General
Walter Robinson, Exuberant Art-World Participant and Observer, Dies at 74
A painter who took his subjects from pop culture, he was also the founding editor of Artnet.com and chronicled the rise of the SoHo art scene in the 1970s.
Walter Robinson, a painter and journalist who reported on the New York art world in publications ranging from a freebie newspaper in the 1970s to Artnet.com, which began in the ’90s as the first digital art magazine, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 74.
His wife, Lisa Rosen, said he died from advanced esophageal cancer that had been diagnosed last month.
As an artist, Mr. Robinson was an exuberant and unpretentious realist who culled his subjects from advertisements and other borrowed sources.
Working in acrylic paint, in a brushy style devoid of angst, he championed a “normcore” aesthetic that drolly countered a century of avant-garde innovation. His paintings depicted wide-eyed kittens, cheeseburgers on sesame-seed buns, and smiling models in polka-dot flannel pajamas from a Macy’s mail-order catalog. He favored drugstore products of the sort found in most medicine cabinets — pain killers, nasal spray, the gleaming dark blue glass of a jar of Vicks VapoRub.
Summing up Mr. Robinson’s achievements, the artist Richard Prince, a longtime friend, said, “He introduced the idea of normality as the next special effect.”
The only painting of Mr. Robinson’s known to be owned by a New York museum, “Baron Sinister” (1986), was purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2017. Rendered on a bedsheet printed with pink roses, it shows a noir scene swiped from the cover of a 1960s thriller: A secret agent — virile, square-jawed, sun-tanned — appears poised for action, his gun raised as his blond girlfriend trembles against his shoulder.
