Bad Boy

In Bad Boy, renowned American artist Eric Fischl has written a penetrating exploration of his coming of age as an artist and his search for a fresh narrative style in the highly charged and competitive New York art world in the 1970s and ’80s. With such notorious and controversial paintings as Bad Boy and Sleepwalker, Fischl joined the front ranks of America artists, in a high-octane downtown art scene that included Andy Warhol, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and others. It was a world of fashion, fame, cocaine and alcohol that for a time threatened to undermine all that Fischl had achieved.

Fischl rebelled against the conceptual and minimalist art that was in fashion at the time to paint compelling portraits of everyday people that captured the unspoken tensions in their lives. Bad Boy candidly follows Fischl’s maturation both as an artist and sculptor, the impact of his dysfunctional family on his art, and his inevitable fall from grace as a new generation of artists takes center stage, and he is forced to grapple with his legacy and place among museums and collectors who paid millions of dollars for his canvases. Beautifully written, and as courageously revealing as his most provocative paintings, Bad Boy takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the passion and politics of the art world as it has rarely been seen before.

Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Eric Fischl is America’s foremost narrative painter; his paintings hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and in collections throughout the world. He lives with his wife, the acclaimed landscape artist April Gornik, in Sag Harbor, Long Island.

Michael Stone is a veteran journalist who covered the New York scene for New York magazine for over a decade. He has over a dozen cover stories to his credit, including newsbreaking features on John Gotti, Robert Chambers, and the Central Park Jogger. This is his first book. He lives in New York City.

“Fischl is entertaining company. The same observational frankness that imbues his paintings makes this a brave and candid book. It's also, in many ways, a painful book: he's such a deft portraitist that he captures himself at his most unknowing, wounded, prideful, and self-contradictory. . . . Occasionally vain, occasionally score-settling, it's as unsparing as the aging Rembrandt's blunt self-portraits.” —New York Times Book Review

"Given Fischl's aptitude for telling stories as a painter, it probably shouldn't be a surprise that Bad Boy, a memoir that covers his life from his earliest years to the present, is so engaging. The book, which takes its name from a celebrated 1981 painting of Fischl's that shows a boy facing a naked woman in a bedroom, is unusual among the writings of artists in its novelistic drive and readability . . . folding painful family memories into accounts of the artist's years in high school, his experiences with girlfriends and teachers, and the art scene he began encountering in New York in the late 1970s." —New York Review of Books

“At once a confessional and a manifesto . . . Will move readers with its tales of a fraught life in art.” —Wall Street Journal

"A sharp critique of the art world's recent evolution" —Los Angeles Times

One of Jeanette Winterson’s picks for the season’s most arresting personal stories —O Magazine

“Must-read for culture vultures.” —New York Post

"Captivatingly written." —Huffington Post

"A clear-eyed account of the art world’s profound transformations over the past thirty or so years, told by an artist whose career perfectly maps that period." —New York Observer

"Will probably stand as one of the more revealing documents about the late twentieth-century art world.” —ARTnews

"A uniquely intimate account of big-time art in [the 1980s]." —National Post

"Editor's Choice" —Buffalo News

"An in-depth look at the life of America's foremost narrative painter Eric Fischl." —Hamptons.com

"[Fischl] pulls no punches in depicting his experiences as a gritty bohemian and upscale urbanite. . . . Equally absorbing as an insider's chronicle of the late twentieth-century art world's booms and busts." —Booklist

"A brave and beautiful book about the difficulties of practicing as a painter in America, and a reminder of how essential the courage of the pursuit of a personal vision is to art." —Adam Gopnik, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Paris to the Moon

“Erich Fischl’s Bad Boy is powerful and important: emotionally incisive, brilliantly well-crafted, and completely authentic. In short, it is just like his art.” —Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Pulitzer Prize–winning authors of Jackson Pollock and Van Gogh: The Life

“So good, so incredibly honest, vulnerable, real, moving, compassionate; an incredible document of a man's life, an artist’s development and a particular moment in time . . . the best artist-memoir I've ever read.” A. M. Homes, author of The End of Alice and May We Be Forgiven

"Eric Fischl’s Bad Boy is a thoughtful, honest, revealing—and frequently moving—memoir of a life in art." —Francine Prose, president of PEN American Center

"Only an artist of Eric Fischl's intellect, resilience, and wit could have survived his dreadful childhood, conquered a nearly fatal addiction to booze and cocaine, salvaged his marriage to the marvelous painter April Gornik, and written this compulsively riveting book." —Francine du Plessix Gray, Pulitzer Prize–nominated writer and literary critic

“As Eric relates across this absorbing chronicle, the ongoing quest for authenticity amidst the thralls of dysfunction would come to constitute one of his primary themes. . . . And as in his art, so here in his writing, he does so with vivid, striking and memorable dispatch.” –Lawrence Weschler, author of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative