By 1980 Walter Robinson (born 1950) had established himself as a critic for Art in America and member of the New York artists' collective Collaborative Projects. He became notable for paintings of square-jawed detective-hero types and swooning vixens based on pulp romance covers. Employing what critic Carlo McCormick termed a -devious sense of irony done with incredible sincerity, - he examined painting's relationship to mass-culture images of desire, mining lurid illustrations from the 1940s and 50s and rerepresenting them in a style culled from -how to paint- books. Robinson's...