Word: longo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There were three one-man shows on the itinerary of most gallerygoers in New York City's SoHo area last month: Robert Longo, David Salle and Gérard Garouste. Taken together, they were fairly instructive. Here are three rising, though by no means certified, reputations; yet their success seems tinged with panic. They are all young (Longo is 30, Salle 31, and Garouste 37) and, of course, figurative - the pendulum of taste having now swung so far that it is practically impossible to have a rising reputation if you are a new abstract painter. Each...
Certainly Longo is the best of them. But his ambitious split show, which fills two galleries (Castelli and Metro Pictures), displays a worrisome unevenness: harshly accurate feeling one moment, bombast the next. Longo's subject is people under stress; in his paintings, the lid on the urban pressure cooker is always about to blow. He began to make a reputation two or three years ago with life-size figures of men and women apparently in their late 20s, starkly drawn in graphite on a blank ground, twisting and grimacing and staggering. They were, of course, done from photos (only...
...Longo is not without entrepreneurial desires. He staged performances, did sculpture and is producing a full-length film, Empire. His art got more ambitious, involving more people both in his pictures and as assistants in the studio. We see the results at Castelli and Metro. They include a large bas-relief in aluminum depicting a horde of struggling Wall Street types: a Roman battle sarcophagus with updated clothes, flanked by ominous, smooth, black effigies of skyscrapers in perspective that recall the architectural renderings of Hugh Ferriss in the '30s. The trouble is that the execution does not carry...
There is, however, a strand of painting that tends to miss out at both ends. It employs the human figure neither as a cooled-out sign linked to the imagery of mass media-like Katz, Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol, Robert Longo-nor as a generalized hieroglyph for "expressionist" feeling, as in de Kooning or the new German painters. Such painting wants to inspect and describe the body as a real object in the world, in all its resistances, its actualities, its peculiar landscapes of pit and pore and hair. It wants to move outward from that to see its social...
DIED. Luigi Longo, 80, secretary general of the Italian Communist Party from 1964 to 1972 and a leader of the hardline, Moscow-trained faction of Italian Communism; of a heart attack; near Rome. The son of peasants, Longo won a Bronze Star from the U.S. for his activities with the Italian underground during World...