Farber on Farber: in his more than 50 years as a film critic and painter, Manny Farber has brought an essentially autobiographical sensibility to bear on a wide range of visual idioms, from process-driven abstractions to rebuslike figurative studies. Here, he tells the story straight

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Leah Ollman

Born in Douglas, Ariz., in 1917, Manny Farber has had long, prominent careers as both a painter and a film critic. He briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley, playing football there, then transferred to Stanford University, where he took his first drawing class. He also attended, for short spells, the California School of Fine Arts and the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design, both in San Francisco.

In the late 1930s, he began to learn the trades of carpentry and construction. In 1939, he moved to Washington, D.C., with his first wife, Janet Terrace, and began making a living in those fields, as well as teaching painting. They moved to New York in 1942, where Farber wrote art and then film criticism for the New Republic. He left the magazine in the late '40s and for the next several decades wrote about art, jazz and film for a wide range of publications, including Time (1949), the Nation (1949-54), the New Leader (1957-59), Cavalier (1966) and Artforum (1967-71). During these same years, he continued, to work in construction and develop as a painter. Farber was divorced from Terrace in the mid-'40s and married Marsha Picker in 1950. Their daughter, Amanda, was born in 1957, the same year that Farber had his first one-person exhibition, at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York.

Farber and Picker divorced in the mid-'60s. In 1966 he met the artist Patricia Patterson, whom he later married and has collaborated with on both critical writings and paintings. In the late 1960s, he and Patterson started to make large, abstract paintings on collaged paper. Notched, rounded, cut into fan or lozenge shapes, and sometimes folded over a dowel, these paintings presented richly textured planes of color--blood, rust, lipstick and fog. The tight geometry of the format reined in the organic flux of the scraped, splattered and layered surface. In 1970, Farber accepted a teaching position at the University of California, San Diego, and the couple moved to southern California, where they still live. Over the subsequent years, he contributed occasional pieces to Film Comment and, with Patterson, City Magazine, but with the move to the West Coast came a concentration of Farber's energies on painting and exhibiting. A collection of his critical writings, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, was published in 1971 and reprinted in an expanded edition in 1998. Pauline Kael called it "a triumph of personality."

In the early 1970s, Farber shifted from painting process-driven abstractions to tighter, figurative studies of objects. The flat plane of the paper (and later, board) was rendered as a tilted-up tabletop, strewn with autobiographical clues. The earliest of these topographical maps of Farber's psychic and physical domain featured loose trails of candy typically sold in movie theaters and the paraphernalia of a writer's desk--paper clips, correction fluid, pencils, tape, pushpins. The "Auteur" series, begun in the late 1970s, made reference to specific directors and individual films through small props and handwritten snippets of script dialogue. Model train tracks crisscrossed the surfaces, negotiating a path for the eye. In subsequent work, this function would be served by lengths of rebar--a nod to Farber's work in construction--and stems of plants and flowers from his home garden.

Throughout the '80s, Farber continued to paint prolifically in this style, arranging objects of personal significance against backgrounds of compartmentalized color or black and white. Scribbled-down dreams and notes to himself became more prominent, scattered among sketchbooks, vegetables and flowers. He retired from leaching, in 1987.

In the '90s, Farber's brushwork loosened and became more nuanced. Much of the writing inside the paintings dropped away. Flowers, fruit and art books opened to particular images--from religious paintings to erotica--predominated. Harking back to the early Color Field abstractions of the '60s, Farber's paintings from the past decade revel almost exclusively in the sensual properties of color and texture.

Leah Ollman: From the start, you've always done both writing and painting.

Manny Farber: Really, painting has been the major thing. I don't know whether one has been closer to me than the other. They come from the same impetus. The writing is obviously harder, much harder to do. The painting I can change almost endlessly, but the writing, I'm always on the fence about. There's more freedom in painting, for me. Someone once said that with the movie criticism I was just fooling around. He was horribly wrong. I never fool around, I prepare like hell. I don't believe in going in cold. For lectures, I used to go to the school about two in the morning and watch these same films I'd been watching for year's. I would run them, whether it took two hours or three, when everyone else was asleep.

It comes from when I was growing up. I had two brothers who were fiendishly good at almost everything they approached, and they were fiendishly competitive. And I had a father who was equally competitive. I learned from way back that I'd have to prepare like and for almost anything that was coming up. I could never do anything automatically. I could never improvise.