Product Description

Eric Fischl emerged in the 1980s as one of America's most important figurative painters. His paintings, many of which show a single intense moment, compel the viewer to participate in a world of middle-class suburban ambiguity and drama. In Fischl's engaging distinctly American canvases, narrative, morality, sexuality, and psychology are preeminent.

This volume, an expanded edition of Eric Fischl 1970-2000, is the most comprehensive examination of this important contemporary painter. More than 250 works, selected in conjunction with the artist, present the full scope of Fischl's career: the formative work of the 1970s; the breakthrough paintings of the 1980s, including the controversial Sleepwalker and Bad Boy; and the mature work, often of a personal and contemplative nature, of the 1990s and 2000s. In his most recent paintings, Fischl has turned to multipiece cycles: The Bed, The Chair series, starting with The Philosopher's Chair; canvases inspired by trips to Italy and India; and the paintings—Fischl terms them "narrative fictions"—of the "Krefeld Project." These engrossing images have been accomplished with a mastery that has been compared to that of Caravaggio.

The introduction, by philosopher and critic Arthur C. Danto, offers a perceptive study of Fischl's work over the course of four decades. Commentary drawn from interviews with the artist, conducted by noted writer Robert Enright, accompanies the paintings. Finally, a witty and personal afterword by Steve Martin, best known as a gifted comic actor and author, but also an astute collector of modern art, discusses Barbeque, a famed Fischl painting from his private collection.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #133150 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-15
• Released on: 2008-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

About the Author
Arthur C. Danto is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Columbia University and art critic for The Nation. He is the author of more than fifteen books, including Narration and Knowledge, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, After the End of Art, The Abuse of Beauty, and most recently Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life.

Robert Enright is the senior contributing editor to Border Crossings magazine and the University Research Chair in Art Criticism at the University of Guelph. He has published a collection of interviews with contemporary artists in Peregrinations and has contributed essays to museum catalogs and other publications. In 2005, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.

Steve Martin is the famed American actor and writer. He is the author of Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Places, the novellas Shopgirl and The Pleasure of My Company, and the memoir Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life. He is also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.

Customer Reviews

Superbly illustrated
This publication is an expanded edition of "Eric Fischl 1970-2000". In the opening essay Arthur C Danto helps us see the artist in context from his student days in the 1970s, when painting was almost an anathema, through his early work and to his notorious painting, "Sleepwalker", which brought him to the public's attention, and to his mature paintings. Selected paintings are discussed in more detail mainly with reference to their content and meaning. The discussion covers forty years of the artist's work and is supported with many quotes by the artist. The second very short essay by Robert Enright further discusses Fischl's work with specific reference to the artist's aims.

The bulk of the book "Fischl on Fischl" comprises examples of the artist's work accompanied by his comments taken from an interview with Robert Enright conducted in 2000 and 2007. The comments sometimes relate specifically to the painting alongside which they appear, but often are more general.

Finally there is a short and witty personal commentary on the painting "Barbeque" by collector of Fischl's work, the actor Steve Martin. The book concludes with a Biography; Exhibition History and a list of Collectors. There is no general index, and no index to the paintings illustrated in the book.

The book is illustrated almost entirely in colour throughout and contains over 250 examples of Fischl's work from his early efforts through to his mature work. The main section "Fischl on Fischl", pp 31 to 338, contains the bulk of these, with picture on virtually every page; most approach full page in size (allowing for margins), but a few are reproduced unnecessarily quite small. While most of the work consists of paintings in oils there are also some drawings, water colours and a few bronzes. Fischl's work is figurative in both senses, and often provocatively sexual in nature, but irresistibly appealing with his free approach and strong sense of light and shade.

This is certainly a very fine volume. I would like to have had more about Fischl's practical approach to his work, although it is very good to have his own thoughts on several paintings and what he was aiming for; and given the often large scale if his canvases it would have been informative to have had a few examples of close-up detail, I also found Danto's frequent references to himself distracting; but these are minor criticisms, although the omission of an index to the paintings is rather more irritating. However it is superbly illustrated with an abundance of Fischl's output; and well worth it for that alone ~ highly recommended.

Well Worth the Wait!
Fischl must be one of the world's greatest living figurative painters and this fantastic collection of his work has been well worth the long wait for publication. It's that rare thing in an art book, top quality reproduction of the artwork with decent sized plates on quality paper, a fairly informative text and not overflowing with the gibberish commentaries that plague many artist's monographs,

I first became aware of Fischl's work some fifteen to twenty years ago when I came upon a reproduction of The Pizza Eater in a cheap book of one hundred paintings of merit or some such nonsense and was immediately struck by both his sheer physical TALENT and the raw and challenging nature of his subject matter. A young pre-pubescent girl wanders naked on the beach, eating her pizza, oblivious to the leers of two teenage boys in the foreground. It's like walking into a meld Edward Hopper, Balthus and Lucien Freud with the savagery of Francis Bacon thrown in for good measure. Talk about being blown away!

Anyway, over the years I've found more work by him, slowly building up a knowledge of his painting, holding him up as a master to aspire to, and, for the last six months, waiting for this book to be published and delivered and it has finally arrived, and I feel like a junkie being let out of rehab with a thousand pounds in my pocket. Seeing anyone's entire output at one sitting is breath-taking, seeing Fischl's is just too much. I have to keep shutting the book and going back to it, indulging in sheer unashamed gluttony after years of famine.

If you only buy one art book in your life think about buying this one!

Great
This book is an epitome of how perfect a book on any artistic subject must be.