Bob Stanley

Robert "Bob" Stanley (1932–1997) was born in Yonkers, New York, and studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School (Max Beckmann Scholarship, 1954–56), Columbia University, and the High Museum Art School. He later taught painting and drawing at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1984 until his death in 1997, with visiting-artist stints at Princeton, Syracuse, and Louisiana State University.

Stanley emerged in the 1960s as one of the earliest Pop artists to translate newspaper and commercial photographs into large-scale paintings, manipulating black-and-white source imagery into flat, saturated color fields bordering on abstraction. His preferred subjects — rock and pop stars, sporting events, and erotic imagery — set his work apart from, though in dialogue with, contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. His work entered the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (four works, acquired from 1969) and the Museum of Modern Art, and he was included in Documenta 4 in Kassel (1968).

His exhibition record ran from his first one-man show at Bianchini-Birillo Gallery, New York (1965), through solo presentations across the U.S. and Europe, including Le Consortium, Dijon (1986), and Galerie Georges Lavrov, Paris (1987, catalog essay by Richard Artschwager). Following his death, his estate has been the subject of continued exhibition and reassessment.