A Kiss Before Dying:
Walter Robinson – A Painter of Pictures and Arbiter of Critical Pleasures
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition deluxe hardback:  January 2021.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
With an Italian translation by Ginevra Quadrio Curzio.
632 pages, with a 4-colour gatefold jacket, a black and white photograph of the artist on the frontispiece, 950 color and black and white illustrations and 47 full-color plate reproductions.
13.5 x 9.75 x 2.5 in. (39.3 x 24.8 x 6.4 cm.), printed, sewn, and bound in Modena, Italy.
Modena, Italy:  Galleria Mazzoli Editore, 2021.

RETAIL PRICE: $250.00 (includes postage and handling)

On the occasion of this museum-worthy exhibition, Walter Robinson: New Paintings and Works on Paper, 2013-2020, with 15 large new paintings, including Robinson’s masterful Grand Guignol of a painting, Pulp Romance, and dramatic images of American hamburgers, beer, cigarettes, lovers, painkillers, dolls, Pinocchio, Warholian stacks of money, even a Massimo Bottura salad and a Ferrari race car at the head of the pack, Galleria Mazzoli Editore has published the monograph A Kiss Before Dying: Walter Robinson – A Painter of Pictures and Arbiter of Critical Pleasures by Richard Milazzo, with an Italian translation by Ginevra Quadrio Curzio.  It is the first major monograph on this important American artist and critical voice. The book documents fifty years of his work, beginning in the 1970s and during the revolutionary heydays of the East Village, tracking his ubiquitous presence right through millennium and continuing to this day.

Both as the curator of the exhibition and the author of this major monograph on the artist, A Kiss Before Dying, Milazzo writes: “I have tried to write a book that would give a comprehensive picture of this major but under-appreciated and quintessential American artist who has functioned both as a painter and a critic (in the tradition of Fairfield Porter, but with a bite as big as his bark). Robinson, in his capacity of artist-as-critic, was one of the earliest and most seminal exponents of Picture Theory art, invested in the postmodern critique of representation, and yet who decided to paint rather than employ photography as his primary medium, even where many of his ‘paintings-as-pictures’ are based on photography and drawn from various photographic sources such as the covers of cheap romance and detective novels and the onslaught of images generated by the advertising industry. Even where, as a part of his working process, he projects a photographic image onto the canvas, this does not prevent him from executing the image in a most sensuous and painterly manner. Few others have used painting as Robinson has, to critique the Spectacle of the photo-based world of images, but not without reasserting the values of sincerity of aesthetical purpose in a cynical culture, even bringing romance (impassioned emotion) to the table, no matter how sinister or lovingly portrayed.

“The fact that this critic-as-artist has also conducted a major career as a writer is extraordinary. Besides founding Art-Rite magazine with Edit DeAk and working for Art in America during its heyday, Robinson was a critical gadfly in the East Village during the 1980s, writing about its colorful characters and street life, and constructing by default a history of the scene there and in the Lower East Side of New York City.  While these sectors of the City (and the South Bronx) were in severe social disarray, tragically afflicted by homelessness and AIDS, the period between 1982 and 1988 contributed to the paradigmatic reinvention of the art world. Robinson was a seminal part of this reenvisionment (sic), in terms of his painting, writing, and editing, having been the Art Editor of the East Village Eye, a short-lived, rambunctious and outré publication covering the arts in general. But it was for Art in America that he wrote, in collaboration with Carlo McCormick, his most controversial essay, ‘Slouching Toward Avenue D,’ which evoked the treacherous response from one of October magazine’s henchmen, Craig Owens.

“It is for these and many other reasons I felt it was necessary for Robinson, this Janus-configured artist-as-critic and critic-as-artist, to speak in his own voice.  Hence, the many citations in the course of this monograph, not only his but others, as well, and the various ‘campaigns’ I have conducted in behalf of other artists, creating hopefully a critical cacophony dominated by no one, especially the author. To advance the cause of this dialectical or dialogical environment, I have employed square brackets to intervene upon texts and expository captions to create autonomous sideshows in this circus or Célinesque Grand Guignol of a monograph, which is hopefully less mono and more multi. It is additionally my hope this new expansive critical methodology – these ubiquitous square brackets and expository captions – will comprise a new more inclusive way of doing art history, advancing, if not revolutionizing, the cause of critique as a source of libidinal pleasure and self-critique. This, in the still greater hope subjectivity and so-called objectivity might play into each other’s hands, like one of the harlequins or clowns in Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques failing sadly to juggle far too many balls.

“By the way, could a title, A Kiss Before Dying, be any more symptomatic or appropriate, if not ironic, during this period of the Great Pandemic of 2020? Although it was not intentional on my part to assign this additional fervid but mournful meaning to these poignant words (stolen by the artist from a movie title no less), I am sure the sincerity of the artist’s work in general, despite the explicit cynicism of his work and habit of mind, and the author’s deciduous role in constructing this self-critical tome, contributed to this massive but subtle ironic deterioration in behalf of this agonizing penultimate fate of a piteous kiss before dying. But, in the end, could we not also say a fearful but fiercely joyous fate?”

In addition to the intensive critical and dialectical analysis of Walter Robinson’s paintings and writings (abundantly excerpted in the book), the 632-page volume contains approximately 950 color and black and white illustrations, 47 full-color plate reproductions of the artist’s paintings and works on paper in the show, a checklist of these works in the exhibition, a comprehensive history of his exhibitions, a selected bibliography, and an index of the works by the artist in the monograph.