Art & Antiques, December 1996

A Mad Dash with Robert Storr

Walk into Robert Storr's office and you'll inevitably have to weave around the stacks of art books, magazines, and catalogues that stand floor to ceiling. The decor suits Storr, who for the past six years has juggled three jobs - abstract artist, renowned art critic, and perhaps, most importantly, curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.

When Kirk Varnedoe, director of Storr's department, sought a curator to oversee the contemporary galleries in 1990, he wanted a person who had "a well-informed sense of the plurality of the art world, with a feeling of ethnic diversity, gender, and politics." Storr fit this description perfectly, having been a strong proponent of Pluralism in the 1980s, a time when multi-culturalism in the arts was at the height of controversy. He thrust himself into the forefront of contemporary criticism by writing and discussing artists who, at that point, were on the periphery of the mainstream - women and minority artists like Elizabeth Murray, Susan Rothenberg, and David Hammons.

"I think modern art is a pluralist phenomenon from start to finish. Well, at least, from start to the point where we stand now," says the 46-year old Storr, whose amicable manner is as wired as the rim glasses that cover his dishwater gray eyes. "It takes effort to keep it open, and the reason for keeping it open is not to be a good liberal or to include the neglected. It is because by neglecting certain people, you make the mix poorer, less interesting, and you make the aesthetic simplified, when, in fact, it should not be."

All this from a man who, when it comes to art history, is remarkably self-taught. Storr grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a family of academics. After a year-long stint in France in 1967, he attended Swarthmore where he studied French literature and history. "I was drawing quietly," says Storr, adding that "there wasn't really much of an art program there. And, again, this was the 60s and I was very interested in all the struggles people were involved in." This political intrigue led him to a job as studio assistant to the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Storr worked on Polyforum, the last of Siqueiros' massive murals. "A truly terrible painting but it was a very, very interesting experience. In a positive way it has made me both very interested and skeptical (about) the ambition to combine social ideas with aesthetic ideas in a direct way."

In 1972, Storr enrolled as a non-matriculating student in the M.F.A. program at the Art Institute of Chicago. Taught by the figurative painter Ed Paschke and other artists involved in Chicago's Imagist movement, Storr, nonetheless, stuck steadfastly to drawing deadpan realist paintings a la Philip Pearlstein. Eventually, he would delve into abstract art, but it is this sense of being an outsider looking in, not being swept up in the current trend, that seems to influence his critical and curatorial work.

His shows at the MOMA have ranged from retrospectives of Robert Ryman and Bruce Nauman to his first exhibition, "Dislocations," where seven artists' installations coerce the viewer to interact with their work. His latest exhibition, "Deformations," surveys the grotesque in modern art. Often disturbing, often uproarious (like John D. Graham's Two Sisters, both of whom are cross-eyed), the show displays Storr's keen sense of humor. In an art show he juried last year in Katonah, New York, Storr awarded the number one prize to a high-school student who made a video of three lumps of clay evolving into Rodin's Thinker. "It had a sense of the playfulness that is usually an element of any really great art," he says with a smile.

Storr's feverish passion for art will play a major role in the museum's impending expansion to neighboring Dorset Hotel. "His expertise with regards to contemporary art and to the museum as a whole is vital," says Glenn Lowry, the Modern's director. He is already hard at work co-curating an immense exhibit on postwar European vanguard art that will span three floors beginning October 1997. He is also in charge of the lobby Projects space, where younger artists, far better known in the gallery scene downtown, get an opportunity to exhibit their wares to the mass public. With Varnedoe, he will be organizing the Chuck Close retrospective in 1999 and he is close to finishing a monograph on Louise Bourgeois. Speaking swiftly, he confesses, "I just need more time."