Robert Storr

Robert Storr is a painter, art writer and curator who has been active since the late 1970s
though his formative encounters with art and artists began in the late 1960s. Among the
most prolific and wide-ranging critics of his generation internationally he has written
regularly for periodicals in France, Italy, Switzerland and the US as well as for museum
and gallery exhibition catalogs around the world. The author of four monographs on
Gerhard Richter, two on Chuck Close, one each on Louise Bourgeois, Philip Guston and
Ad Reinhardt, he has also written major essays devoted to artists as varied as Willem de
Kooning, El Anatsui, Leon Golub, Jasper Johns, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Seydou Keita,
Alex Katz, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Kerry James Marshall, Andrei Monastyrsky,
Bruce Nauman, Jim Nutt, Jose Clemente Orozco, Jackson Pollock, Philip Pearlstein,
Adrian Piper, Martin Puryear, Susan Rothenberg, Robert Ryman, Peter Saul, Nancy
Spero, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Kara Walker. As a critic his goal has been to look
closely and think carefully about what artists actually make. As an historian it has been to
flesh out the narrow accounts of “modernism” that had stood in the way of grasping the
culturally broad, aesthetically pluralist and ideologically contentious nature of artistic
creation in the modern era.

From 1990 until 2002, when he stepped down as Senior Curator, Storr was on the staff
off the Museum of Modern Art in New York where he directed the Projects series and
organized retrospectives of the work of Close, Max Beckmann, Elizabeth Murray,
Ryman, and Tony Smith, as well as surveys of contemporary installation art, the modern
grotesque and other themes and tendencies. Named the first Rosalie Solow Professor of
Modern Art and the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU in 2002, in 2006 he moved to Yale
University where he has been Dean of the School of Art and a Professor of Painting since
then. Between 2005 and 2007 he served as the first American-born Director of the
Biennale di Venezia. The recipient of numerous awards for his criticism and curatorial
work he has also received the medals of Chevalier and then Officier des Arts et des
Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture. His prints and drawings are in the
collections of MoMA, the Nelson-Atkins Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery,
among others.

Photograph credit: Herbert Lotz