The New York art world’s bracing for a warts-and-all memoir by painter Eric Fischl, recounting “the dark side of creativity, success and the go-go ’80s.” The must-read for culture vultures dishes on art stars Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.
In “Bad Boy, My Life On and Off the Canvas,” Fischl — who started his career as a guard at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art — recalls struggling before signing with Mary Boone, who was crowned “the New Queen of the Art Scene” in 1982 for representing Schnabel and Fischl’s CalArts classmate Salle.
Fischl, whose mother committed suicide when he was 22, became an ’80s art-world darling himself, with a painting going for more than $1 million and a Whitney Museum retrospective. But with success came a drug-and-booze habit.
In one of the book’s wild anecdotes, Fischl attends a 1983 party thrown by an art-collecting commodities trader with Haring, Kenny Scharf, Schnabel and Salle. “A fleet of limos picked us up,” Fischl writes. Arriving at a property with “high brick walls,” “lookout towers” and “armed guards,” they find “a glamorous crowd . . . some naked” with waiters passing “glasses of Champagne [and] a choice of cocaine or heroin.”
But Fischl hit a personal low after his Whitney show, when he wound up in a food-throwing tiff at Mr. Chow with Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Haring. While driving home, he also got into a harrowing road-rage altercation and went cold turkey soon after.
Fischl has harsh words for some contemporary artists, calling Koons’ work “all smoke and mirrors,” and Hirst’s shark suspended in formaldehyde — which was purchased for $8 million by uber-collector Steve Cohen — “essentially a fish trophy” and a “disappointment.”
The book, due out May 7 from Crown, also includes contributions from Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels, Mike Nichols and Salle, who didn’t speak with Fischl for years after a blowup on a street corner.