Robert Longo valuation
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.
What a work by Robert Longo is worth
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Bio
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.
Men in the Cities, Johnny Mnemonic and Engines of State
Men in the Cities was first shown at the start of the 1980s and remains the work he is known for. He also directed the feature film Johnny Mnemonic in 1995, and his later drawings have often worked from news photographs and from art history.
His series Engines of State, made between 2012 and 2019, was given to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and shown there in 2023. For a drawing, the title, date and dimensions identify it, and gallery records are the documentation; for a lithograph or other print, the edition and publisher.
Hallwalls, Diane Shea and the Magellan drawings
Longo grew up on Long Island, left the University of North Texas without a degree, studied sculpture with Leonda Finke and in 1972 won a grant to the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. At Buffalo State, where he took his BFA in 1975 under Joseph Piccillo, he and friends set up the Essex Art Center in their co-op building, which became Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center. The idea for Men in the Cities came in 1975 from a still in Fassbinder's film The American Soldier, and he made about sixty of them between 1979 and 1982. The professional illustrator Diane Shea, first commissioned in 1978, drew for that series and remained his illustrator, through the lithographs and later series, until the early 2000s.
Later series include the Black Flags of 1989 to 1991, the Bodyhammers of 1993 to 1995, Magellan, 366 drawings made one a day in 1995 and 1996, the Freud Drawings of 2002 after Edmund Engelman's photographs of Freud's flat, and Monsters, breaking waves shown at Metro Pictures in 2002 and at the Whitney Biennial in 2004. He directed music videos for New Order's Bizarre Love Triangle and R.E.M.'s The One I Love, made the covers of Glenn Branca's The Ascension and The Replacements' Tim, and led the no-wave band Menthol Wars, with Richard Prince among its members. He is represented by Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac.
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