Robert Longo's 'Men in the Cities' re-created by Nicole Kidman The Art Issue cover interview
Creative Partner: Robert Longo
Written by Lynn Hirschberg and Armand Limnander
Photographs by Nick Brinley
Styled by Sara Moonves
Nicole Kidman, dressed in a slim black pantsuit, white shirt, and high-heeled pumps, was in a cluttered Chelsea loft carefully studying images created by the artist Robert Longo for his early-1980s masterwork “Men in the Cities.” “I like this one,” she said, fixating on a woman in a white dress with a full skirt, her body twisting away from the viewer. “You can see her abandon and determination in that moment.” She smiled. “I’m always fascinated by complicated emotions.”
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Kidman was called away to begin W’s photographic homage to “Men in the Cities.” It was a bright, sunny fall day, and we climbed the stairs to the roof of the building. She began to pose in front of a magnificent view of the West Side of Manhattan. Kidman, who had quickly understood the movements required to create Longo’s images, began a feverish dance, her legs apart and her head and arms in motion. There was no thought of looking pretty—instead, she concentrated solely on capturing an emotion. Longo once said, “I’m real interested in that feeling that happens when someone you love leaves you.… I want a gasp or almost a cry. To find that kind of joy and sadness.” Kidman had not heard that quote, but intuitively understood what he was trying to evoke. As she tossed her body around, her commitment was riveting.
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“If you’re lucky enough to get into art history books, you only get one image, unless you’re a major epic artist,” said Longo. “I am in art history books, but just for ‘Men in the Cities,’ not all the other stuff I did my whole life.” The series has achieved cultlike status, not only because of the technical proficiency of Longo’s work but also because of its inherent stylishness—there is the mythical New York skyline, and an innate sense of cool that his subjects project. Because of the time when the work was produced, many assumed that the suited-up men and women were a commentary on the yuppie culture that was coming out of a newly ascendant Wall Street. “That killed me,” Longo said, explaining that the outfits were inspired by a completely different crowd. “Broadway kind of divided the downtown scene to me—east of Broadway were the punks with the green hair and the leather jackets and pushpins. West of Broadway was this kind of No Wave scene where everyone looked like they came out of film noir, like a French film: skinny lapels, but kind of austere. I went after that. I wanted people to have these urban uniforms.”
At the time, Longo took extreme measures to capture the poses he envisioned in his head, sometimes hurtling tennis balls and other objects at his subjects. “I had grown up with the blossoming of violence in cinema,” he said. “There was a major change in the way people died in movies. James Cagney would just get shot, fall over, and go, ‘Ugh.’ And then with Sam Peckinpah, a guy would get blown through the wall. Those dances of death were quite amazing. As a kid, I played this game called Who Could Fall Dead the Best. I was interested in that moment of impact.”
Aware that bombarding Kidman with projectiles was not a possibility, Longo decided to start with the images he had created more than 40 years ago and go backwards. Examining his early output was an interesting detour for him; this year, he has been busy exhibiting very different bodies of work. In September, the Albertina Museum, in Vienna, opened “Robert Longo,” a retrospective centered on his depiction of power in nature, politics, and history. From there he went to London, where he debuted “Searchers” at Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac galleries, featuring large-scale, five-panel multimedia pieces. And at the Milwaukee Art Museum, he inaugurated “Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History” with a series of monumental drawings addressing weighty topics including the 2014 Ferguson riots and the killing of George Floyd.
