Eric Fischl

In the spring of 2002, artist Eric Fischl, best known for his Neo-Expressionist paintings of the 1980s, organized a three-day photo session at the Haus Esters, in the Krefelder Kunstmuseen, Germany. For the project, the house was temporarily furnished with modern domestic necessities and "inhabited" by two actors, an attractive middle-aged man and woman. Photographs of everyday scenes have long been a component of Fischl's repertoire, but here he took pictures of a disruptive mixture of fact and fiction: actors, playing normal people, in an artificial domestic surrounding. From the approximately 2,000 photographs that the artist shot, he carefully chose a selection to be used as sketches for twelve large-scale paintings. The capture ambiguous, intimate, and strangely uncanny moments in the bedroom, the living room, the bathroom, the sunroom, and the dining room. It is these new works that appear here, embodying an essential expansion and synthesis of Fischl's previous work.… (more)

I bought this book after reading the introduction in which Fischl, drunk and high on coke, confronts a road rager in front of the police on the night of his first museum retrospective. Sadly, it turns out to be pretty much the only exciting part of this competent but sluggish autobiography.

Fischl is a nice, earnest guy, but he has a lot of blind spots. He spends waaaay too much time talking about his struggles in art school, evidently unaware that his experience is essentially the same as that of everyone else who studied art (trust me, I too went to art school). He has no sense of irony when he whines about the next generation's scandalous subject matter and the high prices they commanded early in their careers, not realizing that exactly the same could (and was!) said about him and his colleagues. His attempt at inspirational stories about his St. Barts vacations with Steve Martin and about the wisdom of his pal John McEnroe have a bit of a Gwyneth Paltrow-like tone deafness. And when he writes that he didn't like Edward Hopper because his treatment of figures was clumsy I realized Fischl's self-perception was more than a little off.

Oddly, the book is also padded with "other voices," very brief essays by people in Fischl's life. With the exception of the account of a fight with David Salle, all these "other voices" simply confirm what Fischl said without adding anything of value.

If you're interested in the art scene of the 1980s I highly recommend you try True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World by Anthony Haden-Guest and leave Bad Boy to die-hard Fischl fans.… (more)

I don’t follow art, but I’m intrigued by art. So I chose to read and review this book without any knowledge whatsoever of Fischl or his art. (Surely, you say, you could have at least thought about the implications of the title and could have done a quick Google search. Oh wise one, yes, I could have and should have.)

Call me ugly names if you will, but Fischl’s art is not my cuppa-tea. His art is disturbing. Very disturbing.

All of which I learned after finally doing a quick Google search. After I’d already committed to reading and reviewing the book (my bad...if you will please excuse the pun).

It was with great reluctance that I decided to go ahead and try chapter one. I was surprised to find Fisch is a solid writer (well, apparently Fischl with the help of Michael Stone is a solid writer), able to put together enough pages about how art came to him (he isn’t really sure how it came to him) and about his disfunctional family-of-origin and about his attempts to get past his alcoholic mother and about how he established happy grownup relationships to make a nice book. Yes, there is the usual celebrity name-dropping and pages of photos of that disturbing art, but I must admit that Bad Boy is a compelling story.… (more)