What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Very American’ Artist Now?

Robert Longo has had a studio on the top floor of a 19th-century Italianate building in SoHo since 1984. It’s creaky (and a little bit leaky) but still rather grand, having been built in the 1840s as an Odd Fellows hall: The working-class fraternal organization was at one point larger than Freemasonry. “You’re lucky the elevator worked. I can’t walk up anymore,” he tells me, rubbing his knee, when I meet him in the high-ceilinged, smudgy-walled space this past spring. I ask if there are other artists in the building and he says no. “I eat them,” he adds.

Longo first became prominent in his 20s as one of the main artists of the Pictures Generation, a loose cohort — including Cindy Sherman, David Salle, Richard Prince, Jack Goldstein and Sherrie Levine — that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated in the ’80s. The name came from the title of a show, “Pictures,” curated by Douglas Crimp at Artists Space in New York in 1977 and featuring artists known for their appropriation of advertising and Hollywood tropes in deadpan, ventriloquizing works that updated the Pop Art of the 1960s for a younger, far more nihilistic generation. They used the language of mass consumption — a language they grew up with, having been born into postwar prosperity during the baby boom — to critique a culture that had become increasingly defined by greed and self-indulgence. Longo’s most famous works of this period were his drawings known as “Men in the Cities”: photorealistic portraits, rendered in charcoal and graphite, of figures whose bodies twist and recoil, like they are either dancing or dying, all dressed as if they might be off to work at a midcentury office on Madison Avenue.

Longo himself embodied a certain kind of cocky, brash 1980s New York cool, walking a knife’s edge of co-opter but not co-opted, hip but not sold-out. He found a look — rockabilly mullet, Ray-Bans, black jeans, boots — that he’s stuck with, even as his black hair turned silver. A self-described image thief, he wanted to make art that was so big, so compelling, that nobody would be able to look away. Art that was as big as any ad campaign or movie. Art that would make him a star. “My way of being avant-garde,” he once said, is to “have 30 million people think I’m avant-garde, not just a bunch at some arty cocktail party.” He had no use for boutique intellectual fame and, over time, many of the boutique intellectuals didn’t have much use for him either. Instead he sought to play in the world of popular entertainment, where he could have more impact. He fronted a punk band called Menthol Wars with his fellow artist Richard Prince on second guitar. He directed music videos for “The One I Love” by R.E.M. and New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle.” He made an action movie for a major Hollywood studio. He became so ubiquitous that, as he put it in Interview magazine last year, “I was one of the artists that was blamed for the ’80s.”

Now, Longo is 72 and has spent the past year working on dueling retrospectives. One originated at the Albertina museum in Vienna last fall, and then traveled, in slightly modified form, to the Louisiana outside of Copenhagen. The second opened, also last fall, at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where he called it, somewhat portentously, “The Acceleration of History” (Longo never undersells his intentions). A sequel of sorts to that show, including several of the same works, opens over four floors of the Pace Gallery on West 25th Street in Manhattan in September with the title “The Weight of Hope.”

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