Eric Fischl - Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York Wednesday, May 15, 2024 | Phillips

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  • With its ambiguous narrative and figures captured unawares, Motel, 1984, is a brilliant two-part composition feauturing a couple embracing on a motel bed and a lone figure, presumably at a later hour, reclining and watching television. For its focus on quiet, introspective moments, vivid use of day and artificial light and hazy realism, the work distinctly alludes to the paintings of Edward Hopper. An important early example painted amidst Fischl’s rise to prominence in the early 1980s, Motel notably presages Fischl’s new series Hotel Stories, which he debuted to critical acclaim in New York this Spring.

    Capturing the American Psyche

     

    There is something distinctly American about Eric Fischl’s works, something suburban and specific to the cultural moment of the 1980s. His works entangle ideas spanning suburban ennui, the posturing of the American dream, anxieties of physical and emotional intimacy, and taboos relating to sexuality. On the latter, Fischl’s specialty is selecting moments that toe the line of social norms, so peculiar and precise that it is impossible to decipher if they are simply harmless, oddly captured moments or something more suspicious. Motel superbly exemplifies this, containing the themes and nuances shared by Fischl's most enticing works. Fischl is a key figure among a cohort of artists in the 1980s who reintroduced figurative painting into the contemporary landscape, along with David Salle, Julian Schnabel and Ross Bleckner. The continuing resonance of his works speaks to the artist’s ability to confront timeless thoughts, fears and desires.   

    “This insistence on the common coin of our environment is oddly disturbing, for it provides a deadpan background of ordinary truths to a domain of pounding emotions,”
    —Robert Rosenblum

    “It is Fischl’s special gift to fuse these two worlds of outer fact and inner feeling, as if he had selected, from the infinite number of objective images left in the storage rooms of the mind’s retina, precisely the one that cuts the sharpest into a psychological biography,” Robert Rosenblum commended of the artist’s works in 1984.i Motel comes from this definitive year of the artist’s practice. The work presents two versions of the post-coital moment: at left two figures curl around each other’s nude bodies as one tenderly kisses the knee of the other; at right only one figure remains, watching television with a hand behind their head and clothes tossed to the side. The tenor of the room shifts as the blinds close and the bed is bathed with the artificial light of the television. The memory of intimacy dissipates and the subject is left alone, quietly reckoning. Fischl seeks out these awkward moments and they have come to be cornerstones of his most profound paintings. 

     

    Eric Fischl on Edward Hopper

     

    Edward Hopper, Summer in the City, 1949, Private Collection. Image: James Goodman Gallery, New York, USA / Bridgeman Images, Artwork: © 2024 Heirs of Josephine Hopper / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

    Fischl’s loosely rendered painting distills fundamental action and emotional tone, as Arthur C. Danto identifies, “the images are like dream images, occurring in dream space. Dreams contain nothing extraneous.”ii The private, dreamlike Motel recalls the paintings of Edward Hopper, another master of disquieting scenes. Fischl cites Hopper’s companion paintings Summer in the City, 1949, and Excursion into Philosophy, 1959, as important influences. The earlier work shows a clothed woman sitting at the edge of a bed with a nude man sleeping behind her, while the later reverses the scenario, with a clothed man and partially nude woman. Motel and Summer in the City are kindred spirits in their depictions of the solitude that can accompany intimacy and its aftermath. A psychological tension stirs beneath the surface of both outwardly mundane moments. Fischl draws from Hopper’s ability, in his words, “to make a profound narrative seem like just a snapshot from daily life, to make ordinary things seem extraordinary while appearing ordinary.”iii On his relationship to the realist painter he explains: “My first reaction to Hopper is that he’s like an imperfect father. He’s somebody whom I’ve both always admired and found tremendous fault with; he’s also somebody who has cut out a territory that I can’t get around.”iv

     

    Under the Light of the Television

     

    “Television had been my main influence because that’s what I looked at when I was growing up,” Fischl explains plainly, reflecting on his upbringing on suburban Long Island in the 1950s. The television has become a frequent motif in Fischl’s work, often looming to the side of his intimate domestic scenes. The artist speaks about television as a “sense-extender.” In his words, “What a mirror does in a painting is inform the viewer that there are other things in the room they can’t see. What a television in a painting does is inform the viewer of realities that exist in that room but have nothing to do with what’s in that room… It heightens the complexity of our lives.”v

     

    The television creates a doubling of experience: the viewer remains present within their immediate physical surroundings while engaging with unrelated stories and events. In addition to this, television is also a space of stability, anonymity and privacy.  Ambivalent to its viewers, it is unaware and uncaring of who is watching or why. In Motel, television provides a surrogate denouement following the emotional complexity of sexual experience. In Fischl’s loose two-part narrative, the figure gazing at the screen in complete relaxation is remarkably familiar. The unexpected intimacy of the solitary moment is all the more striking viewed side-by-side with the amorous couple. 

     

    Robert Rosenblum, “Eric Fischl,” in Eric Fischl, exh. cat., Mary Boone Michael Werner Gallery, New York, 1984, n.p. 

    ii Arthur C. Danto, “Formation, Success, and Mastery: Eric Fischl Through Three Decades,” in Arthur C. Danto, Robert Enright and Steve Martin, eds., Eric Fischl 1970–2000, New York, 2000 p. 18

    iii Eric Fischl “On Hopper,” in Eric Fischl 1970–2000, p. 100

    iv Ibid.

    v Eric Fischl, “On Television” in Eric Fischl 1970–2000, p. 76

    • Condition Report

    • Description

      View our Conditions of Sale.

    • Provenance

      Mary Boone Gallery, New York
      Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1984)
      Thence by descent to the present owner

    • Exhibited

      Marseille, Action Régional pour la Création Artistique (ARCA), Centre d'Art Contemporain, New York '85, July 9–August 31, 1985, p. 53 (illustrated)

    • Literature

      David Whitney, ed., Eric Fischl, New York, 1988, no. 63, n.p. (illustrated)
      Jens Erik Sørensen, Eric Fischl, exh. cat., Aarhus Kunstmuseum and Louisiana Museum for moderne kunst, 1991, pp. 30–31 (illustrated, p. 31)
      Arthur C. Danto, Robert Enright, and Steve Martin, Eric Fischl, 1970–2000, New York, 2000, p. 100 (illustrated)

346

Motel

signed, titled and dated "MOTEL Left Panel Eric Fischl 1984" on the reverse of the left panel; signed, titled, inscribed and dated "MOTEL RIGHT PANEL Eric Fischl 1984" on the reverse of the right panel
oil on canvas, in 2 parts
each panel 36 x 42 in. (91.4 x 106.7 cm)
overall 36 x 84 in. (91.4 x 213.4 cm)

Painted in 1984.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$300,000 - 500,000 

Place Advance Bid
Contact Specialist

Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com

Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

New York Auction 15 May 2024