Eric Fischl

In Bad Boy, renowned American artist Eric Fischl has written a penetrating exploration of his coming of age as an artist and his search for a fresh narrative style in the highly charged and competitive New York art world in the 1970s and ’80s. With such notorious and controversial paintings as Bad Boy and Sleepwalker, Fischl joined the front ranks of America artists, in a high-octane downtown art scene that included Andy Warhol, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and others. It was a world of fashion, fame, cocaine and alcohol that for a time threatened to undermine all that Fischl had achieved. Fischl rebelled against the conceptual and minimalist art that was in fashion at the time to paint compelling portraits of everyday people that captured the unspoken tensions in their lives. Bad Boy candidly follows Fischl’s maturation both as an artist and sculptor, the impact of his dysfunctional family on his art, and his inevitable fall from grace as a new generation of artists takes center stage, and he is forced to grapple with his legacy and place among museums and collectors who paid millions of dollars for his canvases. Beautifully written, and as courageously revealing as his most provocative paintings, Bad Boy takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the passion and politics of the art world as it has rarely been seen before. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

My Life On and Off the Canvas

Bad Boy

Michael Stone

In Bad Boy, renowned American artist Eric Fischl has written a penetrating, often searing exploration of his coming of age as an artist, and his search for a fresh narrative style in the highly charged and competitive New York art world in the 1970s and 1980s. With such notorious and controversial paintings as Bad Boy and Sleepwalker, Fischl joined the front ranks of America artists, in a high-octane downtown art scene that included Andy Warhol, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and others. It was a world of fashion, fame, cocaine and alcohol that for a time threatened to undermine all that Fischl had achieved. In an extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Fischl discusses the impact of his dysfunctional family on his art—his mother, an imaginative and tragic woman, was an alcoholic who ultimately took her own life. Following his years as a student at Cal Arts and teaching in Nova Scotia, he describes his early years in New York with the artist April Gornik, just as Wall Street money begins to encroach on the old gallery system and change the economics of the art world. Fischl rebelled against the conceptual and minimalist art that was in fashion at the time to paint compelling portraits of everyday people that captured the unspoken tensions in their lives. Still in his thirties, Eric became the subject of a major Vanity Fair interview, his canvases sold for as much as a million dollars, and The Whitney Museum mounted a major retrospective of his paintings. Bad Boy follows Fischl’s maturation both as an artist and sculptor, and his inevitable fall from grace as a new generation of artists takes center stage, and he is forced to grapple with his legacy and place among museums and collectors. Beautifully written, and as courageously revealing as his most provocative paintings, Bad Boy takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the passion and politics of the art world as it has rarely been seen before.

Jamaica Kincaid

A lovely story about girls coming of age written by the West Indian writer, Jamaica Kincaid, and illustrated by the American painter and printmaker, Eric Fischl. 9 color reproductions.

Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam, and Tulip

Nude

Ralph Gibson

58 Monotypes

Scenes and Sequences

An unstinting memoir of the 1980s art scene as experienced by a leading American narrative painter traces his struggle to find his artistic way during a period when his style was contrary to fashion, his relationship with his alcoholic mother, his struggles with addiction and his interactions with such contemporaries as Julian Schnabel and David Salle.

Steve Martin

Arthur C. Danto

Robert Enright

In his most recent paintings Fischl has turned to portraits of his intimate circle of friends, including Mike Nicholas, Steve Martin, and his own wife, the painter April Gornik. These engrossing images have been accomplished with a mastery that has been compared to that of Caravaggio.".

Eric Fischl, 1970-2000

Elsy Lahner

American painter, sculptor and printmaker Eric Fischl (born 1948) is internationally known for his unusual nude paintings, featuring couples and families, which explore tensions between sexuality and power. Many of his works specifically address coming-of-age moments, blossoming sexual awareness and voyeurism--the paintings "Bad Boy" (1981) and "Birthday Boy" (1983) both depict young boys looking at older women in provocative poses on a bed. A charged, oppressive sexual atmosphere often permeates his scenes and overshadows the relationships depicted. In contrast to the bizarre and often unsettling content of his work is Fischl's bright color palette, with its lurid deep yellow and red tones. This catalogue focuses on Fischl's graphic work, showing a cross-section of his substantial printoeuvre. Also included is an interview by Lawrence Weschler.

Eric Fischl

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