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Eric Fischl and his wife
April Gornik |
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 ric Fischl is considered one of the major artists of the international Neo-expressionist movement. During the 1980s the art market experienced an enormous boom when Neo-expressionism dominated. This was caused in part by new and aggressive methods of marketing and media promotion by international art dealers. Auction prices during the 80s often rose into the millions of dollars for a single piece of art. Today Eric Fischl's works can be found in the collections of some of the finest museums throughout the world.
Fischl was born in 1948 into a dysfunctional upper-middle class New York City family. In 1967 he moved with his parents to Arizona and began studying fine art. Shortly thereafter he transferred to the California Institute of the Arts, in Los Angeles where he earned a BFA in 1972. After graduation he spent some time working in Chicago as a security guard at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1974 Fischl was offered a job teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He taught in Canada for four years until a visiting artist named David True recommended him to the Edward Thorp Gallery in NYC.
Fischl exhibited his art and worked various odd jobs to survive in New York until 1981 when he caught the attention of a collector named Edward Downe Jr. who offered him a monthly stipend for one year to paint fulltime. With the help of his former classmates David Salle and Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl was accepted into the Mary Boone Gallery in 1982. Since then Fischl's large figurative paintings have received substantial attention. Eric Fischl became known in the 1980s as the painter laureate of the suburban American neurosis. His psychologically intense paintings depict confrontational scenes that take place in suburban settings. His paintings are unflinchingly focused on the subject of human relationships and they display moments when something potentially disastrous or taboo seems about to happen.
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Eric Fischl
Krefeld Project, Living Room Scene4
2002
Oil on linen
63.5" x 92" |
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Art Interview: Can you tell me a bit what it was like for you when you were growing up?
Eric Fischl: I grew up in an upper middle class, American family in the suburbs of Long Island, New York. My father was a salesman and went to the city every day. My mother was a housewife who had a severe drinking problem and so the family was in a dysfunctional state while I was growing up.
Art Interview: Are you a single child?
Eric Fischl: I have two sisters and a brother.
Art Interview: Are any of them also artists?
Eric Fischl: No.
Art Interview: Did your parents encourage you to become an artist?
Eric Fischl: Actually, both my parents were creative but neither one was a practicing artist. From time to time my mother studied art and writing but she never could pursue it, she wasn't disciplined enough. She definitely was creative and inspired creativity. So she sort of trained me in a way in the imaginative realm.
Art Interview: Did you receive any type of support from your family when you decided, okay; I want to be an artist?
Eric Fischl: Well, not really. My father pretty much had written me off by that time. Up until I committed myself to being an artist I was very unfocussed, undisciplined, rather rebellious. He was completely exasperated by it and my mother was happy that I started to take art-classes and strangely competitive with me about it. But then she died shortly after I began, so she never got to see me develop as an artist.
Art Interview: Did your father realize at some point that you had become a successful artist?
Eric Fischl: Yeah, I mean because he was a businessman he really didn't understand art per se or art as a career. Once my name began to appear in print he began to realize that this was the real thing. And so he sort of did a 180° turnaround and became incredibly supportive and enthusiastic. Actually, after he retired, he became an artist himself.
Art Interview: Do you think that it was difficult for you in the beginning having friction in your family? Did that affect your productivity?
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Eric Fischl
Krefeld Project, Dining Room Scene1
2003
Oil on linen
89" x 54"
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Eric Fischl: I was an art student for just a couple of years while I was living at home and then I moved away, so I would say in terms of that; no. In terms of the kind of madness and the kind of violence that took place in my house that certainly formed my vision of the world, my emotional structure and my psychological structure, so that ultimately was the thing I fed off of in my art.
Art Interview: So that was the foundation for your motif.
Eric Fischl: It's just about relationships, about boundaries, about desire and about taboo and things like that, which were all part of the dynamic at that time.
Art Interview: When you went off to school what gave you that motivation to study art?
Eric Fischl: It was really not a profound choice. I had dropped out of college - I actually failed out of my first year of college. I really had no ambition or desire and no focus. It was in the mid-sixties. I got involved in the peace-movement and the youth-movement and I tried living as a hippie for a while and I began experimenting with drugs but because I was so unfocussed it led to a depression. At that time my parents were living in Phoenix, Arizona and I returned home to them. I was kind of forced to get a job by my father, rightfully so. So I went out and I got this very ridiculous menial job. There was a guy who worked there at the porch and patio furniture store who was taking art classes at the junior college. I used to hang out with him at night and look at the artwork he was doing. I would watch him do something and I would say: Why don't you do this? And he would say: Why don't you go do that. I said but I'm not an artist and he would say: Well you could be if you wanted to be. We would argue about what art was. He was gluing pieces of bread to windowpanes and calling it art and I had the idea that art was like Rembrandt and Michelangelo. So of course we argued and eventually I thought: Well if he can glue bread to windowpanes, I can glue bread to windowpanes too. So I started going to Phoenix Junior College taking art classes. Two things happened very quickly to me that made me realize that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. One was that it was the first time in my life that I could concentrate. And the second thing was it was the first time in my life that I could tolerate being alone. It was from that alone that I decided I was going to do art no matter what.
Art Interview: Did anyone influence you while you were at the university? Were there any professors that you took a liking to?
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Merrill Mahaffey
Shoreline Granite Dells
1985
Acrylic on Canvas
22" x 34" |
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Eric Fischl: Of course. There was my first-year-art-teacher at the junior college, a man named Merrill Mahaffey. He made art seem radically fun. My second year I transferred from Phoenix Junior College to Arizona State University in Tempe and I had a first-year painting teacher who was actually a graduate student, a teaching assistant, a guy by the name of Bill Swaim. He brought a kind of spiritual dynamic to painting. He was an abstract artist and encouraged abstraction and introduced me to artists like Kandinsky and others. He brought a kind of broadened spiritual awareness to the process of making art. Then I transferred to what was at that time a brand new school, an art school called California Institute of the Arts, in L.A., which was a school that Walt Disney had founded before he died. He never lived to see it open but he founded it and he wanted it to be an ambitious art school with all the arts under one roof. So it had theatre and dance and film and music and art and design; all under one roof. It was the end of the sixties and it was in Southern California - they wanted an internationally known faculty with well-known people in their fields. They attracted a lot of very precocious art students who all wanted to be part of a new vision. So it was very dynamic for a couple of years. Although it was anti-painting because it was focused on the avant-garde and the radically new, it was very much a professional art school. They taught you to take art seriously as a career and it brought in a kind of cultural historical dimension to the arts. So it upped the anti in terms of ambition, which was great. I had a young painting instructor at that time named Alan Hacklin who was very insistent and sort of rigorous about art as a career.
Art Interview: Did he explain to you how the galleries work and how the system works?
Eric Fischl: To some extend, yes. You know from the 60s into the 70s was very much a transitional time for the art world, partly because - this is certainly the art world in America - our sense of historical ambition wasn't attached to wealth; it was attached to fame and to the kind of fame that would put you in the pantheon of the artists that you admired, the ones who had come before the Picassos and Matisses and Duchamps etc., etc., you know the Pollacks, DeKoonings, Warhols and Lichtensteins. It wasn't really about the financial reward, even though we were aware that there were some artists who had become not only famous but also very wealthy, so that was a possibility, but the commitment was really to art and to the cultural and historical dialogue in paintings and to some kind of dialogue with modernism.
The gallery system, which was dominated by New York, was in a kind of static state by the mid-seventies; it had become stultifying because it only accepted a very narrow idea of what art was. That whole thing exploded in the late 70s and early 80s, which was when my generation made its appearance.
Art Interview: When you started approaching galleries, did you have any problems dealing with them, did you get rejections?
This oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Eric Fischl on July, 29 2005. The interview took place over the telephone between Berlin, Germany, and New York, New York and was conducted by Brendan Davis for Art Interview Online Magazine.
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