Robert Longo

Pictures Generation

Robert Longo is an American artist, filmmaker, photographer and musician, born in Brooklyn in 1953 and raised on Long Island. A childhood spent on mass media, films, television, magazines and comic books, remains the substrate of everything he makes. He began college in Texas but left without a degree, then studied sculpture under Leonda Finke, who pushed him towards a career in visual art, and received a grant to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

Returning to New York State, he took a degree in fine art at Buffalo State College, where he studied alongside Cindy Sherman and helped found the artist run space that became Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center. He then moved to New York City and into the No Wave scene, the milieu from which the group later called the Pictures Generation emerged.

Men in the Cities and the graphite method

His reputation was made by Men in the Cities, a series of large drawings of sharply dressed men and women contorted in what looks like violent motion, made at the end of the seventies and into the early eighties. The origin was a still from a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The method was to photograph friends lurching backward or collapsing forward, project the photographs, and draw them at or above life size, standardising the clothing into severe black and white. The result reads as dancing and as being shot, and refuses to settle between the two.

Although he trained as a sculptor, drawing became his medium, and the sculptural training shows. He uses graphite as a modelling material, building a chiselled line that gives the figures a dimensional weight. The process is collaborative and slow, with an illustrator laying in detail across days before the artist returns to the sheet repeatedly to finish it.

Later series apply the same photographic realism to emblems of power: blackened American flags, oversized handguns, an archive of daily drawings made across a full year, reinterpretations of documentary photographs of Sigmund Freud's apartment taken moments before his flight from the Nazis, and enormous renderings of breaking waves and of atomic detonations.

Beyond the gallery

He directed music videos in the decade after Men in the Cities, including work for New Order, Megadeth and R.E.M., and made album covers for Glenn Branca and The Replacements. He directed an episode of Tales from the Crypt and the feature film Johnny Mnemonic, and remarked at the time that making a painting is one thing but making a film kicks your ass. He also led a no wave band that played the downtown New York clubs and performed with Rhys Chatham.

Retrospectives followed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1989 and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1990, and later at the Menil Collection, the Deichtorhallen and museums in Nice and Lisbon. He showed Monsters at Metro Pictures in 2002 and was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2004. His charcoal drawings hung alongside Goya and Eisenstein at the Brooklyn Museum in 2017, and he presented a large survey at Pace Gallery in New York in 2025. He is represented by Pace Gallery and by Thaddaeus Ropac.

What a specialist examines

Longo's market divides sharply. Unique large drawings in charcoal and graphite sit at one level, while lithographs and screenprints issued in editions, including the widely circulated Men in the Cities images, sit well below. Establishing which of the two is in front of you is the first task, and with the Men in the Cities imagery it is a frequent point of confusion, because those figures exist as unique drawings, as prints in several formats, and as reproductions of no market standing.

For editions, a specialist records the publisher, the edition size, the impression number and any proof designation. For unique works, ownership history through the artist's galleries and inclusion in a documented exhibition history carry considerable weight. Condition is a serious question on works in charcoal and graphite: these are friable media on paper, vulnerable to offsetting, smudging and abrasion under glass, and any prior conservation or refixing should be disclosed. Scale is a value driver in itself, and framing that has protected a large sheet properly is always worth noting.