In
Bad Boy, renowned American artist Eric Fischl has written a penetrating exploration of his coming of age as an artist and his search for a fresh narrative style in the highly charged and competitive New York art world in the 1970s and '80s. With such notorious and controversial paintings as
Bad Boy and
Sleepwalker, Fischl joined the front ranks of America artists, in a high-octane downtown art scene that included Andy Warhol, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and others. It was a world of fashion, fame, cocaine and alcohol that for a time threatened to undermine all that Fischl had achieved.
Fischl rebelled against the conceptual and minimalist art that was in fashion at the time to paint compelling portraits of everyday people that captured the unspoken tensions in their lives.
Bad Boy candidly follows Fischl's maturation both as an artist and sculptor, the impact of his dysfunctional family on his art, and his inevitable fall from grace as a new generation of artists takes center stage, and he is forced to grapple with his legacy and place among museums and collectors who paid millions of dollars for his canvases. Beautifully written, and as courageously revealing as his most provocative paintings,
Bad Boy takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the passion and politics of the art world as it has rarely been seen before.
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Eric Fischl is America's foremost narrative painter; his paintings hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and in collections throughout the world. He lives with his wife, the acclaimed landscape artist April Gornik, in Sag Harbor, Long Island.
Michael Stone is a veteran journalist who covered the New York scene for
New York magazine for over a decade. He has over a dozen cover stories to his credit, including newsbreaking features on John Gotti, Robert Chambers, and the Central Park Jogger. This is his first book. He lives in New York City.
