![]() When Fischl went to art school at CalArts there was no interest in painting. Totally alienated from the politics of drug culture of Haight-Ashbury, where he spent the summer in 1996, and saved from the Vietnam war only because of a communications glitch at his local draft board, Fischl focused instead on domestic life. ![]() Certainly it’s striking how little impact the public events of the day had on him. This art making mattered for him because he learned how to relive, and thus to master, his guilty memories. He chose what he calls “psychosexual subjects,” traumatic scenes from his own life because he thought that realist painting “needed a little shock therapy.” (p. This compulsively readable book tells how Fischl became a significant figurative artist at a time when critical opinion marginalized painting.įischl’s family was a mess: his parents fought and his mother was a dysfunctional alcoholic who eventually committed suicide, which relieved him and of course also made him feel guilty–“We didn’t want her to be our mother” (p. “I’m an American,” he rightly says in Bad Boy, ”not particularly worldly or sophisticated” (p. While his peers were wrestling with the history of European painting, advancing feminism or presenting leftwing critiques of the art market, Fischl’s narratives about the middle-class white American male would make great cover illustrations for novels about suburban life. ![]() While most of the newly fashionable American art of the day-Julian Schnabel’s and David Salle’s paintings, but also Sherrie Levine’s appropriations of male masterpieces, Cindy Sherman’s self-photographs or Barbara Kruger’s critical riffs on commercial advertising-was frankly custom made for Artforum subscribers, Fischl showed scenes which anyone could understand. I fondly remember seeing Eric FIschl’s psychoanalytic pictures in the 1980s. ![]() In 1978 they moved to New York City where they continue to live and work.Īrt in America – Cover by Eric Fischl, March 2016Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas by Eric Fischl and Michael Stone Eric Fischl, Bad Boy, 1981. It is there that he met his future wife, the painter, April Gornik. In 1974, he got a job teaching painting at the highly touted Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. “The underbelly, carnie world of Ed Paschke and the hilarious sexual vulgarity of Jim Nutt were revelatory experiences for me.”, Fischl has said. It was in Chicago that Fischl was exposed to the non-mainstream art of the Hairy Who. After graduation he moved to Chicago where he worked as a guard at the Museum of Contemporary Art. First at Phoenix Junior College, then a year at Arizona State University, and finally getting his BFA in 1972 at the recently opened California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. With his first New York show at the Edward Thorp Gallery, epithets like “psycho-sexual suburban dramas” became velcroed to his disturbing images of dyfunctional family life.įischl began his art education in Phoenix, Arizona where his parents had moved in 1967. Until the late 70’s, suburbia was not considered a legitimate genre for art. Against a backdrop of alcoholism and a country club culture obsessed with image over content, Fischl became focused on the rift between what was experienced and what could not be said. Born in New York City in 1948, Eric Fischl grew up in the suburbs of Long Island, his parents having moved there shortly before his second year.”Safer place to raise a family”, they used to say.
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