Charcoal

Robert Longo's mastery of charcoal drawing has made him one of America's most admired artists. With every new work he reinvests the tradition of history painting with fresh relevance and impact, rendering majestic, era-defining images in a sensuous and sculptural photorealism. Longo's sense of both literal scale and historical scope is monumental, as a survey of his numerous serial works soon reveals: the Freud Drawings cycle of 2000 with its large-format treatment of Edmund Engelmann's photographs of Sigmund Freud's Vienna apartment, taken days before Freud's departure for London; or the 2003 Sickness of Reasonseries, with its high-contrast images of atomic explosions, combining sublimity and terror; or the famous one-drawing-per-day Magellan sequence of the mid-1990s, a virtual atlas of the iconography of the 1990s, intermixed with images from Longo's immediate daily life. This handsome, chunky volume surveys Longo's drawings of the past two decades, from Magellan and the Freud cycle to Monsters (2000), Sickness of Reason (2003), Ophelia (2002), Beginning of the World (2007) and others.