Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Robert Longo American
(b. 1953)
"LARRY" from the MEN IN THE CITIES series (1983)
lithograph with pencil
73.5" x 37.5"

STYLE: mass media, Neo-Expressionism

Robert Longo has been called "the artist of the 80s" in Newsweek magazine and the New York Times. Can one artist represent a decade, and, if so, how? Certainly, the figures in Longo's "Men in the Cities" drawings have a contemporary air. Their clothing and haircuts look familiar. The drawings had great impact when they first appeared because they showed attention to detail and representation unusual for their time. Also, the figures seem to be under some duress. Many people equate this dynamic with contemporary anxiety in a fast-paced society. The "Men In The Cities" series has been widely interpreted as a commentary of the individual's clash with the culture that surrounds him, an urban, corporate, technological culture.

The figure in this work seem to be falling, or even dancing, but also may be helplessly contorted by forces beyond his control. The strength and grace with which the figure is drawn strengthens its mystery. Although Longo's work may be said to be a negative commentary on corporate America, it is a typical art world paradox that works by Longo are proudly displayed in corporate boardrooms and bank lobbies.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Interview with Barry Blinderman, in Art Talk: The 80s, ed. Jeanne Siegel, Da Capo Press, 1988.
from intro (Siegel): Longo's "Men in the Cities" spanned a period from 1979 to 1983. Giant figures of men and women...were involved in a kind of death dance. At first, Longo appropriated images from magazines, newspapers, or movie stills. Then he began to use his friends as models, posing and photographing them himself... from interview text: "The thing about gestures—I just want to take that imbalance and freeze it forever. It was like using the traditions of art, only introducing the gestures of the 80s. I don't like modern dance; I think the best dance is the way people die in movies—they reel and jerk and explode in space...I'm picking an archetypal uniform or costume. Men wear suits, shirts and ties, and women wear dresses. I would never do a woman in pants. At this point, it's a uniform...When you look at some of the drawings, I believe that there's a real physical and personal relationship to the viewer. You experience the gesture. Did you ever see James Chance of the Contortions, or David Byrne of the Talking Heads? Wouldn't you like to be able to move like them? But that's what these drawings end up doing.

Grace Glueck, NYTimes, 3/10/85
"His way of catching our "time" is by playing back to us the pressures, contradictions and even hopes engendered by its charged mix of cultures—urban, corporate, technological and media—in taut, sometimes powerful icons that he has said "exist somewhere between movies and monuments...Part of a long series called "Men in the Cities," these highly finished drawings are done with great attention to the massings of blacks and accentuating detail...They have been widely interpreted as powerful expressions of urban angst."
Nancy Princenthal, Art in America, 1/91
"For the segment of the art world that came closest over the past ten years to Hollywood and Wall Street, and to big deals of every kind, Longo has been something of a standard bearer...in both Men in the Cities and the flag drawings, a dark, single, centered form is tossed against a white expanse by an unseen violent force...For all the anger and sadness, there is also an irresistible grace." ticized by clean, stark, modernist compositions and pellucid washes of color..."

Charlotta Kotik, Figures, Forms and Expressions catalog, 1981, Albright/CEPA/Hallwalls show
"Isolated in the white blankness of their uniform background, Longo's drawings of urban men display a formal beauty that disguises their unsettling content. The descriptions of men and women are ambiguous—we will never learn whether it a dance of joy or the gestures of infantile grief; whether it is the spinning fall of the victim or of the assassin, which Longo has singled out to be locked into visual performance...In his earlier work, Longo used to derive his images from movie stills, but at present, he creates his own sources. He photographs his friends in countless poses, carefully screens the images for their dynamic content, and then enlarges those he selects into drawings, Clad in the black armor of formal business suits, Longo's figures become anonymous as people. They become personifications of universal feelings and anxieties, pathetic in their dehumanization, objects in the hands of their creator."