Manny Farber
[Image description: A photograph of Manny Farber standing in a doorway. A balding, older man with light skin, he wears a white button-down shirt and dark pants.]
Manny Farber (1917–2008) was a painter and film critic. Born and raised in Douglas, AZ, Farber studied painting at the California School of Fine Arts and the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design, eventually moving to New York in 1942. Initially working in the Abstract Expressionist style of the times, by the 1970s he had developed his mature painting style, which frequently featured a birds-eye view on still lifes of everyday objects and pop culture detritus. Farber frequently included narrative references to his favorite films in his paintings, as concurrent with his career as a painter Farber was a celebrated film critic, regularly contributing to publications such as The New Republic, The Nation, Artforum, Film Culture, and others. (artnet)
Farber was the recipient of numerous awards for his painting, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and a Graybar Fellowship. He was an influential member of the faculty at UC San Diego from 1970 to 1987, and lived the rest of his life in San Diego County. A 1979 retrospective of his work was presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and his paintings were recently featured in the exhibition One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Read about his work on HereIn: