Manny Farber: Manet's Fish

Born in the southern border town of Douglas, Arizona in 1917, Manny Farber left his hometown to study painting at several universities in the Bay Area as a young man. In the 1940s, he moved to New York to pursue a career as an Abstract Expressionist, while working during the day as a carpenter. Across both painting and film criticism, he became an influential figure across both  fields, though widespread recognition for his artwork did not come until he broke with the Ab-Ex tradition and started making abstract constructions of works on paper in the 1960s. As a film critic, he wrote extensively for publications like The New Republic, The Nation and Artforum, developing an overarching thesis that was reproachful of the sentimental in cinema, preferring the immediacy and freewheeling spirit of American western and horror filmmakers of his time. This brand of iconoclasm is best characterized by his seminal essay: “White Elephant vs. Termite Art,” with the latter descriptor now used to talk about Farber’s own prolific career as a painter. 

 

In 1970, he moved from New York to San Diego with his wife, the painter Patricia Patterson. He joined a growing, avant garde group of artists, filmmakers, and poets on the faculty of UCSD, where he taught film and later, painting. He retired from teaching in 1987 and continued making work at his studio in Leucadia until his passing in 2008. 

 

Manny Farber’s tabletop paintings, like the one on view here, were driven by a relentless engagement with the process more than a desire to speak of film or flowers. These compositions are characteristically punctuated by leaves, vegetables, and flowers from the home garden designed by and tended to by Patricia, and which divided their studio spaces. The viewer is pulled up close by messages scribed into the paint, alternately deadpan and unexpectedly revealing, surly and self-deprecating. The missives record the nagging details of composing a painting, things that need to be done, fragments of conversation, and the anxious and very funny narratives of dreams. Other objects, like cutout paper constructions and torn out art book pages, rebar, and garden tools deploy paths directing the viewer to work their way through the painting. 

 

Manny Farber received the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fellowship for Independent Study in 1977-78 and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978-79. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston among others. In 2018, MOCA LA organized One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, which included more than 100 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and sound dating from the 1950s to the present.