As a museum curator, academic, editor and writer, Robert Storr has come into contact with the most important artists of our era. Over the years he has amassed a major body of interviews, collected here for the first time in a single volume. Interviews on Art includes over 60 fully illustrated discussions, conducted between 1981 and 2016, with some of the most renowned names in the art world.
Interviewees represented in this book include Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Richard Serra, Gabriel Orozco, Elizabeth Murray, Harald Szeemann and Mike Kelley (among many others), and each text is accompanied by relevant works and previously unpublished photographs of the artists. A number of the interviews are unpublished or appear in full for the first time, including those with Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober, Buckmister Fuller, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer and Kara Walker.
Refreshingly, Storr is as reflexive about his own work as a critic as he is about the artistic works up for discussion. The book is introduced with a conversation between Storr and curator and art historian Francesca Pietropaolo. The two carry on a wide-ranging discussion in which they dissect the interview as a medium: exploring the ethics involved, various techniques and approaches as well as the limitations and difficulties of the process.
Robert Storr is a painter, critic, museum curator, and exhibition-maker. From 1990 until 2002, he worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where he was curator and then senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. His group exhibitions there included DISLOCATIONS, a survey of installation art that included Louise Bourgeois, and Modern Art despite Modernism, in addition to which he organized retrospectives of Robert Ryman, Tony Smith, Chuck Close, Elizabeth Murray, Gerhard Richter, and Max Beckmann. From 1990 until 2000 he directed MoMA’s Projects program, for which he assembled small monographic shows by Art Spiegelman (the first exhibition devoted to a “comix” artist in MoMA’s history), Franz West, Ann Hamilton, and others. In 2002 he was named the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and from 2006 to 2016 he served as Dean of the Yale University School of Art, where he is also a professor of painting. Since 1982 his essays, reviews, and columns have appeared in Art in America, Artpress, Frieze, Artforum, Corriere della Serra, The New York Review of Books (online edition) and numerous other magazines and journals. Storr’s latest book is Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois (The Monacelli Press) for November 2016. In addition to catalogues written for shows he has organized in Brazil, Greece, Japan, Spain, and the United States, he has contributed to exhibition publications for all the major museums in New York and for many other museums around the world. In 2007 he served as Director of the Venice Biennale, the first American to hold that position. Storr is the recipient of five honorary doctorates and awards from organizations including the International Association of Art Critics and the Archives of American Art. In 2000 he was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and was later promoted to Officier of the same order. He lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, and Brooklyn, New York.
Francesca Pietropaolo is an Italian-born art historian, curator and critic based in Venice. Her research interests focus on post-war European and American art, and on international contemporary art. She has held curatorial positions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, Venice and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. During her time at MoMA, she worked on Roth Time. A Dieter Roth Retrospective (2004), Plane Image. A Brice Marden Retrospective (2006) and exhibitions drawing from the museum’s collection of works on paper. She was on the curatorial team of Greater New York 2005, MoMA/P.S. 1, New York. At the Fondation Luis Vuitton she was in charge of artist commissions, notably a site-specific installation by Ellsworth Kelly for the Auditorium as well as works by Cerith Wyn Evans, Adrian Villar Rojas and Taryn Simon. Her projects as independent curator include exhibitions such as North by New York: New Nordic Art (American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York, 2011), and Wrinkles in Time (IVAM, Valencia, 2009). In 2015 she co-curated the international film festival Fireflies in the Night at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC), Athens as well as its second edition Fireflies in the Night Take Wing (2016). In 2017 she co-curated Only Connect!, an international program of performances, at the SNFCC, Athens presenting performances by Kim Jones, Mieskuoro Huutajat (Screaming Men’s Choir) and Tania Bruguera among others. She is the editor of Ellsworth Kelly, first issue of “ Les Cahiers de la Fondation” (Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2014) realized in collaboration with the artist. She is the author of numerous essays in publications for, among others, MoMA, the Walker Art Center, Tate, Fondation François Pinault, Venice, and the Estorick Collection, London. As critic, she has contributed to Flash Art International, ARTnews, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Art Press, and Arte e Critica.
By Robert Storr
Edited and with an introduction by Francesca Pietropaolo
(Heni Publishing, 2017)
