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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A lot of people trace my style in art to copying caricatures of sports stars in newspapers way back in high school. It's sort of true. The way this guy, Feg Murray, drew sports cartoons, he wasn't very good, but I thought he was the end of the world in terms of art and drawing when I was growing up. They were so innocuous, and obviously not very artistic, but they still dog me. I became a pretty good mimic from copying them.

LO: Tell me about how your more formal art studies began.

MF: It started at Stanford. I figured I wasn't going to get anywhere as a football player at Cal [UC Berkeley], so I shifted to Stanford in my sophomore year. That brought me next door to my two brothers, who were capitalizing on Stanford.

LO: Didn't that put you back in the center of that competition within your family?

MF: I don't think it bothered me, because [our parents'] attention was locked on the older two brothers. I took my first art course at Stanford. It revealed what I'd learned from Feg Murray, a way of shading. You can see it if you run your eye around all the stuff that's in the paintings of the last 15 or 20 years. It's a kind of stiff centralizing, the deepening of the edge from one angle, but from another angle it's very tight. It was a very good year at Stanford for me, because it brought me in closer to art. Immediately I thought of going to art school in San Francisco. No one was watching me. No one was paying any attention to me, so it was great. I had a lot of freedom.

LO: You studied briefly at the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design. Schaeffer based his teaching an Arthur Wesley Dow, his theories and principles of composition, having to do with asymmetry and light and shade.

MF: Schaeffer was a very doctrinaire design teacher. I only lasted about one quarter at that school.

LO: And that ended your formal art training.

MF: Well, my older brother, Les, was always a subscriber to all the art magazines and intellectual magazines. He was very perceptive. So that became home base for me--the Partisan Review and the New Republic.

LO: In 1939 you moved to Washington, D.C., to be near [Les], and you began to earn a living doing carpentry and construction.

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