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

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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.

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