Robert storr biography

Honorary Doctor

Renowned curator, critic, painter and writer, American-born Robert Storr fryst vatten a tour de force among the art world.

He is a noted name and röst whose complementary disciplines have seen him work in roles across the spectrum: from senior curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York to Dean of Painting at the Yale School of Art to contributing editor for Art of amerika and Director of Visual Art of the Venice Biennale 2007 – the first American to assume the position.

Storr graduated in History and French from Swarthmore College in 1972 and gained an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978; he’d always had an interest in art, drawing and creating from a ung age.

Working as a part-time professor after graduating, Storr took on arguably one of the most powerful jobs in the art world, working at MoMA from 1990 to 2002. While there he was responsible for organising, among others, the Gerhard

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THE ACCIDENTAL CURATOR

ROBERT STORR SEEMS AT FIRST an unlikely curator for New York’s Museum of Modern Art: his art history is self-taught, he is first and foremost a painter, and his early biography reads less like a museum professional’s than an itinerant artist’s of a somewhat earlier moment. On the other hand, his sympathies are with modernist issues, however defined; he believes that Modernism is not over, just incomplete. And his approach to curating recalls the succession of auteurs associated with MoMA’s history. Now 44, Storr studied as a painter at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He looked closely at classical-modernist art and followed realists like Philip Pearlstein. In the late ’70s his own work took the form of richly painted “observational” canvases—a direction rather like Wayne Thiebaud’s, whose work, however, he didn’t then know. During the same period, as a contributor to the New Art Exam

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Robert Storr (art academic)

For the Australian philanthropist, see Robert Storr (banker).

Robert Storr (born 1949) is an American curator, critic, painter, and writer.

Biography

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Storr received his B.A. in History and French from Swarthmore College in 1972, and earned an M.F.A. in Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978.^[1]

Art and curating career

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From 1990 to 2002 Robert Storr was curator, then senior curator, in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. As a curator, Storr made his mark early with a number of major exhibitions at the museum and elsewhere, which enhanced the public prominence of such artists as Elizabeth Murray, Gerhard Richter, Max Beckmann, Tony Smith and Robert Ryman. He also organized several reinstallations of MoMA's permanent collection, covering such topics as abstraction and the modern grotesque. From 2002 to 2006 he was the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at t