Robert W. Richards

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Robert W. Richards (* 1941 ) is one of the most distinguished and well-known illustrators in the USA.

Richards grew up in the industrial city of Sanford in the US state of Maine . As an intimate partner of the downtown art and music scene, he drew record covers and advertising posters for many of the greats of show business, which proved to be style-defining. He has worked for Frank Sinatra , Lena Horne , Anita O'Day , Tony Curtis , Peggy Lee , among others . He also illustrates for the fashion industry, and his clients include brands such as Chanel , Valentino and Yves St. Laurent .

As part of the bourgeois wing of the gay movement of the 1970s , his decades-long love for the “hunks” of this scene, the porn stars, began . Richards captured the fleeting beauty of those modern love gods in countless drawings and interviews. These works caused quite a stir in the exhibition "Gods of Erotica" at the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation in SoHo .

As a draftsman and portraitist, the artist naturally takes a back seat, his works are better known than himself. The film documentary on Peter Berlin , in which Richards played a key role and appears in numerous interviews with Peter Berlin himself, offers a glimpse of Richard as a person . Richard's drawings and photographs from all career phases in Berlin are valuable contemporary documents that record the "golden years" of the US gay movement in the 1970s. In the photo book Allure , Richards shows numerous highlights of his erotic illustrations of male ideals.

literature

  • Robert W. Richards: Allure , Berlin (Gmünder) 2006, ISBN 978-3-86187-881-0
  • Robert W. Richards: Robert W. Richards' gods of erotica: the interviews , New York (Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation) 2003
  • Ken Johnson: Stars of the blue screen: Robert W. Richards talks about the new exhibition and the guys who inspired it , in: HX magazine, issue 594 (2003)
  • Krach, Aaron, Idol worship: Robert Richards talks about drawing gay porn gods , in: Gay city news, New York 2003

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Richards, Robert W.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American illustrator
DATE OF BIRTH 1941