Announcement

By Robert L. Pincus, UNION-TRIBUNE ART CRITIC for The San Diego Union-Tribune, August 24, 2008

Manny Farber never tired of looking at small things: a flower, a Post-it note or a section of rebar. He never stopped being fascinated with how “to get it as I see it,” as he said one day in his studio.

This was the prime paradox of Farber as a painter: He located the profundity of existence in its ordinary details, the everyday things of his life that he valued so much. He wasn't ever going to try to hit you over the head with meaning or message, by trying to create what he pejoratively referred to as “masterpiece art.” But like the great Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, he gave humble forms a second life, a glow that invested them with a large beauty.

Farber died early Monday at 91, in the Leucadia home he shared for many years with wife and fellow artist Patricia Patterson. His career spanned styles and epochs in recent art: Abstract expressionism, pop art, minimalism, conceptual art all came and went in his lifetime.

He experimented with his own versions of expressionism and made subtly ravishing works in the minimalist vein that foreshadowed his later brilliance with color in his figurative paintings. He was destined never to become a conceptual artist, given his deep love for painting and its history. Beginning in the 1970s, he developed a body of figurative paintings equal in brilliance to any artist of the last three decades.

His achievement as a painter brought him recognition. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, gave him a major show in 1985, and 18 years later the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego organized a sprawling retrospective that traveled to P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. He had gallery shows in New York and Los Angeles; Quint Contemporary Art in La Jolla, which has represented him for 24 years, developed a wide roster of collectors, who eagerly acquired his work at every solo exhibition.

But the greatness of his paintings has outdistanced its reputation, particularly in New York. Though he spent decades there, it was in California where he made his best work, and New York critics never seemed to get him fully.