Manny Farber

Manny Farber – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

Delve into the life and mind of Manny Farber — American painter, film critic, and provocative thinker. Explore his dual arts legacy, essays like White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art, and memorable quotes on art and cinema.

Introduction

Manny Farber (February 20, 1917 – August 18, 2008) was a singular American figure, whose work bridged painting, criticism, and theory. As both a visual artist and a film critic, he challenged convention, championed the underground, and left behind a body of writing and art that continues to provoke and inspire. Farber’s legacy lies not just in what he created, but in how he reframed the way we interpret art and cinema.

Early Life and Family

Manny Farber was born Emanuel Farber in Douglas, Arizona, on February 20, 1917.

His family relocated to California when Manny was a teenager, settling in Vallejo. The move opened new educational and artistic pathways for him.

Youth and Education

Farber’s academic path was eclectic and exploratory. He first enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and later transferred to Stanford University, where he began taking drawing classes.

He continued his art training at the California School of Fine Arts (in San Francisco) and the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design.

Career and Achievements

From Painter to Critic (1930s – 1940s)

Even in his early years, Farber maintained a dual interest in painting and writing. In the late 1930s, he worked as a painter and carpenter in San Francisco.

By 1942, he had relocated to New York City and began contributing to The New Republic — initially as an art critic and later as a film critic. Time, The Nation, Artforum, Film Culture, Film Comment, and Cavalier.

His criticism was bold, inventive, and iconoclastic. He is often credited with coining the term “underground film” in 1957.

Painting & Visual Work

Parallel to his writing, Farber continued painting. Over time, his style matured into a unique still-life vocabulary often infused with cinematic references and narrative fragments.

His canvases often carry layers of scribbled text — fragments of dialogue, observations, internal notes — making the viewer privy to his process as much as to the result.

Academic Role & Later Years

In 1969, Farber joined the faculty of the Visual Arts department at the University of California, San Diego, trading his New York life for teaching and studio focus.

By the 1970s, Farber and his third wife, artist Patricia Patterson, co-signed many of his later film criticism pieces and collaborated in thought and practice.

He passed away at his home in Leucadia, Encinitas, California, on August 18, 2008.

Historical Milestones & Context

• Farber’s essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (first published in Film Culture, 1962) remains central to his intellectual legacy. In it, he distinguishes between “white elephant” art (grand, formal, self-important) and “termite” art (modest, creeping, process-driven).

• He embraced B-movies and marginalized auteurs when they were dismissed by mainstream critics, arguing that their energy, flaws, and ambition often led to more vitality than polished prestige works.

• His writing style was conversational, sportive, and laced with metaphor — often drawing from sports journalism energetically applied to film criticism. He described his own effort as trying “to remain faithful to the transitory, multisuggestive complication of a movie image.”

• His dual identity as critic and painter gave him a rare vantage: his criticism was shaped by his painter’s eye, and his painting was enriched by cinematic awareness.

Legacy and Influence

Manny Farber’s influence can be traced across art, criticism, and cultural theory:

• Critical influence: He is often cited as one of the greatest American film critics, admired for his daring voice, irreverence, and originality.

• Termite art doctrine: The termite/white elephant framework remains a reference point for artists and critics debating approach, scale, and ambition.

• Cross-disciplinary resonance: His blending of visual art and criticism invites practitioners not to confine themselves to one mode of expression.

• Underground valorization: His championing of marginalized and experimental filmmakers and artists helped let new voices emerge.

• Artistic example: For painters especially, his integration of text, process, and narrative voice continues to inspire.

Personality and Talents

Farber was known as an iconoclast: curious, combative, witty, and deeply skeptical of orthodoxies.

He resisted the idea of art as a display of mastery — instead favoring art that reflects process, effort, and internal struggle.

Farber had a wry sense of humor about the gaps and absurdities in both cinema and art, often revealing in his work the unglamorous labor behind the scenes.

Famous Quotes of Manny Farber

Here are some memorable quotes that reflect Farber’s critical and artistic sensibility:

• “A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward, eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.”

• “I think it’s sinful to give the audience material it knows already, whether the material is about race relations or the car culture or the depiction and placement of a candy bar.”

• “I have a great love of the actual.”

• “Capra is an old-time movie craftsman, the master of every trick in the bag … But all of his details give the impression of contrived effect.”

• “The cold, mean ‘Sunset Boulevard’ — a beautiful title … is further proof of the resurgence of art in the Hollywood of super-craftsmen with insuperable taste.”

• From IMDb (on William A. Wellman): “In any Bill Wellman operation, there are at least four directors — a sentimentalist, deep thinker, hooey vaudevillian and an expedient short-cut artist …”

These quotations capture his critical bite, his insistence on originality, and the ways he observed cinema, narrative, and art with both affection and skepticism.

Lessons from Manny Farber

• Valuing the marginal: Farber reminds us that creativity often flourishes outside the center, in the fringes, in what is overlooked or undervalued.

• Process over polish: His work affirms that the struggle, the drafts, the visible traces of making are not flaws — they are integral to meaning.

• Crossing boundaries: He shows the richness possible when one refuses to stay within categorical lines (critic vs artist).

• Critical courage: He encourages critics and creators alike not to defer to consensus or prestige, but to maintain independent voice.

• Reading for complexity: His work teaches readers to look for ambiguity, texture, and conflict in art — not just closure or resolution.

Conclusion

Manny Farber lived a life of contrapuntal energies: a painter who thought like a critic, a critic who saw like a painter, and an intellectual committed to shaking complacency. Through essays like White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art, his forceful visual work, and his idiosyncratic voice, he reshaped how we look at movies and paintings alike.

His influence persists — among critics who prize expressive agility, among artists who make work from both impulse and reflection, and among readers who admire writing that lives at the edge. Farber’s legacy beckons us to keep pushing boundaries, to stay attuned to the unruly margins, and to accept that art, at its best, is always in motion.

If you want, I can also dig into a full chronology of his exhibitions or compare Farber’s thought to other art critics. Would you like me to?