences that inspired the creation of her work, this title examines Bourgeois' artistic legacy.