Bad Boy: My Life on and Off the Canvas Hardcover - 2013

Media reviews

“Fischl is entertaining company. The same obervational frankness that imbues his paintings makes this a brave and candid book. It's also, in many ways, a painful book: he's such a deft portraitist that he captures himself at his most unknowing, wounded, prideful and self-contradictory...Occasionally vain, occasionally score-settling, it's as unsparing as the aging Rembrant's blunt self-portraits.” -New York Times Book Review

"Given Fischl's aptitude for telling stories as a painter, it probably shouldn't be a surprise that Bad Boy, a memoir that covers his life from his earliest years to the present, is so engaging. The book, which takes its name from a celebrated 1981 painting of Fischl's that shows a boy facing a naked woman in a bedroom, is unusual among the writings of artists in its novelistic drive and readability...folding painful family memories into accounts of the artist's years in high school, his experiences with girlfriends and teachers, and the art scene he began encountering in New York in the late 1970s." -New York Review of Books

“At once a confessional and a manifesto…Will move readers with its tales of a fraught life in art.” -Wall Street Journal

"A sharp critique of the art world's recent evolution" -Los Angeles Times

One of Jeanette Winterson’s picks for the season’s most arresting personal stories –O Magazine


“Must-read for culture vultures.” –New York Post

"Captivatingly written." -Huffington Post

"A clear-eyed account of the art world’s profound transformations over the past 30 or so years, told by an artist whose career perfectly maps that period." -The New York Observer

"...will probably stand as one of the more revealing documents about the late 20th-century art world.” -ARTnews

"A uniquely intimate account of big-time art in [the 1980s]." -National Post

"Editor's Choice" -Buffalo News

"An in depth look at the life of America's foremost narrative painter Eric Fischl." -Hamptons.com

"[Fischl] pulls no punches in depicting his experiences as a gritty bohemian and upscale urbanite...Equally absorbing as an insider's chronicle of the late twentieth-century art world's booms and busts." -Booklist

"A brave and beautiful book about the difficulties of practicing as a painter in America, and a reminder of how essential the courage of the pursuit of a personal vision is to art."
–Adam Gopnik, staff writer, the New Yorker, author of Paris to the Moon
 
“Erich Fischl’s Bad Boy is powerful and important: emotionally incisive, brilliantly well-crafted, and completely authentic.  In short, it is just like his art.”
–Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of Jackson Pollock and Van Gogh: The Life
 
“Soo good, so incredibly honest, vulnerable, real, moving, compassionate; an incredible document of a man's life, an artist’s development and a particular moment in time…the best artist-memoir I've ever read.”
–A.M. Homes, author of The End of Alice and May We Be Forgiven
 
"Eric Fischl’s Bad Boy is a thoughtful, honest, revealing—and frequently moving—memoir of a life in art."
–Francine Prose, president of PEN American Center
 
"Only an artist of Eric Fisch's intellect, resilience and wit could have survived his dreadful childhood, conquered a nearly fatal addiction to booze and cocaine, salvaged his marriage to the marvelous painter April Gornik, and written this compulsively riveting book."
–Francine du Plessix Gray, Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and literary critic
 
“As Eric relates across this absorbing chronicle, the ongoing quest for authenticity amidst the thralls of dysfunction would come to constitute one of his primary themes…And as in his art, so here in his writing, he does so with vivid, striking and memorable dispatch.”
–Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative

Citations

• Booklist, 05/15/2013, Page 10
• Kirkus Reviews, 03/15/2013, Page 0
• New York Review of Books, 07/11/2013, Page 32
• New York Times Book Review, 06/23/2013, Page 12
• Publishers Weekly, 03/25/2013, Page 0
• Shelf Awareness, 05/17/2013, Page 0