In Bad Boy, renowned American artist Eric Fischl has written a penetrating, often searing exploration of his coming of age as an artist, and his search for a fresh narrative style in the highly charged and competitive New York art world in the 1970s and 1980s. With such notorious and controversial paintings as Bad Boy and Sleepwalker, Fischl joined the front ranks of America artists, in a high-octane downtown art scene that included Andy Warhol, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and others. It was a world of fashion, fame, cocaine and alcohol that for a time threatened to undermine all that Fischl had achieved.
In an extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Fischl discusses the impact of his dysfunctional family on his art-his mother, an imaginative and tragic woman, was an alcoholic who ultimately took her own life. Following his years as a student at Cal Arts and teaching in Nova Scotia, he describes his early years in New York with the artist April Gornik, just as Wall Street money begins to encroach on the old gallery system and change the economics of the art world. Fischl rebelled against the conceptual and minimalist art that was in fashion at the time to paint compelling portraits of everyday people that captured the unspoken tensions in their lives. Still in his thirties, Eric became the subject of a major Vanity Fair interview, his canvases sold for as much as a million dollars, and The Whitney Museum mounted a major retrospective of his paintings.
Bad Boy follows Fischl's maturation both as an artist and sculptor, and his inevitable fall from grace as a new generation of artists takes center stage, and he is forced to grapple with his legacy and place among museums and collectors. Beautifully written, and as courageously revealing as his most provocative paintings, Bad Boy takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the passion and politics of the art world as it has rarely been seen before.
Eric Fischl is America's foremost narrative painter; his paintings hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and in collections throughout the world. He lives with his wife, the acclaimed landscape artist April Gornik, in Sag Harbor on Long Island.
Show moreIn Bad Boy, renowned American artist Eric Fischl has written a penetrating, often searing exploration of his coming of age as an artist, and his search for a fresh narrative style in the highly charged and competitive New York art world in the 1970s and 1980s. With such notorious and controversial paintings as Bad Boy and Sleepwalker, Fischl joined the front ranks of America artists, in a high-octane downtown art scene that included Andy Warhol, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and others. It was a world of fashion, fame, cocaine and alcohol that for a time threatened to undermine all that Fischl had achieved.
In an extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Fischl discusses the impact of his dysfunctional family on his art-his mother, an imaginative and tragic woman, was an alcoholic who ultimately took her own life. Following his years as a student at Cal Arts and teaching in Nova Scotia, he describes his early years in New York with the artist April Gornik, just as Wall Street money begins to encroach on the old gallery system and change the economics of the art world. Fischl rebelled against the conceptual and minimalist art that was in fashion at the time to paint compelling portraits of everyday people that captured the unspoken tensions in their lives. Still in his thirties, Eric became the subject of a major Vanity Fair interview, his canvases sold for as much as a million dollars, and The Whitney Museum mounted a major retrospective of his paintings.
Bad Boy follows Fischl's maturation both as an artist and sculptor, and his inevitable fall from grace as a new generation of artists takes center stage, and he is forced to grapple with his legacy and place among museums and collectors. Beautifully written, and as courageously revealing as his most provocative paintings, Bad Boy takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the passion and politics of the art world as it has rarely been seen before.
Eric Fischl is America's foremost narrative painter; his paintings hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and in collections throughout the world. He lives with his wife, the acclaimed landscape artist April Gornik, in Sag Harbor on Long Island.
Show moreEric Fischl is America's foremost narrative painter; his paintings hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and in collections throughout the world. He lives with his wife, the acclaimed landscape artist April Gornik, in Sag Harbor on Long Island.
“Fischl is entertaining company. The same obervational frankness
that imbues his paintings makes this a brave and candid book. It's
also, in many ways, a painful book: he's such a deft portraitist
that he captures himself at his most unknowing, wounded, prideful
and self-contradictory...Occasionally vain, occasionally
score-settling, it's as unsparing as the aging Rembrant's blunt
self-portraits.” -New York Times Book Review
"Given Fischl's aptitude for telling stories as a painter, it
probably shouldn't be a surprise that Bad Boy, a memoir that covers
his life from his earliest years to the present, is so engaging.
The book, which takes its name from a celebrated 1981 painting of
Fischl's that shows a boy facing a naked woman in a bedroom, is
unusual among the writings of artists in its novelistic drive and
readability...folding painful family memories into accounts of the
artist's years in high school, his experiences with girlfriends and
teachers, and the art scene he began encountering in New York in
the late 1970s." -New York Review of Books
“At once a confessional and a manifesto…Will move readers with its
tales of a fraught life in art.” -Wall Street Journal
"A sharp critique of the art world's recent evolution" -Los
Angeles Times
One of Jeanette Winterson’s picks for the season’s most arresting
personal stories –O Magazine
“Must-read for culture vultures.” –New York Post
"Captivatingly written." -Huffington Post
"A clear-eyed account of the art world’s profound transformations
over the past 30 or so years, told by an artist whose career
perfectly maps that period." -The New York Observer
"...will probably stand as one of the more revealing
documents about the late 20th-century art world.” -ARTnews
"A uniquely intimate account of big-time art in [the 1980s]."
-National Post
"Editor's Choice" -Buffalo News
"An in depth look at the life of America's foremost narrative
painter Eric Fischl." -Hamptons.com
"[Fischl] pulls no punches in depicting his experiences as a gritty
bohemian and upscale urbanite...Equally absorbing as an insider's
chronicle of the late twentieth-century art world's booms and
busts." -Booklist
"A brave and beautiful book about the difficulties of practicing as
a painter in America, and a reminder of how essential the courage
of the pursuit of a personal vision is to art."
–Adam Gopnik, staff writer, the New Yorker, author of Paris to the
Moon
“Erich Fischl’s Bad Boy is powerful and important: emotionally
incisive, brilliantly well-crafted, and completely authentic.
In short, it is just like his art.”
–Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning
authors of Jackson Pollock and Van Gogh: The Life
“Soo good, so incredibly honest, vulnerable, real, moving,
compassionate; an incredible document of a man's life, an artist’s
development and a particular moment in time…the best artist-memoir
I've ever read.”
–A.M. Homes, author of The End of Alice and May We Be Forgiven
"Eric Fischl’s Bad Boy is a thoughtful, honest, revealing—and
frequently moving—memoir of a life in art."
–Francine Prose, president of PEN American Center
"Only an artist of Eric Fisch's intellect, resilience and wit could
have survived his dreadful childhood, conquered a nearly fatal
addiction to booze and cocaine, salvaged his marriage to the
marvelous painter April Gornik, and written this compulsively
riveting book."
–Francine du Plessix Gray, Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and
literary critic
“As Eric relates across this absorbing chronicle, the ongoing quest
for authenticity amidst the thralls of dysfunction would come to
constitute one of his primary themes…And as in his art, so here in
his writing, he does so with vivid, striking and memorable
dispatch.”
–Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing
One Sees and Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
