Manny Farber: An Up Beat Title

Quint Gallery is pleased to present Manny Farber: An Up Beat Title, an exhibition of paintings and drawings made between 1984 and 2008, the year before his passing. This exhibition will be presented in coordination with the La Jolla Historical Society’s exhibition Double Bill: The Art of Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson, which will explore the creative partnership of the celebrated husband-and-wife painters, highlighting how life in Leucadia and their work at UC San Diego shaped their distinct artistic voices. We will celebrate the opening of both exhibitions with a reception at the La Jolla Historical Society’s Wisteria Cottage on Friday, November 8th. A member preview commences at 5:00pm, with the public opening to follow from 5:30-7:00pm. 

In addition to Farber’s well-known tabletop compositions, An Up Beat Title highlights a set of late drawings that revisited a style seen in his earlier drawings from the mid-70s. Depicting the exterior of the home and garden shared with his wife, Patricia Patterson, these drawings give the impression of an artist in his final years, taking stock of that which has been cultivated over the long run of a life lived in art. Farber’s late style, while in markmaking returns to a younger version of himself, in gesture appear quick and loose, perhaps even unfinished. These intimate paper works, inspired by Patricia’s gardens, stand as a tender closing chapter to his practice.

The bulk of his output, his "tabletop paintings," 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. Though Farber was known for his iconoclastic views on art and film, his midcareer paintings also depict a self awareness of the inevitability and pitfalls of ego, literally scrawled in the handwritten notes that uncrumple in paint throughout the surface layers. 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 humored 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 these paintings. 

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 as an Abstract Expressionist painter, 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, best characterized by his seminal essay: “White Elephant vs. Termite Art.” 
 

In 1970, he moved from New York to San Diego with 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 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.