Although it has been several months since Walter Robinson’s untimely death on February 9, his absence continues to resonate within the New York City art community. In the mid-1970s, Walter was a magnetic figure in the downtown avant-garde art scene. Throughout his life, he led a multipronged, highly successful career as a writer, editor, publisher, curator, culture critic, and artist.

Many eloquent tributes have already documented his professional achievements, and praises extend across digital platforms and in print. It seems practically impossible to sing any more accolades; instead, we want to offer personal reflections born from years of friendship. Over the years, we spent much time together attending numerous exhibition openings, art fairs, weddings, funerals, and meals at local coffee shops.

In 1978, Robinson became Art in America’s chief news editor under the helm of Elizabeth C. Baker, the magazine’s formidable editor-in-chief for some seventeen years. For much of that time, we worked together there, sharing office space where we had front-row seats to the constant demonstrations of his sharp wit and often scathing pen, but usually well-hidden exasperation. Some of our first writing assignments were for his section of the magazine, “ARTWORLD.”

In recent years, Robinson concentrated on his painting while continuing to provide incisive art-world reports and exhibition reviews to his extensive Instagram following. Shown in galleries such as Vito Schnabel, Jeffrey Deitch, Owen James, and Pamela Salisbury, his colorful, figurative paintings gained increasing exposure and praise over the past decade. His work has also reached audiences in Switzerland and Germany, where he exhibited regularly at contemporary galleries, attracting a devoted European following for his distinctly American visual vernacular.

As Peter Schjeldahl brilliantly observed in The New Yorker in 2016, “The art is like the man: wry, with blatant charms and slow-acting authenticities.” Indeed, Robinson’s exploitations of pop imagery succeeded precisely by refusing ironic detachment. “Robinson is a Manet of hot babes and a Morandi of McDonald’s French fries and Budweiser beer cans,” Schjeldahl noted, capturing the peculiar magnetism of Robinson’s painterly devotion to the banal.

As a reporter, Robinson had a broad and eclectic range of interests. He highlighted a great variety of exhibitions, from historical surveys to the most groundbreaking contemporary shows in town. He exuded infectious energy and an upbeat attitude in art and in life. These traits were sharpened by a sarcastic wit and a cutting sense of humor. He connected countless creative spirits across the art world, never hesitating to introduce new acquaintances and old friends whom he regarded as compatible artists and colleagues. But he also had his detractors, who viewed him as a provocateur who challenged artists, gallerists, and writers to defend their positions, actions, motivations, and intent. In his 1990s cable TV venture, Gallery Beat, with collaborators Paul Hasegawa-Overacker and Cathy Lebowitz, he occasionally drew the ire of gallery directors and artists who grew defensive at his dogged queries.  

Walter argued for more transparency in the art world and would, for instance, regularly include the prices of artworks within his exhibition reviews and in his astute Instagram commentaries. At the time, most high-brow culture writers and editors recoiled from addressing the business of art directly, and most galleries kept price lists hidden from public view; information about sales and collectors was a well-guarded secret.       

Walter Robinson (right), with then Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin, and David Ebony, 2008.

Born Walter Rossiter Robinson III (and sometimes called Mike), in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1950, and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Robinson moved to New York City in 1968, studying art history and psychology at Columbia University. He graduated from the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1973. That year, he co-founded Art-Rite, an edgy newsprint journal he produced with co-publisher Edit deAk. Three years later, in 1976, he co-founded Printed Matter, the groundbreaking nonprofit venue for avant-garde and underground periodicals, zines, and other artist publications that remains a vital institution in New York’s art ecosystem today. At the same time, he was part of Collaborative Projects, which organized exhibitions and impromptu performances and art events around New York.  

In the 1980s, he became a key figure in the East Village art scene, where he began to regularly show his paintings—wistfully playful post-pop compositions that embraced consumer items, advertising logos, cute kittens, fast-food still-lifes, and lurid, pulp-fiction book covers. Unlike the intrinsic cynicism of most Pop art works, Robinson’s art pulsed with genuine affection and romance. He painted what he often referred to as “objects of desire.”   

In 1996, Robinson founded Artnet Magazine, at the time an innovative and pioneering online contemporary art platform, where he stayed writing news and commissioning articles and reviews for sixteen years. Following his Artnet stint, he dedicated himself primarily to his painting while continuing to contribute articles to a variety of publications. In his 2014 Artspace.com essay, “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism,” a term he coined caused an art-world stir. With his hallmark tongue-in-cheek humor, Robinson offered Zombie Formalism as a critique of a new wave of abstract painting that echoed the works of certain dead abstractionists championed by formalism’s guru Clement Greenberg. While many read the piece as a scathing put-down of recent art, Robinson explained that it was “just an observation” and was not intended as a dismissal of his contemporaries who were engaged with “reductive abstraction.”  

Later that year, a retrospective exhibition of eighty of his paintings was organized by Barry Blinderman for the University Galleries at Illinois State University. The exhibition traveled to the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, and to Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York. Many of these compositions are painted on patterned cotton bedsheets, which he describes, as “metaphor(s) for the continuous field of consciousness.” One of these works from 1986, Baron Sinister, showing a male and female couple borrowed from the cover of a steamy James Bond-like novel, was acquired in 2017 by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Our hearts go out to Robinson’s wife Lisa Rosen, a fine-art restorer, his daughter Antonia Dean, and his two grandchildren. In the coming years, we will continue to remember and honor our beloved friend and mentor, an irreplaceable, witty art-world raconteur with a unique, charismatic personality. He was always supportive of us throughout the years and encouraged our various endeavors in art and in life. Now, in our daily thoughts and feelings, he remains an inspiring presence.