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Walter Robinson celebrated at Moore College of Art & Design

Over the last two decades, Walter Robinson's art criticism and editing have been more visible than the paintings he first became known for, loosely rendered iterations of pulp-fiction book covers that were synonymous with New York's East Village art scene

"Amboy Dukes," a 1981 Walter Robinson acrylic-on-masonite painting.
"Amboy Dukes," a 1981 Walter Robinson acrylic-on-masonite painting.Read moreCourtesy Image

Over the last two decades, Walter Robinson's art criticism and editing have been more visible than the paintings he first became known for, loosely rendered iterations of pulp-fiction book covers that were synonymous with New York's East Village art scene of the early 1980s. A few of Robinson's other diversions included cofounding Printed Matter and the legendary magazine Art-Rite - whose covers, designed by such artists as Ed Ruscha, Joseph Beuys, and Christo, made them artworks in themselves - and founding and editing the now-defunct online journal Artnet.

It turns out Robinson has been painting off and on all along, according to the first major survey of his paintings, "Walter Robinson: Painting and Other Indulgences," organized by Barry Blinderman and on view at Moore College of Art and Design (Blinderman is curator of the University Galleries of Illinois State University, where the exhibition originated).

Robinson's paintings from the 1980s, when he seems to have been painting most feverishly, make up about two-thirds of the 80 or so canvases in his exhibition. Some 35 years later, his pulp-fiction cover appropriations foreshadow later paintings by Richard Prince, and his expressionistic, world-weary portraits of himself and his artist and critic pals (Martin Wong, Joseph Masheck, Carlo McCormick, among others) could seem to anticipate Elizabeth Peyton's rakish characters.

Robinson's spin paintings, apparently the only abstract works he has made since the Color Field-inspired paintings of his college days, were created in the late '80s with a custom-made "spin art" machine. I was immediately reminded of Damien Hirst's spin paintings of a decade later. The only Robinson paintings that reflect any particular artist's influence are his images of solitary objects - a Tampax box, a Vaseline jar, a bottle of Bromo-Seltzer - that bring to mind a less optimistic, East Village version of Wayne Thiebaud's lonely slices of cake, gumball machines, and other iconic Americana. Surprisingly, perhaps, Robinson has a tender side that emerges in his paintings of his daughter, her toys, and two kittens, each of which dominates its canvas with a wide-eyed intensity that made me think of Alice Neel's portraits.

Robinson's recent paintings of cakes and doughnuts, hamburgers, and of images borrowed from Lands' End catalogs and Macy's ads, also recall Thiebaud's painting style, except that Robinson's are clearly ironic and mocking of American consumerism, an attitude not expressed by his early paintings of Scotch and gin bottles, for instance, which seem to take a romantic view of overindulgence. His painting Savarin (2013), of french fries standing erect in a red cardboard McDonald's-like container - clearly referring to Jasper Johns' seminal, much-admired 1960 Painted Bronze, a painted bronze sculpture of paintbrushes in a Savarin coffee can - says it all.

Moore has three smaller contemporaneous exhibitions that should not be missed.

Holly Zausner, a New York and Berlin artist, is showing her large color photographs from the series "10th Avenue 10011," that capture the airborne peregrinations of a mysterious red, twisted, Gumby-like object against a sky and background I'll assume is in the vicinity of Manhattan's 10th Avenue.

"Hawk Krall: The New Philadelphia" gathers Philadelphia artist Hawk Krall's exuberant drawings of gritty Philadelphia neighborhoods and street scenes, which cover every inch of the paper they're drawn on.

Last but not least, Sally Heller, a resident of New Orleans and a contemporary bricoleur, has taken over the window gallery facing Race Street with her site-specific installation, Orange Alert, using found, mostly orange-colored mundane materials in her scene of urban chaos.

Through March 12. The Galleries at Moore, Moore College of Art and Design, 20th and Race Streets, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays. 215-965-4027 or www.galleries@moore.edu.