Robert Longo

Robert Longo was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York. He first enrolled at the University of North Texas as an art major but left without a degree, then received a grant in 1972 to study restoration and art history in Florence, Italy. In the fall of 1973 he enrolled at the State University of New York College at Buffalo (Buffalo State College), where he earned his BFA in 1975.

In 1977 Longo moved to New York City with fellow Buffalo artist Cindy Sherman and worked as a studio assistant to Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim. That year he was included in "Pictures" at Artists Space, the exhibition, organized around appropriated and mediated imagery, that gave the Pictures Generation its name. Longo's national profile grew through the 1980s with Men in the Cities, a series of large charcoal and graphite drawings and prints of figures in suits caught in contorted, ambiguous poses, reproduced widely and closely associated with the decade's image of urban anxiety.

He was included in the Whitney Biennial in 1983 and again in 2004, and in the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997. His practice has continued to center on monumental, hyperrealist charcoal drawings, extending in recent decades to works addressing protest, state power, and global conflict, including responses to Occupy Wall Street, the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Black Lives Matter protests, and refugee migration. Longo also works in photography, film, and sculpture. He lives and works in New York and East Hampton, New York.

Longo's early work has been read, since the 1977 "Pictures" exhibition, as part of a generational shift toward appropriated and mediated imagery, a framework closely associated with critic Douglas Crimp's account of the Pictures Generation. Critical attention to Men in the Cities emphasized its ambiguous, cinematic staging of bodies in suits, images that could read as ecstatic or as under attack. In later decades, museums have consistently framed his monumental charcoal drawings, of waves, weapons, riots, and instruments of state, as a kind of contemporary history painting concerned with power, authority, and violence. That framing has driven a steady run of institutional attention, including surveys at the National Gallery of Art, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and the Milwaukee Art Museum in the 2020s.

Longo's auction record is Untitled (Leo), a large-scale charcoal drawing of Leonardo DiCaprio made for Christie's 11th Hour benefit auction organized with Leonardo DiCaprio, which sold for USD 1,575,000 at Christie's in 2013; the exact sale date and saleroom location are not consistently documented in public sources. As of this writing, no later sale has surpassed that result: a 2016 sale of Untitled (Tiger Head, No. 8) at Heritage Auctions for approximately USD 1.22 million is the next-highest publicly reported figure, though Heritage's own listing frames it as the artist's top result; this profile follows Christie's own designation of the 2013 sale as the artist's world auction record. He is currently represented by Pace Gallery and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, with recent gallery exhibitions including The Weight of Hope at Pace New York in 2025 and Angels of the Maelstrom at Pace Tokyo in 2026.

No catalogue raisonne for Longo has been identified in public sources, so provenance and verification through Pace Gallery, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, or the artist's studio matter more than they would for an artist with a settled scholarly record. His auction history is comparatively thin relative to his museum footprint, with a single record sale from 2013 still standing, so collectors should treat any individual result as a data point about a specific work and moment rather than as evidence of a broad market trend.