I fondly remember seeing Eric FIschl’s psychoanalytic pictures in the 1980s. While most of the newly fashionable American art of the day—Julian Schnabel’s and David Salle’s paintings, but also Sherrie Levine’s appropriations of male masterpieces, Cindy Sherman’s self-photographs or Barbara Kruger’s critical riffs on commercial advertising—was frankly custom made for Artforum subscribers, Fischl showed scenes which anyone could understand. While his peers were wrestling with the history of European painting, advancing feminism or presenting leftwing critiques of the art market, Fischl’s narratives about the middle-class white American male would make great cover illustrations for novels about suburban life.  “I’m an American,” he rightly says in Bad Boy, ”not particularly worldly or sophisticated” (p. 159). This compulsively readable book tells how Fischl became a significant figurative artist at a time when critical opinion marginalized painting.

Fischl’s family was a mess: his parents fought and his mother was a dysfunctional alcoholic who eventually committed suicide, which relieved him and of course also made him feel guilty–“We didn’t want her to be our mother” (p. 9). He chose what he calls “psychosexual subjects,” traumatic scenes from his own life because he thought that realist painting “needed a little shock therapy.” (p. 153). This art making mattered for him because he learned how to relive, and thus to master, his guilty memories. Certainly it’s striking how little impact the public events of the day had on him. Totally alienated from the politics of drug culture of Haight-Ashbury, where he spent the summer in 1996, and saved from the Vietnam war only because of a communications glitch at his local draft board, Fischl focused instead on domestic life.

When Fischl went to art school at CalArts there was no interest in painting. He recalls a scene where  “everybody in the studio was naked. . . . The model was sitting in a corner of the room absolutely still, bored to tears and smoking cigarettes” (p. 47). In that environment, he had to struggle. After doing abstract pictures, a failed synthesis of Richard Diebenkorn and Brice Marden, he found that telling stories was “a way back to my feelings through narrative association and evocative imagery” (p. 107). In the early 1980s, when he had moved to Manhattan,

Nobody knew what made a good painting or sculpture or performance. The so-called experts—the critics and curators and academics—continued to opine. But without history or any objective criteria in which to ground their opinions, their theories seemed increasingly personal or political or just plain bizarre. We artists sure as hell had no idea (p 190).

The challenges posed by his contemporaries in this environment made him “a better painter. I felt I had to be clearer and more assertive, to stretch the limits of what I was doing” (p. 243). If Fischl had some ambivalence about his fame, “the truth is I felt like a fraud. I felt I didn’t deserve the recognition I was getting” (p. 199), still he comes off as a man who has achieved genuine self-satisfaction. His long-lasting stable relationship with April Gornik, who is a distinguished landscape artist, seems enviable.

When Fischl compares his early paintings to those of Edgar Degas and Max Beckmann, or when he notes his more recently felt relationship to Edward Hopper, then you see how hard he is to place within a history of contemporary art. Recently, of course, there have been a number of fashionable younger figurative artists. But they tend, generally, to be ironists, artists who place the act of representation making within brackets, as if it were inherently untrustworthy. Fischl is too desperately sincere to be ironical. When he says that he painted his Self Portrait: An Unfinished Work (2011) showing him with close friends in a favorite place, “to remind me that I’m no longer alone” (p. 344), he really sets himself apart.

Bad Boy is very honest about the real pleasures and extreme perils of recognition and world success—and about how much Fischl has been driven by rivalry. Struggle is a more attractive subject for an autobiography than success. Edna O’Brien’s Country Girl: A memoir (2012), marvelously lyrical when it tells the story of her difficult early life, becomes oddly dull when it describes the celebrities she met after achieving success. The story told in Bad Boy, analogously, effectively ends in 1990, when Fischl, finding himself out of sync with the emerging younger artists, moves to the country, and turns to making sculpture. It’s a mistake, a wise editor once told me, to score points in print. I’m not surprised that Fischl doesn’t admire Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons, but I am a little disappointed that having himself been the beneficiary of the broadening of stylistic options in the 1980s, during what Arthur Danto called our ‘post-historical’ period, he doesn’t allow his successors also to break with tradition. “Many of the new crop of artists,” he complains, “seem to be using the styles and techniques of art in order to make advertisements for themselves” (p. 308). That, I would think, is a good description of his achievement, which I admire.

See Listings for details of Eric Fischl’s conversation with Robert Berlind this week at the National Academy Museum

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Macho masterpiece intentions are baked into the very setting of Eric Fischl’s paintings of the Corrida Goyesca.  By all rights these life-and-death-size duels in the sun between bullfighters and bulls should be awful, stripped of the mystery and mediation that until now had been the artist’s stock-in-trade.  No longer is the narrative a salacious, question-begging blur which relentlessly exploits a sweet seam of collector-class reflexivity.  No layering of time, place, and causation neutralizes the camera’s primacy in these transcriptions of decisive moments.  And Fischl’s signature befuddled technique can’t so easily masquerade as a dexterous X-ray of the corpse of painting, or else as a heartfelt rummaging for form, or both.  In the shadeless corrido, ineptitude, no matter how studied or brooding, will get you killed.

Throughout his career, Fischl has kept “bad” and “good” painting in the air like a pair of translucent beachballs. At the 1983 Whitney Biennial, the grotesque concatenating of fleshy white Americans on a Caribbean beach with desperate Haitians washing up in Florida seemed valid, if not mesmerizing, but what did it have to do with a tortured non-chalance about painting the figure? Fischl quickly abandoned politics and returned to his true subject, the noir boudoir of the suburban mind. But Fischl’s drive to paint well proved genuine. In the intervening 25 years Fischl has taught himself a great deal about anatomy, drama, light, color, atmosphere, surface, and attack

But was improving his skills a good thing?  Recent forays into sexy Roman statuary, tourist exoticism, and Bauhaus fashion shoots had threatened to leave Fischl exposed as a credulous consumer of his own 50-page bibliography.  And now, here was Fischl declaring himself a matador to the wounded beast of great painting, nicely setting himself up for a critical goring.

Thinking I’d be there to bury, I found much to praise.  An elegant frieze of poised, form-fitted buttocks in Corrido in Rondo No. 6 (all 2008) arpeggiates a velvety chord of tonic silhouettes across the dominant pink glare of background sand.  The four victorious killers are dynamic and buoyant, yet solidly constructed, suggesting a stripped-to-essentials version of Manet’s stripped-to-essentials version of Veronese — a thousand times more crude but effective all the same.  The matadors in these paintings are not young, and the marvelously chewed face of the veteran leader of this quadrillo hints at confederacy with a jaded Leon Golub colonel.

Corrido in Rondo No. 3 is an unapologetic paean to Goya’s great Jekyll-and-Hyde synthesis of the canny and the brutal.  Here the bull looms across the middle ground, held in tension by the graphic competence of his profile against a hint of architecture.  Following the master, Fischl squares the circular ring and sets up receding scrims of texture and temperature that vibrate with spatial conflict.  Most of the bulls in the show are downed, with scumbled blotches of cadmium oozing from their wounds, but this one still patrols dangerously, contained solely by visual guile.  The decorous sheen of the matador’s cape waves the bull from washed-out, steely light into foreground shadow, onward to exhaustion in his doomed chase of illusions.  Goya himself is said to have designed the vivid costumes, and while Fischl’s palette is almost Neapolitan, the clear, smart rhythms of warm and cool distribution are all Goyesca business.

The pirouetting matador of No. 3 bends backwards with perfect balance.  As with most of these paintings, Fischl makes use of a ritually balletic postcard moment in order to ardently convince us, perhaps for the first time in his career, of a figure’s groundedness and weight.  But one telling exception is made with Corrido in Rondo No. 4. Here the airborne, twisting feet of the matador flop like a rag doll’s; he seems caught in a moment of indecision as to whether to turn his back on the bull’s resting brawn and upraised horns.  Fischl’s disdain to attach the feet to the body seems like a holdover from a former strategem: subversive postural disorganization derived from the capricious snapshot, the wicked cool of Bacon, and urgent clumsiness.  There will be viewers who prefer this otherwise impeccable painting for the very reason of its refusal to play to bourgeois taste.  Of course, that refusal has long constituted its own status quo, and Fischl appears now to have taken up the mantle of classical rigor over – or at least alongside – aging, punk, post-modernist non/sense.  80 percent of Fischl’s massive success has always consisted in just showing up.  By no means is this as negligible a feat as it sounds, but with theCorrido paintings currently on view, the remaining 20 percent can and should be held to account as well.

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Marlene Dumas at Zwirner & Wirth until April 23 (32 E. 69th Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, 212-517-8677)

MAKING MOVIES IN THE BEDROOM

In March 2002 Eric Fischl was let loose in Mies van der Rohe’s Ester’s Haus in Krefeld, Germany. After decorating the 1928 villa, which belongs to the city’s art museum in contemporary style, he had a pair of actors play out domestic scenarios that he photographed. From the thousands of shots that ensued Mr. Fischl culled a book, “The Krefeld Project,” (2002) and used others as his source material for two painting exhibitions, the second of which is at Mary Boone.

This turn to directing, albeit to produce still rather than moving images, conforms to the cinematic impulse of Mr. Fischl’s generation: Artist-moviemakers among his peers include Robert Longo, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, and of course Julian Schnabel. Mr. Fischl crept behind the camera later than these 1980s artists, amongst whom he was always the most Old Masterly, committed in earnest to traditional practices and technique. But it could be argued that he was also the most cinematic, all along.

Mr. Fischl’s images implied narrative in a linear, temporal way. When a boy steals from the pocketbook of a mother, sprawled in drunken revelry on her bed, a story lies behind and consequences ahead. Such images worked to the extent that they could orchestrate past, present and future. Indeed, it was this storytelling capacity as much as the slippery paintwork and suburban sexuality that confirmed Mr. Fischl’s credentials as a “Bad” artist.

The six new “Bedroom Scenes” from 2004 at Mary Boone imply rather than impose narrative, leaving the viewer to determine a sequence of events — to decide, even, if they represent a single scenario. They might, after all, be scenes from a marriage. (They can claim Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode engravings, 1745, and Degas’s “The Interior,” 1869, as forebears alike.) How happy, or otherwise, are relations between this couple is up for grabs, though the titles are more directed than the images themselves.

The protagonists are a portly though sturdy man of middle age and an althletic, somewhat masculine and slightly younger woman; their domestic situation implies that they are people of substance. We catch them in various states of dress and undress, communication and distance. When dolled up in evening dress they could be on their way in from or out to a social gathering. He is not the kind of painter who ensures that you know which.

Generally, their intercourse seems fraught, connections frayed. One canvas, subtitled “The Earth Rolls Over You,” depicts sex, but we sense a fumbling moment of non-penetration. In another, “After the Tantrum, Unholy News,” with a broken vase and other props strewn around as witness, the woman, kneeling, points up to the seated man in a Renaissance pose, while he nonchalantly sniffs his sock (though he could be dabbing a cut or wiping away a tear — it isn’t clear.)

The figures are realized, in other words, in languages out of sorts within a single picture. She is classically composed, all rhetoric and gesture, while he is arbitrarily caught, the way a camera slices into a moment to give us an ambiguous transitional smudge. It is as if these disparate painterly strategies signify marital incompatibility.

In the early paintings with which he secured his reputation, Mr. Fischl can be said to have “art directed” within the medium itself. He has confirmed in interview what seems to be the case from the paintings themselves, that scenarios worked themselves out upon the canvas. Now that he works from his own stage managed photographs and has separated out the processes of image-formation and facture, the paintings are increasingly, and inevitably, slick, polished, cold machines.

That could just be what he is after. The photographic source is compelling for an artist intent on those terrible twins of modern realism, alienation and instantaneity. But the ambiguities that arise are surface ambiguities that have to do with the dislocation of different modes of representation (celluloid and paint) rather than psychological ones. They have more to do with lack of clarity than double entendre.

Certainly the one has the potential to be a metaphor for the other. The problem for Mr. Fischl is that ambiguity becomes a mere device that can be dropped in at will — like “painterliness” itself, warmed up just where you expect it, for streaks of light on muscley flesh. In the Old Master tradition he wants to tap, ambiguity in all its richness arose from observational crises. For them, awkwardness was a sign of vitality.  For Mr. Fischl, ambiguity on demand is a symptom of enervatednes.  But then, as a true realist chronicler of bourgeois ennui, this might be his point.

***

Like Mr. Fischl, Marlene Dumas knows how to make herself at home in other people’s bedrooms. Born in 1953, this South-African artist who has made her career in Holland, is five years younger than Mr. Fischl.  A selection of her raunchy, winsome work dating back to the mid-1980s at Zwirner & Wirth makes a fine case for her as a contemporary master of louche nostalgia. She depicts bodies with an angst-free urgency at once perfunctory and precise, bolshy and endearing. She recalls moderns like Münch and the less known but quite marvelous Nordic expressionist, Helene Schjerfbeck, as well as more contemporary figures like Beuys (his watercolors) and Ms. Dumas’ junior, the Belgian Luc Tuymans.

Her nonchalant yet gestural style — at once washed out and voluptuous,— actually resembles Mr. Fischl’s work in the late 1980s when, working out of Emil Nolde, he turned to monotype printmaking. The slick, squidgy eroticism of those sequential images, arguably his most likeable if intellectually his least ambitious works, coupled with their “blaxploitation,” and knowingly subversive appropriation of primitivism made him a kind of painterly cousin to Ms. Dumas.

Her work has an altogether more innocent rapport with both racial and representational otherness than his. In images like “Couples” (1994) — a frieze of the same voluptuous redhead embracing her black lover — the private desire and social stance aren’t too difficult to decode. In a funny way, the old-fashionedness of her expressionist style and liberal sentiment alike gives her work a period edge not unakin to her fellow South African, William Kentridge, another master of the wistful collision of the personal and the political.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, March 10, 2005

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