Manny Farber: Paintings of the Eighties

54 Pages·1991·5.977 MB·English

by  Sally Yard, Manny Farber

G A L L E R Y
R O S A E S M A N
Press Release
February 5, 1993
FARBER
MANNY
NEW PAINTINGS
April 3 - May 15, 1993
Rosa Elman Gallery wlll exhlbn new paintings by Manny Farber opening Aprll 3,
1993. Born in Douglas, Arizona in 1917, Farber began painting in the 1930's. Before
joining the painting faculty of the University of California at San Diego in 1969, he was
a film critic ln New York writing for The New Republic, Nation and Artforum. Identified
in the SO's and 60's with his abstract paintings on shaped canvas, Farber turned to
representational imagery in the mid-70's. Farber retired from teaching in 1987 and
lives and works in Leucadia, California. .
Since introducing imagery Into his previously unrelenting abstract art, Farber has
probed the tensions between figure and ground, abstraction and representation,
image and idea. His paintings have a cinematic, choppy rhythm, aggressively
exploding with color, detail and texture. Personal notes, agendas, lists and stories
serve as devices to draw the viewer physically closer to the painted surface while
revealing clues to the artist's private life.
This will be the first exhibition of paintings by Manny Farber In New York since his solo
exhibition In 1982 at Oil and Steel Gallery. In 1985,the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Los Angeles mounted a major retrospective. Other recent solo exhibitions include
Texas Gallery, Houston; Larry Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles; and Quint Krichman
Projects in San Diego. The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham,
Massachusetts will o~n a ten-year survey of Farber's work titled, •Manny Farber
Paintings 1984 1992 , in June, 1993, curated by Carl Belz with catalog essays by Carl
Belz and art critic Kenneth Baker.
This exhibition Is the third In a series of one-person exhibitions In collaboration
with Quint Krlchman Projects. ·
Biography attached.
Catalogs available:
Paintings of the Eighties, essay by Sally Yard
Manny Farber Paintings 1992, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
1984➔
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 1C am - 6pm
575 Broadway New York 10012 (212) 219-3044 Fax (212) 941-5921

Manny Farber
Acknowledgments
IT 1s with great pleasure that Quint· Krichman Projects
presents Ma,111y Farbtr, Paittlittgs of tht Eightits as the first
of what we hope will be many publications concerning
the artists with whom we work. Above all else, we are
deeply grateful to Manny Farber for his cooperation in
this particular project and for his unflinching support
of our program generally. Sally Yard has done much
more than write the extensive and enormously
thoughtful essay. Indeed, Sally has been integrally
involved in all aspects of this project and we cannot
begin to thank her for her time or dedication.
Leah Hewitt has essentially donated her considerable
talent in designing and producing a publication in
which we take enormous pride. Julie Dunn has been
a vigilant editor. Finally, we want to thank our friend
and assistant, Cerri Wortmann, for her patience and
sensitivity in coordinating all of our efforts.
Michael Krichman
Mark Quint
© I lJ9 I Quint• Krichman Projects, La Jolla, California
All right~ rc~crvcd. No rart of the cont(·nts of this book may
he reproduced without the wriltcn pcrmi~\ion of the publisher.
Library oi C:ongn:" Catalogue ( ·ard Number. 90-6l842
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Manny Farber
Pretext and Process
Sally Yard
PAINTED halfway through the eighties, /\ttanny Farber's is pulled up close by messages scribed into the paint.
Domtslic Movies refers in title and subject matter to the Alternately deadpan and unexpectedly revealing, surly
past and future. Sinuous lengths of film leader arc and self-deprecating, the missives record the nagging
through the painting, spectral reminders of the movies details of composing a painting, things that need to be
that had dominated his imagery at the start of the done, fragments of conversation, and of late the anxious
decade. Pots and vases of lush magenta, mauve, iris and very funny narratives of dreams. Scattered across
yellow, paper white and lilac flowers, and sumptuously the paintings like untethered thoughts and ebullient
painted dishes of fruits and vegetables suggest the wisecracks, these dispatches conspire with the wily,
enveloping domestic mood that now overtakes the witty, and far-from-chance encounters of objects to
work. But the lemons and mums, like the game cards, discombobulate the observer. Here exposed to the
model houses and trains of earlier years, arc on one eavesdropping eye, the notes take time to read.
level a pretext. Lingering over the writing, the viewer is immersed
The cinematic and still-life imagery belies the in passages of painting, enveloped empathetically in
formal concerns that link Farber's representational work the artist's process of looking, of making an image.
with the abstract painting and sculpture he made from But the spell of such intimate proximity is
the forties into the seventies. Farber is, in the long run, broken as towering calla lilies, birds of paradise, and
more interested in the collision of the offbeat cobalt amaryllises push the viewer back in a display of paint•
violet of a freesia blossom and the tart yellows of a dish erly muscularity. And from the distance enforced by
of lemons, in the zigzagging strokes of pigment that cut the startlingly foreshortened and sturdy stems, the
the flowers loose from the gestural facture of the surface, viewer once again is in position to discern the broad
than he is in the iconographical import of the objects. and generous sweep of the compositions. As if scattered
Farber's paintings are driven by a relentless engagement by centrifugal force, or excerpted from a continuum
with process more than a desire to speak of film or expanding beyond the domain that the painting records,
flowers. Engrossed in the visual fabric of the physical Farber's objects can scarcely be contained. Cropped by
world, Farber tackles the making of a painting with the perimeters of the boards, flowers and dishes, trains
intellectual guile and ardent scnsuousity. It is an act of and model houses defy the imperative of the painting's
absorption invoking the I-You of /'v1artin Buber, a record edge, which in 1962 Farber had bemoaned as an unex
of deliberation recalling the anxiety of Cezanne. pected affliction of "advanced painting" with its "burnt
Yet the work is scarcely as hermetic as this out notion of a masterpiece"' While this compositional
might suggest. Proustian in its descriptive evocation, momentum-with its defiance of a center or focal point
Farber's painterly world of the pa,;t fi vc years is redolent relates to thc all-over rhythms of Pollock, in typical
of the fragrance of fn:esia and citru,. ol the intoxicating Farber fashion this high-art connection could be
hues of dahlias and bougainvilka, and the earthy fecun matcht·d by one from popular art. The Toonervillc
dity of just-pulled bl'ct,, radi-,hc-,, and potatoe,. The eye Trolley comics of Fontaine Fox? provide a madcap
is drawn through the painting~ along path., of echoing prototype for the trains and track, of tht· earlier paint
forms and the ~pace, routed hetwecn them. The viewer ing, and a mndc:I ol c:xplo~iv<: di~rK·r,al.
In Domestic J\1ovies (plate 5) the freesia and irises mounting concentration on painting. The imagery
have double lives. Their blossoms both extend upward of film slips away from Farber's painterly world as it
toward the viewer with robust illusionistic three subsides in his teaching life. The toy lexicon of the
dimensionality and are absorbed into the web of force movies gives way to the produce of the garden as
lines which maneuver across the two-dimensional lectures on film are displaced by time spent in a new
surface. Staked out by stems and film leader, and by house and then newly constructed studio opening onto
the repetitions of flower pots, dishes and vegetables. the rows and clusters of flowers cultivated by his wife.
these visual pathways whirl and wend through the the painter Patricia Patterson.
painting. The buoyant purple freesia are tugged back With the American Candy series the peppy
to the surface of the board by a purple ribbon in an act names and perky portrayals of candies and their wrap
of Cezannesque passage. And the dizzying tilt of the pers touched immediately, if inadvertently, on the inter
yellow freesia and irises is steadied by their chromatic twinings of word, image, and representation. Vignettes
affinity with the more spatially complacent lemons of Cadbury chocolate, Cracker Jacks and Good & Plenty
above and Post-its below. These pale yellow notes adorn the packages, seductive simulations of the sweets
surmount a fuchsia pink sheet bearing the interrupted that they enfold. From the start, the domain of the
message "Get ... tired of Mozart." Scribed through the candy is horizonless. And the picture plane is tipped
paint, the unpopular proposal keys up the collision of to become the table top.
azure blue and brazen pink which the transparently This tilting of the space is at once an honest
brushed surface of the paper has set in motion. record of the painting's execution-Farber paints on
• • •
paper or board laid out horizontally with the objects
Since introducing representational imagery which are his models arranged on the flat surface- and
in 1973 into his previously unrelentingly abstract art, a modernist move of pivotal import. For the lineage of
Farber has probed the tensions between figure and this space is traced back to the tipped-up still lifes of
ground, abstraction and representation, image and Cezanne and the angled-down gaze toward the water
idea, in paintings filled with the stuff of his life. The lilies of f'..,1onet. This is the bold domain of Pollock,
Abba-Zabba taffy, Hershey's chocolate, Bit-a-Honey, his pigment flung across canvases laid out on the studio
lollipops, Bazooka, Sun-Maid raisins, Tootsie Rolls, floor; it is the "flatbed picture plane"1 of Rauschenberg.
and Milk Duds of the American Candy series ( 1973-75) In Farber's work the restless gaze of Cezanne links up
form an emporium of movie theater treats. The pencils, with the omnipotent and mobile vantage point of the
erasers, rulers, liquid Paper, Carr's water biscuits, and movies. The viewer seems to hover over and move
cigarette papers of the American Stationery series through these candy store still lites. Pez, /\.1r. Goodbars.
( 1976 and 1978) constitute a writer's still life. And the and T wizzlcrs are displayed across fields organized like
notebooks, photos. trains, dollhouse furniture, and Diebenkorn's Oa,m Park painting~ and J\1otherwell's
game cards of the Auteur series ( I 976-78) and of the ()f>ws. The loose. energetic handling ot the backgrounds
works that follow into 1983 become props in Farber's in betray~ the abstract history of Farber\ work and under
vocation of a ~uccession of movie director~. That Farber ,cores hi~ di,intere~t in tricking the eye in any total,
spent decades as a critic of film and art, and twenty years unmitigated scn,e.
as a professor ot both, is evident in his painting. Farber works through the American Candy,
In I 985 ~arber's imagery ,;hiits, drawn now American Stationery, Second Stat1u11cry, and Auteur
from the space nf his hou,e, g,1rdcn, and ,tudiu. The ~cries in oil 011 paper, in i<J,8 mounting ,\lo~t/y "The Wild
increa~ingly diaristic chara<.tcr of the work, confirms ll1111,I.>" on canva~. only in l'°l79 working in oil 011 canvas,
a decision m1dwav thrnugh the decade to fn(us with and th:n year bcg111ni11g to work in oil 011 hoard. This