.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Stepping gingerly through the sand dunes, the figure of a young girl dominates the composition. Carrying a slice of pizza in one hand and a bottle of soda in the other, she appears lost in her own thoughts and oblivious to the two men looking at her as she makes her way through the dunes. The tension inherent in this voyeuristic scene is further enhanced by the ominous clouds that encroach across an otherwise bright blue sky. Furthermore, the sense of disquiet is amped up by the presence of pleasure boats full of people enjoying their day out on the sea unaware of the scene unfolding on land. What could easily be dismissed as an innocent day at the beach is, in Fischl’s execution, rife with unspoken tension. “Fischl's pictures seem to promise us clarity about complex issues,” the American art critic and poet Danold Kuspit has observed, “but in fact suggest depth of a complexity that can never be fully deciphered” (Fischl, New York 1987, p. 7).
This tension is due, in part, to Fischl’s Neo-Expressionist painting style. Rendered in a series of loose, almost impressionistic, brushstrokes, the artist obfuscates the very deliberate narratives that he wants us to decipher. Unlike Claude Monet’s nineteenth century beach scenes, where the fluid brushwork brings us into the narrative by capturing the blustery atmosphere of the bleak Normandy beaches, Fischl’s open and loose brushwork seems specifically designed to prevent us from reaching definitive conclusions.
It also plays into Fischl’s interest in photography, a medium where clarity and ‘truth’ are inherently implied. The artist sourced his characters for these early beach paintings from his archive of captured images of the sunbathing vacationers of St. Tropez. Fischl was particularly struck by the way in which the private and public merged in this act, a fact that he reminisced on, saying "In 1980, in St. Tropez, the experience of being there was so overwhelming that I couldn't believe what I was looking at. I had no idea how I felt about it. I was so compelled by what I was seeing, I don't know whether it was a joke, or whether it was wonderful, or horrifying, or stupid, or everything. I was seeing people on the beach who were naked, who were behaving in a totally socialized way. So that their body language was social language rather than private language. But they were naked, which was the most private space. And so that contradiction was compelling in and of itself" (quoted in A.M. Homes, “Eric Fischl by A.M. Homes,” Bomb, no. 50, Winter 1994). Though the scene depicted in The Pizza Eater could be regarded as completely normal in a European sense, for Fischl—an American artist—something else could be at stake. The figures seem exposed, their naked bodies, tinged with latent sensuality, are juxtaposed to create a visual conversation and turn the eye back on those viewing the goings-on. Thrust into the more reserved confines of the Western art world, they create a tension that forces us to confront our own reticence toward the topics of sexuality and the nude.
Fischl…created psychologically charged situations that reveal much about the viewers who read into them.
Phyllis Tuchman
This tension between the naked and the nude is one that runs throughout art history. Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit Omnia (1601-1602, Gemäldesgalerie, Berlin) shocked seventeenth-century Rome with its very contemporary depiction of a naked Cupid, and the biblical story of Susanna and the Edlers has been the subject of depictions by artists as varied as Artemesia Gentileschi in 1610, through Rembrandt’s version in 1647, to Thomas Hart Benton’s American interpretation in 1938. With the present work, Fischl reminds us that the debate is ongoing.
The artist belonged to a generation of young painters who, in the early 1980s, began to reassert the importance of painting after a decade that saw the dominance of the stylistically cool and distant Minimalism. Along with the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Julian Schnabel, Fischl began to champion the seriousness of painting, with its associated highly textural and expressive brushwork and vivid color palette. As their name suggests, the Neo-Expressionists returned expressiveness and emotion to painting after an absence of two decades, using their fluid and dynamic brushwork to challenge the rapidly changing world in which they lived.
“Central to my work is the feeling of awkwardness and self-consciousness that one experiences in the face of profound events in one’s life,” Fischl explained a decade after the present work was painted. “These experiences, such as death, or loss, or sexuality, cannot be supported by a lifestyle that has sought so arduously to deny their meaningfulness, and a culture whose fabric is so worn out that its public rituals and attendant symbols do not make for adequate clothing. One, truly, does not know how to act! Each new event is a crisis, and each crisis is a confrontation that fills us with much the same anxiety we feel when, in a dream, we discover ourselves naked in public” (quoted in E. Billeter, “Eric Fischel and His Art-Historical Environment” in J. E. Sorensen, ed., Eric Fischl, exh. cat., Aarhus Museum, 1991, pp. 26-27).
This tension is due, in part, to Fischl’s Neo-Expressionist painting style. Rendered in a series of loose, almost impressionistic, brushstrokes, the artist obfuscates the very deliberate narratives that he wants us to decipher. Unlike Claude Monet’s nineteenth century beach scenes, where the fluid brushwork brings us into the narrative by capturing the blustery atmosphere of the bleak Normandy beaches, Fischl’s open and loose brushwork seems specifically designed to prevent us from reaching definitive conclusions.
It also plays into Fischl’s interest in photography, a medium where clarity and ‘truth’ are inherently implied. The artist sourced his characters for these early beach paintings from his archive of captured images of the sunbathing vacationers of St. Tropez. Fischl was particularly struck by the way in which the private and public merged in this act, a fact that he reminisced on, saying "In 1980, in St. Tropez, the experience of being there was so overwhelming that I couldn't believe what I was looking at. I had no idea how I felt about it. I was so compelled by what I was seeing, I don't know whether it was a joke, or whether it was wonderful, or horrifying, or stupid, or everything. I was seeing people on the beach who were naked, who were behaving in a totally socialized way. So that their body language was social language rather than private language. But they were naked, which was the most private space. And so that contradiction was compelling in and of itself" (quoted in A.M. Homes, “Eric Fischl by A.M. Homes,” Bomb, no. 50, Winter 1994). Though the scene depicted in The Pizza Eater could be regarded as completely normal in a European sense, for Fischl—an American artist—something else could be at stake. The figures seem exposed, their naked bodies, tinged with latent sensuality, are juxtaposed to create a visual conversation and turn the eye back on those viewing the goings-on. Thrust into the more reserved confines of the Western art world, they create a tension that forces us to confront our own reticence toward the topics of sexuality and the nude.
Fischl…created psychologically charged situations that reveal much about the viewers who read into them.
Phyllis Tuchman
This tension between the naked and the nude is one that runs throughout art history. Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit Omnia (1601-1602, Gemäldesgalerie, Berlin) shocked seventeenth-century Rome with its very contemporary depiction of a naked Cupid, and the biblical story of Susanna and the Edlers has been the subject of depictions by artists as varied as Artemesia Gentileschi in 1610, through Rembrandt’s version in 1647, to Thomas Hart Benton’s American interpretation in 1938. With the present work, Fischl reminds us that the debate is ongoing.
The artist belonged to a generation of young painters who, in the early 1980s, began to reassert the importance of painting after a decade that saw the dominance of the stylistically cool and distant Minimalism. Along with the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Julian Schnabel, Fischl began to champion the seriousness of painting, with its associated highly textural and expressive brushwork and vivid color palette. As their name suggests, the Neo-Expressionists returned expressiveness and emotion to painting after an absence of two decades, using their fluid and dynamic brushwork to challenge the rapidly changing world in which they lived.
“Central to my work is the feeling of awkwardness and self-consciousness that one experiences in the face of profound events in one’s life,” Fischl explained a decade after the present work was painted. “These experiences, such as death, or loss, or sexuality, cannot be supported by a lifestyle that has sought so arduously to deny their meaningfulness, and a culture whose fabric is so worn out that its public rituals and attendant symbols do not make for adequate clothing. One, truly, does not know how to act! Each new event is a crisis, and each crisis is a confrontation that fills us with much the same anxiety we feel when, in a dream, we discover ourselves naked in public” (quoted in E. Billeter, “Eric Fischel and His Art-Historical Environment” in J. E. Sorensen, ed., Eric Fischl, exh. cat., Aarhus Museum, 1991, pp. 26-27).