Walter Robinson (1950–2025)
146Feb. 13, 2025
Painter and critic Walter Robinson, known for his acerbically witty writing and his louche, hot-blooded paintings, died on February 9 at the age of seventy-four. His wife, painting conservator Lisa Rosen, toldArtnet Newshe died of liver cancer. Robinson was a man of passionate and multiple appetites, and in the 1970s and ’80s seemingly had a finger in every pie to be found on the downtown New York art scene. As an artist he was part of the Pictures Generation, working alongside such figures as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, dashing off lurid paintings of hard-boiled men in steamy clinches with red-lipped sirens as well as guileless depictions of bathroom-cabinet staples and limp-bunned burgers. As a critic, he was relentlessly entertaining. Whether bursting unannounced into a gallery accompanied by a video camera for a public-access TV show, or writing for his ownArtnetmagazine, he could be counted on to supply his unvarnished opinion as well as a delightfully embellished description of all that he had seen and heard at the museum, the gallery, the party. He remained modest to a fault despite his many achievements, which themselves flew in the face of perhaps his most widely quoted observation. “With success becoming so common,” he said in 1986, “the only way to be unique is to fail.”
Walter Robinson was born July 18, 1950, in Wilmington, Delaware, and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 1968, he moved to New York to attend Columbia University, where he studied art and psychology before enrolling in the Whitney Independent Study Program as an art critic in 1972. The following year, with Edit DeAk and Joshua Cohn, he cofounded the irreverent zineArt-Rite, which until 1978 offered anonymous commentary on the New York art scene alongside interviews and art. Owing to the trio’s impecuniousness, Robinson often found himself going to great lengths to get it out, spending a long night stamping covers with ink-dipped potatoes alongside his colleagues, or sneakily running off copies at his day job atJewish Weekand subsequently getting fired. “I don’t even know if there was an intellectual process,” he toldArtforum’s David Frankel in 2003. “I was trying to stop being nervous and do something.”
In 1976, Robinson, alongside Lucy Lippard, Sol LeWitt, and others, cofounded Printed Matter, one of the earliest publishers and distributors of artists’ books, which it presented as artworks in their own right. The press went nonprofit in 1978 and in 2019 moved to Chelsea, where it remains today. Robinson in the early 1980s worked as an art editor for theEast Village Eye, and from 1980 to 1996 served as the news editor for Art in America. Beginning in 1993, with Cathy Lebowitz and Paul Hasegawa-Overacker, he ran the public-access TV showGalleryBeat. Memorably described as “idiotic” by Julian Schnabel, the show ran for 130 episodes and featured on-the-spot interviews and gallery visits, accompanied by a wildly panning camera and running commentary by Robinson. “Congratulations, Mitchell,” hecalls out to Mitchell Algusat a sweltering group show at the dealer’s eponymous gallery. “Fabulous show. Turn on the air-conditioning!”
In 1996, Robinson became the founding editor ofArtnetmagazine, and over the ensuing years launched or elevated the careers of now-renowned critics including Charlie Finch, Donald Kuspit, and Jerry Saltz. Following the magazine’s 2012 demise, he wrote a regular column for Artspace.com from 2013 to 2014, notably contributing agroundbreaking essayin which he coined the term “Zombie Formalism” to describe backward-looking contemporary abstract art tailored to current market demands.
Concurrent withArtnetmagazine’s closure, he returned full force to his own practice, which he had begun back in the 1970s. Searching for his own style as a young man, he’d found himself drawn to the lusty, bravado-filled scenes that graced the covers of pulp fiction paperbacks of the 1940s and ’50s. Aiming to dispense with the “avant-garde, posing and phoniness” that he saw as characterizing the art world of the time, and with an eye to getting laid—“it seemed that young women liked pictures of couples kissing, so I found they gave me a certain kind of sex appeal,” he told theWhitney Museum of American Artin 2017—he began making richly hued works depicting similarly licentious scenes. Some he painted atop patterned bedsheets, inspired by Sigmar Polke and a desire to avoid shipping costs; contrasting with the gritty scenes these backgrounds lent the work yet another dimension.
After a brief dalliance with Super 8 film—Robinson with DeAk and filmmaker Paul Dougherty shot theiconic 1978 music videofor Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop”—he went back to whatNew Yorkercritic Peter Schjeldahl termed his “uncool love of paint,” expanding his subject matter to include such mundane objects as beer, nasal spray, and french fries. Too, in the 1980s he moved beyond oil paint, experimenting with spray paint and then making large-scale spin paintings, which predated (and sadly undersold) those of Damien Hirst. During this decade he showed with Semaphore Gallery and Metro Pictures, and alongside Lippard and Kiki Smith was involved with Collaborative Projects—or Colab, as it was known, working with other artists to fundraise and mount exhibitions.
His practice had largely petered out by the 1990s, as his involvement with publishing increased. On his return to painting, he was greeted by a resurgence of interest, which culminated early in a 2014 touring retrospective. Curated by Barry Blinderman at the University Galleries at Illinois State University in Normal, the exhibition traveled to the Moore College of Art in Philadelphia before landing at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York in 2016, prompting Schjeldahl to laud “the subtle magic of all of Robinson’s art: returning tired images and jaded tastes to the first-morning blush of their, and our, innocence.”
Robinson’s work is held in the collections of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, and the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, both in New York. Among the volumes he published are Instant Art History: From Cave Art to Pop Art (1994) and Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula (1998). A monograph of his work, Kiss Before Dying: Walter Robinson – A Painter of Pictures and Arbiter of Critical Pleasures, by Richard Milazzo, appeared in 2021.