Remember art before Instagram? These days, it can seem that gallerygoers are in it for the selfies (#Koons #nofilter). But if you spot Eric Fischl with a camera in hand, beware. One recent Sunday, the sixty-six-year-old painter steered his red Ford Flex along the back roads of Long Island’s East End, toward the Art Southampton fair, which takes place in a large tent behind the Elks Lodge. He was on his way to photograph the fairgoers.
“I only started going to art fairs two years ago, and only because I was doing research,” he explained, in a droll monotone. His wispy gray hair was swept back from a tanned forehead. “They’re so depressing. This one is sort of secondary-market stuff. And some third-tier stuff—a lot of shiny things.” Fischl is known for his early, psychologically fraught paintings of suburban life, as well as for Updikean moonlit nudes, and portraits of his friends—prominent artists and collectors—often at the beach. He said, of his new paintings, “They’re all art fairs, all people in various relationships to each other or to the art, usually ignoring it, sometimes looking at their phones.”
He attends fairs—Art Basel in Miami, Frieze’s New York edition—and takes hundreds of photos with a Sony a7 digital camera. He makes Photoshop collages with the resulting images, creating vignettes that he then paints. A show of these canvases (priced between four hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand dollars) will open at the Victoria Miro Gallery, in London, next month, to coincide with the Frieze fair in that city. “I figure people can go to the art fair and then come to my show and see what they look like at the art fair,” Fischl said, as he turned into the parking lot. Encountering a bottleneck, he backed up—directly into a silver Jaguar.
“Ah, shit,” he said. A petite woman in white Versace jeans emerged from the Jag.
“I don’t think you did too much here,” she said cheerfully.
They exchanged phone numbers, and Fischl made his way into the tent. Noticing a sculpture of a prancing cat, he crouched and clicked. “Let’s get the cat in, for God’s sake. It’s adorable.” Fischl and his wife, the painter April Gornik, have two cats, Hooper and Beebop, of whom he said, “They’re very respectful of art; it’s the one thing they haven’t peed on.”
A cologned gallerist strode over, business card extended. He drawled, “We’re in Dallas, and let me tell you something—Dallas is the absolute hottest market going right now. It’s on fire!”
“See what I have to live with?” Fischl mumbled. He caught sight of a woman in a floral jumpsuit: “Look at this dress. It’s an outfit.” Snap snap snap.
He himself wore rimless glasses, Nantucket red shorts, and an East Hampton Indoor Tennis T-shirt. Fischl has played tennis since the early eighties; he traded drawing lessons for tennis lessons with John McEnroe. “We started with nudes, live models—very intimidating,” he said. “I should’ve started him off on a still-life.”
Tucked between booths was an outpost of the Hamptons realty firm Saunders & Associates. Sofas flanked a vase of hydrangeas; a de Kooning painting hung on the wall. “We’re sellin’ houses, sellin’ art—we got couches for sale, too,” the broker said. Fischl photographed a woman, wearing hiking boots and a dolphin sweater, napping outside the Maserati V.I.P. Lounge, then moved on to a young girl who was taking a photo of her mother in front of a metal sculpture of underpants.
The Chicago-based Hexton Gallery was hawking some of Fischl’s work—prints and sculptures cast in glass. Madeline Kisting, manning the booth, told him, “So far, Eric, people have said that you’re cute; that you’re Eric Fischl the author” (of the recent memoir “Bad Boy”). “I also got, ‘He’s the local guy.’ ”
Fischl laughed and said, “Local boy makes good!” He grew up in nearby Port Washington, with three siblings, a salesman father, and an alcoholic mother, who committed suicide when Fischl was twenty-two. In 1967, the family moved to Phoenix; in the seventies, Fischl left to pursue a B.F.A. at the California Institute of the Arts, before winding up in New York, in 1978. He and Gornik moved to Sag Harbor full time ten years ago.
Fischl photographed a mopey woman, pecking on a laptop beneath a sparkly, all-pink interpretation of “Girl with a Pearl Earring.”
“I wonder whether, after my show, people will know to be wary,” he said. After one of his art-fair paintings was shown in New York this year, he recalled, “I got an e-mail that said, ‘I think I’m the person in the painting.’ And it was. It was this girl I photographed in Miami. She was wearing this hat and glasses and a denim shirt. Must be from a wealthy family, because she said, ‘My grandmother wants to buy it.’ ”
A yell came from a nearby booth: “He’s the one who hit my car!” It was the Versace-jeans woman. She was standing with the proprietor of a gallery in Nuremberg. “He said I should take a painting! I’ll take a sketch. Poor Jaguar. But we’ll work it out. All right, sweetheart?” ♦
