Moving pictures

On a recent Friday morning, Manny Farber -- dressed neck to toe in black -- sat at his breakfast table reading the newspaper and fretting about “Manny Farber: About Face,” the retrospective surveying four decades of his paintings that was about to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. At a time fit for celebration of an unusually rich life’s work, he’d been up all night worrying about an interview he was about to endure. He was also worried about whether his work adds up to anything. Left alone, he’ll worry about everything.

“I am a synonym for quagmire,” he growled in his characteristic self-deprecating and curmudgeonly way. It may be a defensive posture, but he is certainly not a simple person. Well-known and loved by many on the West Coast for his work as an artist, he is best known in other circles as a film critic -- the man who coined the notion of underground films in 1957, who eschewed star-style acting in favor of the small gesture, who was not afraid to “blame the audience” for the errors of Hollywood but was equally hard on some of the movie world’s most beloved -- from Billy Wilder to Katharine Hepburn. He once famously called “Casablanca” “Casablank.”

Over the years he’s hardly changed; he’s still got the look of the street-smart, mole-like New York intellectual, even though for more than 30 years he and his wife and frequent collaborator, painter Patricia Patterson, have lived in this northern San Diego County beach town. At 86, Manny Farber is not resting. Although he hasn’t been writing criticism since the late 1970s, he’s still as prolific a painter as many artists half his age. In addition to painting full time he goes to one or two movies a week so he can keep up with his film friends. (“Where’s the cattle?” he remarked when asked about Kevin Costner’s new western, “Open Range,” which he’d just seen. “Seemed like it was all gunplay.”) Farber has slowed some, but he’s remarkably sprightly, and he’s maintained the intensity and wry sense of humor that shines out from all the photos of him as a younger man; it’s all there in his eyes.

Farber is an exceptionally visual person whose visceral observations have spilled into both his paintings and his writings on film and art. He admits that one form fed the other: In both, he has deliberately disregarded narrative in favor of imagery and spatial relationships.

He was an early friend and advocate of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists and wrote one of the first favorable reviews of Jackson Pollock’s work. He was also a close friend of the pivotal Modernist art critic Clement Greenberg until they had a brawl in the ‘40s over who said what first. He continues to think and work in the tradition of Modernism, and his early paintings, some of which will be in the show, are abstract -- the earliest works included are painted-wood constructions, followed by paper collages with subtle fields of color.

THE BIRD’S-EYE VIEW

Since the early ‘70s, Farber has worked exclusively on still lifes, painted realistically from a bird’s-eye perspective on boards that he laid out on table tops. Each work depicts a series of objects -- from items related to film to vegetables and flowers. The most recent works show Farber loosening up his brushwork, illustrating both confidence and buoyancy.

“My paintings always do the same thing,” he says, gesturing around his studio, which stands behind his home. It is an expansive space filled with about two dozen works completed in the past couple of years, most of which soon will be sent off to the Quint Contemporary Art gallery, Farber’s representative in La Jolla, for a show that opens Oct. 19. All the works are filled with the detritus of the artists’ lives -- flowers from Patterson’s ever-expanding garden, pictures of historical art books open to favorite images, reproductions of small, handwritten notes inscribed with a word or two stolen from a conversation. There are also images of Farber’s tools -- his palette knife and Sharpie markers attached to long sticks, which he uses to sketch out his vision. These objects appear to float on the colored backgrounds, which, reflecting the deep collaboration between the artists, Patterson prepares for him. Her own works -- landscapes and intimate paintings of domestic settings -- include the same vibrant palette that she has shared with Farber.

“They always start here,” Farber says, pointing to the bottom of one large painting, “then swoop up, and then come across this way, and then they come down.” As he talks, a harmony among all the works in the room suddenly becomes acutely obvious, and the drive to figure out what they mean disappears. Specifics fade as the images become like dance patterns laid out for the novice student. It’s all about directing the viewer, Farber says, a way of moving the viewer’s eye from detail to detail.

“What I’m doing in painting is pretty much creating movies,” he says. “I’m lining up objects and lining up paths through the painting, pretty close to the way a movie director makes a movie.”

ALWAYS BUILDING

He was born Emanuel Farber in 1917 in the small border town of Douglas, Ariz.; his parents ran a dry goods store, one of a chain owned by four Farber brothers across the Southwest. He and his two brothers grew up playing sports and going to the movies nearly every day. Farber also liked copying cartoons of sports stars in the Douglas Daily Dispatch.

When the family moved to Vallejo, Calif., in 1932, he started playing alto sax and football on the high school team. He studied at UC Berkeley, where he was a sportswriter for the school paper, transferred as a sophomore to Stanford and moved from there to California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. His earliest artwork was strongly influenced by Cezanne, he said, and though he left the obvious influence behind, echoes of that Post-Impressionist artist’s fetishistic, detailed brushwork is still very much in evidence in Farber’s work today.

Always living by his principles and never very practical, the young Farber eschewed the Works Project Administration that was supporting many artists just after the Depression. Instead, he chose to labor as a carpenter -- a craft that would earn him his living for decades. In 1939, he moved to Washington, D.C., to be near his older brother, Leslie, a psychiatrist, and in 1942 moved to New York. He continued working in carpentry and painting, in addition to writing regularly for publications like the New Republic and the Nation. In 1966, he met Patterson, who later became his third wife. Frustrated by their continual financial difficulties, the pair moved west in 1970 to teach at UC San Diego.

It’s as if Farber has lived multiple lives: most notably as a down-and-dirty starving artist-writer, always at the thick of things, and then as a popular teacher and painter in a thriving academic outpost. His daughter, Amanda Farber, born in 1957, is also an artist, now based in San Diego with her artist husband, Mathieu Gregoire, and their son, Raphael. For all appearances, Farber’s life today is centered on his work and the comforts of his domestic life with Patterson. Her soft-spoken Irish American friendliness contrasts sharply with Farber’s Eastern European, Jewish-style character, but their shared love for art and film have fed a long and fruitful life of give-and-take. In addition to constantly sketching together, the pair co-wrote many of his later critical writings. She also has had a great influence on the images in Farber’s paintings. He says he hardly knows the names of the various vegetables or flowers in his work and is inclined to ask her just to “get me a yellow one.”

By contrast, Farber’s vast and detailed knowledge of film generated work that is insider in the extreme -- every densely composed sentence assumes his reader knows the topic already, as well as a whole body of other outside references. On Jean-Luc Godard, Farber wrote in 1966, “I think that I shall never see scenes with more sleep-provoking powers or hear so many big words that tell me nothing, or be an audience to film writing which gets to the heart of an obvious idea and hangs in there, or be so edified by the sound and sight of decent, noble words spoken with utter piety. In short, no other filmmaker has so consistently made me feel like a stupid ass.”

“Manny has a way of describing what he sees that is clearly from the eye of a painter,” says Peter Rainer, film critic for New York magazine and an admirer of Farber’s writing since the 1960s. “We should all be so lucky to have his eye.” Much more idiosyncratic than his contemporary critics, notably James Agee or the highly influential Pauline Kael, both of whom were friends and admirers, his style is unique. “You can read any passage and know that it is his right away,” Rainer says, “it’s like a thumbprint. Yet his opinions are impossible to predict.”

LABOR-INTENSIVE

About 16 years ago, soon after Farber retired from teaching at UCSD, he wryly noted over lunch one day that at least he could take credit for being “the most famous artist in Leucadia.” That’s half true. Nobody in Leucadia knows him, actually; his life there has always been anonymous.

But he also has always had a large presence. His writing on the movies is collected in the book “Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies,” first published in 1971 by Preaeger and reissued in an expanded version in 1998 by Da Capo Press. A new collection of additional writings is also underway. His exhibition record includes a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles that opened in late 1985 as well as shows at museums and galleries from Boston to New York, Texas and many in California.

The current exhibition is his second solo show to be organized and presented at the contemporary art museum in La Jolla -- the first appeared 25 years ago. Hugh Davies, director of the museum for the past 20 years, says he has long been a fan of Farber’s work. He conceived the show several years ago and invited Stephanie Hanor, an assistant curator at the museum, to execute it.

More than 70 works are included, spanning the artist’s career, and, under Hanor’s guidance, the museum has published a voluminous, well-illustrated catalog to document it.

“He never bogs you down,” Davies says of the experience of looking at Farber’s paintings. “You never stop and say, ‘I hate how he painted that bird.’ Or, ‘That book is really clunky where he’s placed it.’ That ability to keep it moving, to keep one still-life object from dragging the whole thing down, that takes enormous experience and talent. You aren’t just born with that kind of good taste. He has worked hard to get to where he is with these paintings.”

Farber agrees that nothing comes easily to him. Everything he has done in his life has been labor intensive, even the carpentry. “My work is always marked by work,” he says with a laugh, a statement worthy of the great Modernist writer Gertrude Stein. It’s a remark said with self-knowledge and confidence. But immediately after, in keeping with the title of his show, he does an about-face and begins to worry again.

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‘Manny Farber: About Face’

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily; Thursdays until 7 p.m.; closed Wednesdays.

Ends: Jan. 4

Price: $6

Contact: (858) 454-3541