Robert Dowd (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1936–1996) was an American artist, who also painted under the name Robert O'Dowd.
After his discharge from the U.S. Marines in 1957 he entered the Society of Arts and Crafts/Center for Creative Studies, Detroit, Michigan where he studied painting. In 1958-59 he began drawing common objects, including 'Stop' signs. His work first appeared in an Art in America article on the "Young Artists Group" in Detroit. In 1960 he moved to San Francisco and began work on his first images of postage stamps. In 1961 he moved to Los Angeles and began work on his currency paintings. By 1962 he was getting attention for his ground breaking paintings of common objects. Around the country several other artists were experimenting with this new concept and in 1962 he was invited to show his work at the Pasadena Art Museum.
Birth of Pop Art
In 1962 Dowd's work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Phillip Hefferton, Joe Goode, Edward Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the historically important and ground-breaking New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum. This exhibition is historically considered the first "Pop Art" Exhibition in America. These painters started a movement, in a time of social unrest, which shocked America and the Art world and changed Art forever, "Pop Art".
1960s
The 1960s were a time of social unrest. Hoover's FBI and the government thought anybody who was anti-establishment should be investigated and persecuted despite the right of freedom of expression. Unfortunately for Dowd his fascination with painting currency caught the attention of the Secret Service. Painting currency in those days was considered counterfeiting even if intended as a spoof. Dowd explains what happened in an interview with Lynn Pyne: "One morning in 1963, two agents from the Secret Service knocked on the door of Dowd's studio. They took him down to the Federal building in downtown LA, where they sternly read to him a litany of counterfeiting laws. Evidently it didn't matter that he was a former U.S. Marine. "They were attempting to intimidate me with all these threats" he says. "It was really a matter of them attempting to tell me that if I continued to paint money, that I would be arrested for counterfeiting, that I was breaking the law". "They did have some work of mine that they had confiscated as contraband. They told me they were going to museums and collectors and confiscate all the paintings out of the collections. "My situation as a young artist, struggling at that point, was that I certainly didn't need any major problems added onto my life at the moment, in terms of survival and trying to do my work". Certainly this hurt his career so he switched back for a while to painting postage stamps but continued to paint currency in private. In November 1963 he began a red and white colored JFK Inauguration Stamp and had just finished it on November 22, 1963 the day JFK was assassinated. Dowd destroyed the painting as he spent the day listening to the events of November 22, 1963. The pencil on paper drawing of the painting dated 11/22/63 survives. On one occasion he found a year's work of paintings of his, which he had in storage for an up-coming exhibition, destroyed and ripped to shreds, so consequently he canceled the exhibition. Sometimes paintings in storage and in his studio would just disappear. He often wondered if the FBI had them in their own collection. Dowd continued to paint and exhibit in L.A. throughout the 1960s. In addition to his currency and stamp paintings Dowd painted 20+ paintings in his Circus series, he painted from photographs (Hefferton Poloroid, 1962), painted candy apples, oreos and chocolate chip cookies, fingerprints, Ohio cookies, appetite eraser, oranges and many, other common objects. He made candy apples in multiples as art, made miniature oreo and chocolate chip cookies with magnets on the back which led to the refrigerator magnet craze. In 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, as was Robert F. Kennedy. In L.A. several months later, there were Viet Nam protests against the war. In 1969 Charles Manson and the Tate–LaBianca murders took place in L.A. and Dowd's artist friend John Altoon died of a sudden heart attack at age 44. In late 1969 Dowd began a new series of paintings Through the Object Barrier and in 1970 he moved to SoHo, New York.