26.11.1911 - 20.01.2004 (92 years) (Carmichaels, Pennsylvania, USA)
Robert Morris Donley (born 1934) is an American artist who has been identified with the Chicago Imagist movement. Judith Wilson of the Village Voice called him the "Chicago imagist Tolstoy." The narrative aspects of his work center on broad social and political statements that are complex--often playful and satirical with respect to ways in which propaganda, power, and social diversity mix with and conflict with historical and religious personalities. In this career retrospective in 2000 at the Chicago Cultural Center, Dr. Paul Jaskot wrote that "his art investigates the changing political and social geographies of [the modern] city."Donley has spent most of his career in Chicago, where his work was exhibited in shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago, the Peace Museum, Hyde Park Art Center, and numerous other group and solo exhibitions. He started his professional career in Los Angeles at the Paul Plummer Gallery and was later represented by Monique Knowlton in New York City. Donley was a chair and full professor of art at DePaul University. John Russell of the New York Times wrote of his work that "You will have an approximate idea of the teeming and endlessly pugnacious human scene that Robert Donley sets before us... It has the fascination of perpetual motion."