Manny Farber

Roses and Two Lemons

1996
oil on board
36 x 180 inches

Born in 1917 in Douglas, Arizona. Died in 2008 at the age of 91, in his home in Leucadia, CA.

Manny Farber was a painter and film critic. He attended UC Berkeley, Stanford University and the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design. In the 1930s, Farber worked as a painter and carpenter, first in San Francisco and then in Washington DC, eventually moving to New York in 1942. Initially working in painterly abstraction, by the 1980s he had developed his table-top still lives, crammed with personal associations, domestic artifacts, and scrawled wisecracks. Farber frequently included narrative references to his favorite films in his paintings.

Concurrent with his career as a painter Farber was a celebrated art and film critic, regularly contributing to publications such as The New Republic, The Nation, Artforum , Film Culture, and others. Often described as "iconoclastic”, Farber developed a distinctive prose style which has had a significant influence on later generations of film critics. Susan Sontag considered him to be "the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country has ever produced."

Farber was a member of the Visual Arts faculty at UCSD for many years. He was the recipient of numerous awards for his painting, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (1967 and 1978–79), the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Independent Study (1977–78), a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1971), and a Graybar Fellowship (1967). He exhibited extensively, including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the P.S.1 Center for Contemporary Art in New York, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, among others.