Robert Longo
Men in Cities, drawn enormous in charcoal, and forty years of black-and-white since.
Robert Longo was born in Brooklyn in 1953, studied at Buffalo and was part of the Pictures Generation with Sherman, Prince and Goldstein. Men in the Cities, begun in 1979, are huge charcoal and graphite drawings of office workers in suits contorted mid-fall, made from photographs of friends on a rooftop being pulled by ropes and pelted with objects; they became the defining image of the decade. He directed Johnny Mnemonic and music videos, then returned to drawing at enormous scale — waves, sharks, nuclear explosions, protest, the American flag — all in charcoal, all black and white.
Charcoal on mounted paper at this scale is the central practical fact: the surfaces are large, heavy, minimally fixed, and cannot be cleaned or retouched, so any abrasion is permanent and glazing, transport and installation history matter greatly. The Men in the Cities drawings lead the market and are scarce; the later large charcoals form the main body of available work. There are editions and prints of the Men in the Cities images which are frequently confused with the drawings in reproduction, and lithographs and screenprints from across the career.
If you own a work by Robert Longo
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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