Robert Storr

American, 1949

Preeminent art critic, curator, artist, and educator Robert Storr is the former Dean of Yale School of Art and senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Storr graduated in History and French from Swarthmore College in 1972 and gained an M.F.A. in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978.

He has been a contributing editor at Art in America since 1981 and writes frequently for Artforum, Parkett, Art Press (Paris), Frieze (London) and Corriere della Serra (Milan). He has also written numerous catalogs, articles, and books including Philip Guston (Abbeville, 1986), Cate: 6 Paintings by Gerhard Richter (2009) Chuck Close (with Lisa Lyons, Rizzoli, 1987), and the forthcoming Intimate Geometries: The Work and Life of Louise Bourgeois.

Among his many honors he has received a Penny McCall Foundation Grant for painting, a Norton Family Foundation Curator Grant, and honorary doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Maine College of Art as well as awards from the American Chapter of the International Association of Arts Critics, a special AICA award for Distinguished Contribution to the Field of Art Criticism, an ICI Agnes Gund Curatorial Award, and the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History from the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art. In 2000, the French Ministry of Culture presented him with the medal of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and in 2010 awarded him the status of "Officer" in the same order.

From 2005 to 2007, he was visual arts Director of the Venice Biennale, the first American invited to assume that position. Storr was appointed Professor of Painting/Printmaking in the School of Art at Yale University in 2006 and served as Dean of that School for two terms ending in 2016.