Robert Cottingham

The Photorealist artist Robert Cottingham, (born 1935), often refers to a seminal experience when, as a twelve-year-old, he saw Edward Hopper’s 1930 painting, Early Sunday Morning. He recalled, “I still remember the feeling, the power, that it had. It’s the first time I realized there could be a kind of dialogue between the artist’s work and the viewer. And looking back now, I see that it’s had a major influence on not only my style of painting but on my subject matter and I’ve never really wavered from that.” [1]

Robert Cottingham grew up in Brooklyn and studied graphic design at Pratt Institute, a distinguished New York school for art and design. His first career was as an art director for Young & Rubicam, an advertising agency, initially in their New York offices and later in Los Angeles. It was not until he was twenty-eight years old that Cottingham began painting seriously. Four years later he became a full-time artist. His steady commitment to the American urban landscape continued even when he and his family lived in England from 1972–1976. He received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship grant in 1974, which helped to fund his annual trips back to the United States; on one such trip, he visited twenty-seven cities and took at least two thousand slides. [2]

Cottingham, along with fellow Photorealists Richard Estes and Don Eddy, has focused on mid-to-late twentieth-century urban America. These artists begin with a photograph which they then recreate by various means in other artistic media, usually paintings, but also technically impressive prints. Photorealist artists make no secret of their reliance upon the photograph, often confusing the viewer into questioning whether the artwork is an actual photograph or a painting. A Photorealist work is not the mechanical reproduction it appears to be, but is instead a tour-de-force rendering by hand. Unlike other Photorealists who depict a scene with many details, Cottingham prefers to depict tightly cropped, individual details only. By showing partial elements of commercial signs, or a detail of a building, the artist allows the viewer to mentally complete its full pictorial context.

In addition to Hopper, Cottingham shares a fascination for urban architecture with such earlier American artists as Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, and George Tooker. Like his contemporaries Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha, Cottingham appropriates commercial signage text and produces works in various media, including gouache, acrylic, and oil as well as woodcut, linoleum cut, etching, and lithography. For Cottingham, printmaking was critically important, and he clearly benefited from the huge post-World War II expansion of the art market and from his collaborations with technically proficient master printmakers.

Notes:

[1] Robert Cottingham, “Artist’s Talk” (transcript. Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC, October 21, 1985).

[2] Jacquleyn Serwer. “Heroic Relics: The Art of Robert Cottingham,” American Art 12, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 12.