How can we account for a growing interest in the subject of artists’ decisions to withdraw from the artworld, and the ways in which their actions have been critically framed as a form of resistance? This paper will suggest that narratives of withdrawal afford a valuable perspective from which to approach a broader recuperative tendency in the contemporary fields of art history and curatorial studies. Central to this inquiry is the role professionals from these fields play in articulating and disseminating such accounts of artistic resistance. Considered in this manner, ‘withdrawal’ refers less to an artist’s initial decision to withdraw from the artworld than it does to a subsequent moment in which this action is rendered visible through an act of institutional validation. This reciprocity between institution and artist poses a fundamental challenge to the assumed independence upon which the figure of withdrawal is based, while at the same time better elucidating its function within current reappraisals of the art historical canon. What accounts of artistic withdrawal allow us to formulate is an imaginary in which a position outside institutional parameters is critically viable; albeit one that is only made intelligible through a retrospective act of institutional incorporation. In such circumstances, the withdrawn artist operates as a synchronic agent, one whose perceived value is contingent not only upon the temporal challenge they pose to existing art historical accounts, but also the existential alternative they offer to the operational realities of the professionals responsible for maintaining such accounts.