Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas
How much fame does it take to stop an artist from working in top form? How much pain does it take to keep an artist going? Controversial painter and sculptor Fischl addresses these questions with almost masochistic honesty in this revealing memoir. While chronicling his upbringing in a troubled family savaged by his mother’s suicidal alcoholism and his highs and lows in the shifting New York art scene of the 1970s and 1980s, Fischl offers raw confessions of the emotional hardships that drove his life as a professional artist along with revelations about his own evolving creative ethos. As with his acclaimed and notoriously provocative portraits, Fischl’s self-portrait draws its best energies from exhibition and confrontation as he pulls no punches in depicting his experiences as a gritty bohemian and upscale urbanite. Fischl’s look back is equally absorbing as an insider’s chronicle of the late twentieth-century art world’s booms and busts. Complementing each chapter are commentaries from Fischl’s friends, mentors, and lovers; the result is a remarkably objective warts-and-all memoir. --Greg Baldino