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Eric and Cindy belong to the precious photographic source material for Robert Longo’s iconic Men in the Cities drawings. These series contributed to Robert Longo’s fame in the early 1980s: larger-than-life drawings of sharply dressed businesspeople writhing in contortion under the impact of an invisible, obviously violent power, a sort of death dance of the modern man.

“It [the ultimate priority of work] is the picture, the image that it creates. But now it’s made is important. What ends up happening is I showed my assistants how to work on the drawing style. But I touch everything. It’s not like a movie.” — Robert Longo

In 1975 Longo got inspired for this work after looking at a still image in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The American Soldier. Four years later the artist began photographing his friends, that included Cindy Sherman and Larry Gagosian, in distorted and almost choreographic poses on a New York rooftop. With the help of assistants, the pictures were then reworked with graphite clay and to a larger scale. One of the drawings appeared on the cover of Glenn Branca‘s album The Ascension, the work from the Men in the Cities series is also prominently displayed in the apartment of fictional character Patrick Bateman in the film American Psycho.