Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas

In this patchy, but forthright memoir, Fischl, whose paintings of suburban life propelled him to celebrity in the 1980s, chronicles his struggles to bring a personal style and voice to the canvas, to render “characters that were real enough, sincere enough, and vulnerable enough to command empathy,” as he grapples with a past haunted by his mother’s alcoholism and, ultimately, his own substance abuse within New York’s decadent art world. The book, written with Stone, mainly focuses on Fischl’s artistic life, and the chapter on his student days at CalArts in the early 1970s is among the book’s richer moments. Under John Baldessari, CalArts was a hub of conceptualism, and painter Fischl was “consigned to the school’s backwaters.” Though the memoir (unlike his best paintings) is not particularly sensitive to the nuances of either people or events, Fischl discusses art with an infectious enthusiasm. Whether describing the evolution of “Sleepwalker,” or the similarities between tennis and painting, the artist’s fervor is palpable. Fischl, however, has previously made much stronger, more eloquent defenses of his bronze “Tumbling Woman” statue, which opened in Rockefeller Center on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to widespread controversy. The suggestion that the controversy about the work had to do with American culture’s “stubborn refusal to address issues of aging and mortality” is hardly convincing. Two 8-page full-color photo inserts. Agent: Mark Reiter, the Reiter Agency. (May)