Movie City Indie

« World Trade Center: a prequel | Main | Two Chicago photo exhibits: you are cordially invited »

June 05, 2006

Manny show: recollecting Farber and art

On the occasion of an art show in La Jolla and "Roads and Tracks," an upcoming collection of uncollected criticism, Duncan Shepherd at San Diego Reader offers personal reminiscence about near-90-year-old critic and painter Manny Farber. "The eventual meeting would occur in the last half of my senior year at Columbia University, a school chosen solely for the number of proximate movie theaters in New York City, my primary yardstick for Quality of Life. By this time Farber—I was still on last-name terms with him—had moved his column to Artforum, readily available in the college library, and in some ways his most hospitable venue ever, where his observations on movies could share space with views of Frank Stella, Robert Motherwell, and Andy Warhol... I got wind of a writing workshop run by Farber at the School of Visual Arts, ninety-some blocks southward in Manhattan... I would follow along on that trail come Spring... And then there he was, sitting six feet away from me, his prominent brow and forehead suggesting superhuman braininess, starting off fearlessly reading aloud from a recent piece he had penned on Luis Buñuel: "His glee in life is a movie of raped virgins and fallen saints...." "Manny... was a red-blooded American sports fan as happy to talk, in after-class adjournments to the coffee shop, about the Knicks as about the new Hitchcock or new Bresson. Too, he was preparing a show of his recent paintings in SoHo or thereabouts, a side to him I had known nothing about. Film buffs as a breed have a dangerous tendency to put on blinders to anything outside a movie screen, and the broadening of my horizons to the world of art studios, galleries, openings, and the bohemian digs he shared with his fellow painter and future wife, Patricia Patterson, was a healthy thing. Most fortunate of all, he was then putting together his own collection of film criticism, and I was flabbergasted and flattered to be called upon to help sift through the file box of clippings that dated back to the Forties, The New Republic, The Nation, The New Leader..." But what Shepherd appreciates about the Man is that "It was always about looking and seeing." [There's much more at the link, and it's as sweet a song of well-rounded, well-founded cinephilia as you'd want; Farber's paintings are at La Jolla's Quint Gallery, and there are reproductions of new paintings and drawings at the link. An appreciative, informed review of the show by Neil Kendricks, film curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, from the Union-Tribune, is here. Via GreenCine.]

Posted by Ray Pride at June 5, 2006 06:34 PM

Comments

Post a comment