Word: fischl
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Eric Fischl has become the painter laureate of American anxiety in the '80s. From the moment he exhibited Sleepwalker, 1979, his image of a teenage boy resentfully masturbating in a suburban wading pool, Fischl has zeroed in with unblinking curiosity on the discontents of the White Tribe whose territory stretches from Scarsdale to Anaheim: unreachable kids, grotesque parents, small convulsions of voyeurism and barely concealed incestuous longing...
This is the suburb as failed Eden, noted by two out of three American sociologists and not a few novelists. But Fischl's project is not to embroider cliches on it. Rather he finds images that seem to trail a whole narrative history behind them, but obliquely -- so that you, as viewer, are put at the threshold of a hidden life that may, if you look closer, be yours. Fischl is a true American realist, but he works at a pitch of psychological truth ! (especially about adolescent sexuality) not known in the American narrative art of his forebears...
...When Fischl started out, the odds were against the very idea of narrative painting based on the human figure. Born in New York City in 1948, he went to the California Institute for the Arts in Valencia in 1970, just at the height of the belief, then endemic in the American art world, that "painting is dead." Cal Arts epitomized the frivolity of late-modernist art instruction -- no drawing, just do your own thing and let Teacher get on with his. Art education that has repealed its own standards can destroy a tradition by not teaching its skills, and that...
...Clearly, Fischl wants an overall look that is not too finished, consistently "imperfect," with an air of unconcern for its own pictorial mechanism -- the creamy, dashed-off realism of a Manet oil sketch. But this requires a mastery over the detail and frequency of brushstrokes, and a certainty about the drawing embedded in them, that he has not yet attained. He will slide from a passage of near virtuoso colloquialism to one of awkward smearing and prodding, and not fix -- maybe not see -- the difference...
...sexes. Hirsch thinks the only reason more women have contracted the AIDS virus from men than the other way around is that many more men now have the disease. As more women become carriers, he suspects, they will infect their partners. "There is no doubt," says Dr. Margaret Fischl, an AIDS researcher at the University of Miami School of Medicine, "that this virus, when it comes into contact with any mucous membrane, is going to be transmitted." Men and women, she insists, are equally vulnerable...