Robert Heinecken (1931–2006) was born in Denver and grew up in Colorado and California. After four years of military service as a Marine Corps fighter pilot, Heinecken completed a BA (1959) and MA (1960) at the University of California, Los Angeles. One of the most provocative American artists of the past 50 years, Heinecken developed techniques that expanded the traditional boundaries of fine art photography. Like his contemporary Robert Rauschenberg, Heinecken appropriated and combined found images in a manner that altered their original meaning. In the 1960s and ‘70s he superimposed pornographic pictures and images of the Vietnam War over advertisements from fashion and news magazines. The jarring juxtapositions not only comment on the violence and materialism of contemporary society, but also reference the irreverence and eroticism that characterized the Dada and Surrealist movements earlier in the century. The mass media remained a central source of material for Heinecken’s relief collages of the 1980s and ‘90s that explore similar themes. Since Heinecken’s first one-person show in 1960 his work has been the subject of over 60 solo exhibitions in this country and abroad. Career retrospectives were recently organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (“Robert Heinecken: Photographist,” 1999), and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Ariz. (“Robert Heinecken: A Material History,” 2003). Heinecken was the recipient of numerous distinctions, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1975); a National Endowment for the Arts Photographers Fellowship (1977) and Individual Artist Grants (1981, 1986); the Friends of Photography Peer Award (1986); a UCLA Art Council Travel Grant (1982); and grants from the Polaroid Corporation (1988, 1996) and Apple Corporation (1992). Heinecken founded the photography program in the Department of Art at UCLA, where he taught for over 30 years, and was appointed Professor Emeritus upon his retirement in 1991. He also taught at the Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University, the State University of New York, Buffalo, and the San Francisco Art Institute. His work can be found in public collections throughout the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y.; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Polaroid Collection, Cambridge, Mass.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Seattle Art Museum; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Heinecken’s photographic publications include Are You Rea (1968), Mansmag (1969), Just Good Eats for U Diner (1971), He:/She: (1980), 1984, A Case Study for Finding an Appropriate TV Newswoman: A CBS Docudrama in Words and Pictures (1985), Recto/Verso (1988), and Studiesnineteenseventy (2002). Heinecken’s archive is located at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Ariz. Go back to top               Printable PDF version