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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MF: They weren't done the way people draw, with their arm. You gauge a linear work with the length of the arm making the move. The spatiality of those huge paintings came about partly because the rude and crude loft we had was huge. It's also related to the fact that when you're doing a bridge or a building in carpentry, it's not an arm length that's the measure, it's the whole span--the roof length or floor length. You can't cut that kind of a line with your arm. You're cutting it with expansiveness. The spatiality comes from being in dangerous positions on bridges or skyscrapers.

The color is strictly from Patricia. From the very beginning, she's been regulating that in my work. I don't think there's anyone equal to her in terms of that. She tells me the color, and I mix the paint. It was the same way with the kind of line we made. She'd tell me where the line seemed to be going right, and I'd cut it on that line. Those pictures have a lot to do with the kind of illumination they create, the kind of color that arises from bigness, from a lot of space.

LO: Let's catch up with your writing a bit. When you first moved to New York in 1942, you got a tryout job with the New Republic, writing about me. But you soon shifted to covering film for the magazine. Why?

MF: I'd been studying movie criticism from way back, during my high school years and before that, even. I would go to the library and study the so called radical magazines of the period. So I was aware of Otis Ferguson and Stark Young and Gilbert Seldes and younger critics working in that period. When Ferguson went off to the Coast Guard at the beginning of the war and was destroyed by a Nazi bomb, I immediately wrote a letter to the editor saying that I could do the job very well.

I'd been an art critic for the New Republic from the moment we reached New York. So it was sort of a natural, and I thought it would be a much more desirable job being a movie critic than an art critic. It's still more desirable. Your audience is much larger for movie criticism than it is for painting. Also, doing movies, I would be in print every week. Doing painting I would be in once a month. I was getting $40 or $50 an article and that wouldn't be sufficient for getting us through life. It was economically important to have some kind of sustenance as well as something more interesting or exciting. The field of movie criticism was very rich at that time, unlike art criticism or any other type of criticism.

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