Obituary: Walter Robinson: A Painter of Pictures and Arbiter of Critical Pleasures is Gone

By JOSHEPH NECHVATAL February 10, 2025

First Gary Indiana, then Robert C. Morgan and now Walter Robinson. Friends and neighbors from the 1980s art world are checking out of Trumpistan faster than the penny.

This is as pithy as I care to be, though Walter, an American painter, publisher, art curator, and art writer known to us as Mike in the 80s was as pithy and sarcastic as he was warm hearted and generous. Meaning a lot.

 Walter Robinson by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (1985)

As you can see from Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ 1985 portrait, Walter was a handsome rake. In 1985 his Robert Mitchum-like good looks and style echoed his stock character throwback imagery that began in 1980 with these two unique spray painted prints from my collection.

As I, Robinson was active in Collaborative Projects (aka Colab) in the early 1980s and he lived down the block from me on Ludlow Street. Thus we shared many private moments together, some exuberant and some sad.

But a biography is not necessary here, as Robinson is the subject of the exhaustive 632page book A Kiss Before Dying: Walter Robinson – A Painter of Pictures and Arbiter of Critical Pleasures by Richard Milazzo which was published in 2021 with an Italian translation by Ginevra Quadrio Curzio. I will only mention that a 2014 touring exhibition of Robinson's paintings premiered at the University Galleries at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois under the good curatorial graces of Barry Blinderman. It subsequently traveled to the Moore College of Art in Philadelphia and the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City in 2016. Robinson had already exhibited at several New York galleries since the 1980s, including Semaphore Gallery and Metro Pictures.

For us artists who like to write and read as well, Robinson was an important fellow traveler for he began writing about art in the 1970s when he co-founded with Edit DeAk the art zine Art-Rite. Robinson subsequently served as news editor of Art in America magazine (1980–96) and founding editor of Artnet magazine (1996–2012).

In 2013–14, he was a columnist for Artspace.com, where his seminal essay on Zombie Formalism appeared. He also served as art editor of the East Village Eye in the early 1980s. In the 1990s, he was a correspondent for GalleryBeat TV, a public-access television show.

My heart goes out to Lisa Rosen and all of his family and many friends. He will be dearly missed. WM