BAD BOY: A PREVIEW AND GIVEAWAY

GIVEAWAY ENDED 
BAD BOY

BY ERIC FISCHL

AND MICHAEL STONE

ABOUT THE BOOK:

In Bad Boy, renowned American artist Eric Fischl has written a penetrating, often searing exploration of his coming of age as an artist, and his search for a fresh narrative style in the highly charged and competitive New York art world in the 1970s and 1980s. With such notorious and controversial paintings as Bad Boy and Sleepwalker, Fischl joined the front ranks of America artists, in a high-octane downtown art scene that included Andy Warhol, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and others. It was a world of fashion, fame, cocaine and alcohol that for a time threatened to undermine all that Fischl had achieved.

In an extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Fischl discusses the impact of his dysfunctional family on his art—his mother, an imaginative and tragic woman, was an alcoholic who ultimately took her own life. Following his years as a student at Cal Arts and teaching in Nova Scotia, he describes his early years in New York with the artist April Gornik, just as Wall Street money begins to encroach on the old gallery system and change the economics of the art world. Fischl rebelled against the conceptual and minimalist art that was in fashion at the time to paint compelling portraits of everyday people that captured the unspoken tensions in their lives. Still in his thirties, Eric became the subject of a major Vanity Fair interview, his canvases sold for as much as a million dollars, and The Whitney Museum mounted a major retrospective of his paintings.

Bad Boy follows Fischl’s maturation both as an artist and sculptor, and his inevitable fall from grace as a new generation of artists takes center stage, and he is forced to grapple with his legacy and place among museums and collectors. Beautifully written, and as courageously revealing as his most provocative paintings, Bad Boy takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the passion and politics of the art world as it has rarely been seen before. 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: 

ERIC FISCHL  is an internationally acclaimed American painter and sculptor. His artwork is represented in many distinguished museums throughout the world and has been featured in over one thousand publications. His extraordinary achievements throughout his career have made him one of the most influential figurative painters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Fischl was born in 1948 in New York City and grew up in the suburbs of Long Island. He began his art education in Phoenix, Arizona where his parents had moved in 1967. He attended Phoenix College and earned his B.F.A. from the California Institute for the Arts in 1972. He then spent some time in Chicago, where he worked as a guard at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1974, he moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to teach painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Fischl had his first solo show, curated by Bruce W. Ferguson, at Dalhousie Art Gallery in Nova Scotia in 1975 before relocating to New York City in 1978. 

To read more about Eric Fischl, visit his website "Bio" HERE.

 

MICHAEL STONE is a veteran journalist who covered the New York scene for New York magazine for over a decade. He has over a dozen cover stories to his credit, including news breaking features on John Gotti, Robert Chambers, and the Central Park Jogger. This is his first book. He lives in New York City. 

PRAISE FOR BAD BOY:

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

“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

"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

SOME PUBLIC WORK OF ARTIST ERIC FISCHL:

The paintings are part of a mural called GARDEN OF CIRCUS DELIGHTS and is part of Multiple Glass Mosaics in the 34th Street Subway Station in New York City, done by Fischl in 1998. The sculpture is one you may recognize if you are a tennis fan as it is from the Arthur Ashe Memorial called SOUL IN FLIGHT, a bronze done in the year 2000. All these were taken from Eric Fischl's website HERE.

GIVEAWAY

THANKS TO JESSICA AND THE GOOD FOLKS

AT CROWN PUBLISHING WITH RANDOM HOUSE,

I HAVE ONE COPY OF THIS BEAUTIFUL

NON-FICTION BOOK, BAD BOY, TO

GIVE AWAY TO ONE VERY LUCKY READER

  

--U.S. RESIDENTS ONLY
--NO P. O. BOXES
---INCLUDE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS
IN CASE YOU WIN!
--ALL COMMENTS MUST BE SEPARATE TO 
COUNT AS MORE THAN ONE!

HOW TO ENTER:

+1 ENTRY: COMMENT ON WHAT YOU READ ABOVE ABOUT BAD BOY THAT MADE YOU WANT TO WIN THIS BOOK, AND DON'T FORGET YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS 

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GIVEAWAY ENDS AT 

6 PM, EST, JUNE 28

GOOD LUCK!