Lot Essay
Mother and Daughter is a classic example of Eric Fischl's narrative paintings of the 1980's in which apparently commonplace scenes of suburban American life appear to be charged with tensions or emotional dislocations between the subjects depicted. In this case, the two dominant figures are literally separated by being painted on two distinct canvases, with the abutted dividing edge starkly emphasized by the unnatural shift from sunlight to shadow that belies the continuity of the backyard setting. The mother, brightly highlighted by the sunlight falling on her body, is as self-absorbed as the daughter, whose contours are somewhat more obscured in shadow. Although their nude bodies face one another, there is no contact between them.
The dog, depicted on the right panel near the daughter, is a feature of many Fischl paintings, beginning with the highly disturbing A Woman Possessed, 1981, that was based on the artist's memories of returning home from school to find his alcoholic mother passed out.
In many of his pictures, dogs display a peculiar affinity for women, the animals often serving as possible surrogates of boys or men... Above all, his dogs embody animal innocence interacting with human perversity at an ambiguous edge that shifts back and forth as one tries to locate it (P. Schjeldahl, Eric Fischl, New York 1988, p. 15).
Fischl's art had moved from abstraction to figuration in the late 1970's when he began to create glassine drawings of figures in simple settings and staged poses.
I quit abstraction because each painting had begun to seem like the last one. I began to feel the same thing when I got to figural images, so I thought a good strategy would be to find a way of generating a lot of work by working off a core narrative. Each thing that I did would illustrate and extend the basic narrative...I started with the family matrix, exploring their relationships and the various permutations (D. Kuspit, Eric Fischl: An Interview, New York 1987, p. 31).
The figures in Mother and Daughter, like those in Fischl's other major paintings of this period, are somehow impersonal, generic types, taken from magazines and snapshots, fully exposed and, yet, somehow alienated and removed both from each other and the viewer. Fischl's skills here call to mind a number of art-historical precedents, including Manet, Balthus and Hopper. Like those precedents, Fischl's narratives are never intended to be his ends, but the means by which he places his painting in its art historical context. Of these likely predecessors, Fischl's brushwork shares with Manet's a sense of both freedom and control in which the strokes create light while delineating only those elements of form truly essential to his narrative goals.
In a prescient 1982 exhibition statement, Fischl observed,
I would like to say that central to my work is the feeling of awkwardness and self-consciousness that one experiences in the face of profound emotional events in one's life. These experiences, such as death, or loss, or sexuality, cannot be supported by a life style 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 (Schjeldahl, op. cit., p. 21).
The dog, depicted on the right panel near the daughter, is a feature of many Fischl paintings, beginning with the highly disturbing A Woman Possessed, 1981, that was based on the artist's memories of returning home from school to find his alcoholic mother passed out.
In many of his pictures, dogs display a peculiar affinity for women, the animals often serving as possible surrogates of boys or men... Above all, his dogs embody animal innocence interacting with human perversity at an ambiguous edge that shifts back and forth as one tries to locate it (P. Schjeldahl, Eric Fischl, New York 1988, p. 15).
Fischl's art had moved from abstraction to figuration in the late 1970's when he began to create glassine drawings of figures in simple settings and staged poses.
I quit abstraction because each painting had begun to seem like the last one. I began to feel the same thing when I got to figural images, so I thought a good strategy would be to find a way of generating a lot of work by working off a core narrative. Each thing that I did would illustrate and extend the basic narrative...I started with the family matrix, exploring their relationships and the various permutations (D. Kuspit, Eric Fischl: An Interview, New York 1987, p. 31).
The figures in Mother and Daughter, like those in Fischl's other major paintings of this period, are somehow impersonal, generic types, taken from magazines and snapshots, fully exposed and, yet, somehow alienated and removed both from each other and the viewer. Fischl's skills here call to mind a number of art-historical precedents, including Manet, Balthus and Hopper. Like those precedents, Fischl's narratives are never intended to be his ends, but the means by which he places his painting in its art historical context. Of these likely predecessors, Fischl's brushwork shares with Manet's a sense of both freedom and control in which the strokes create light while delineating only those elements of form truly essential to his narrative goals.
In a prescient 1982 exhibition statement, Fischl observed,
I would like to say that central to my work is the feeling of awkwardness and self-consciousness that one experiences in the face of profound emotional events in one's life. These experiences, such as death, or loss, or sexuality, cannot be supported by a life style 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 (Schjeldahl, op. cit., p. 21).