Background
Robert Heinecken was born on October 29, 1931, in Denver, Colorado, the only child of a Lutheran minister. His parents were Friedli Wilhelm and Mathilda Louise (Moehl) Heinecken. In 1942 the family moved to Southern California.
Riverside College
University of California at Los Angeles
Robert Heinecken with his installation "Waking Up in News America."
Robert Heinecken was born on October 29, 1931, in Denver, Colorado, the only child of a Lutheran minister. His parents were Friedli Wilhelm and Mathilda Louise (Moehl) Heinecken. In 1942 the family moved to Southern California.
In 1942 Robert's family moved to Southern California, where Heinecken attended public high school and then community college in Riverside, earning an Associate’s Degree in Art in 1951. For the next two years, Heinecken studied at the University of California, Los Angeles. He dropped out in 1953 to enlist in the United States Navy, where he learned to fly airplanes. In 1954 he joined the Marine Corps as a fighter pilot. When he was discharged in 1957, he returned to university on the GI Bill, earning a Bachelor of Arts in art in 1959 and an Master of Arts the following year. While in school, Heinecken concentrated mostly on printmaking, but by the end of his graduate study, he was introduced to photography and to the pre-Pop art ideas of Robert Rauschenberg and other artists who were using photographic imagery.
Throughout his career, Robert Heinecken amused, educated, and often shocked viewers with his pointed, irreverent photographic works. So provocative were Heinecken’s subjects — the Vietnam War, pornography, sexual politics, the media marketplace — that many critics and other observers rank either as avid fans or staunch detractors.
It has always been difficult to call him a “photographer” in the strict sense of the word, because he rarely used a camera to make his pictures. Rather, Heinecken worked on the fringes of the photographic medium, and in the margins of what might be considered acceptable subject matter, as an artist who used photography only as a means to an artistic end.
In 1960, Heinecken was appointed as an instructor in the Department of Art at University of California, Los Angeles, teaching drawing, design, and printmaking. Within two years he had initiated a photographic curriculum for the department and was appointed Assistant Professor in 1962, overseeing a regular series of courses in undergraduate photography.
Over the next three decades, Heinecken’s influence as a teacher was profound; he encouraged his students to approach art — and particularly photography — in the same spirit of experimentation with which he approached his own work. Fostered in part by social and political events of the day — the Vietnam war, the women’s movement, and the growth of the counterculture — the classroom became a place for dialogue and self-evaluation.
When Heinecken emerged in the Southern California art scene in the mid-1960s, he was one of a growing number of artists who had begun to incorporate photographs and other images into their art as a way to renegotiate the nature and meaning of contemporary art. Other Los Angeles artists, like Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari, practiced photography as a medium of conceptual art. Inspired by these new approaches, Heinecken seized the opportunity to transform a medium restrained at one time by the purist principles of modernism into one increasingly intertwined with popular culture.
At every stage, Heinecken’s work reminds of photography’s pervasiveness and its significance as a medium of transformation. The Center’s first director, Harold Jones, acquired the first Heinecken prints for the collection in 1975. The formal arrival of the Robert Heinecken Archive began in 1981. It has now grown to over 90 boxes of archival materials and more than 500 artworks. Robert Heinecken, an artist and teacher whose eclectic and challenging work radically expanded the range of possibilities for photography as art, died on May 19, 2006.
Heinecken used found images to explore the manufacture of daily life by mass media and the relationship between the original and the copy, both in art and in our culture at large. Thriving on contradictions, friction, and disparity, his examination of American attitudes toward gender, sex, and violence was often humorous and always provocative.
In 1964 Robert Friedli Heinecken helped found the Society for Photographic Education, an organization of college-level teachers.
Quotes from others about the person
Instead of treating photographs as the autonomous creations of their makers, as did Ansel Adams and other postwar tastemakers, he viewed them as forms of cultural iconography that reflected the commercialism and venality of contemporary life. In this sense, he was a forerunner of appropriationist artists of the 1980’s like Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince, who borrowed and recontextualized existing photographic images culled from printed reproductions.
Robert Heinecken married Janet Marion Storey on January 7, 1955 but the couple divorced in 1980. They had three common children, Karol Leslie Heinecken, Kathé Marie Heinecken, and Geoffrey Robert Heinecken. Then he married Joyce Neimanas.