American Dreams, Private Desires: The Uneasy Erotics of Eric Fischl

The American painter Eric Fischl was born in New York in 1948 and raised in the suburbs of Long Island. In his paintings, lots of them from the eighties yuppie era, turned the seemingly comfortable world of affluent American suburbia into one of his principal subjects. His official biography describes his upbringing as shaped by alcoholism and a country-club culture preoccupied with appearances, and his early paintings consequently became concerned with the gap between what was experienced privately and what could not be spoken publicly. It is precisely within this gap that much of Fischl's erotic art takes place. ‘Bad Boy ’, the title from one of his paintings, seen in Fig.1., was also later used as the title of his autobiography.

Fig.1  Eric Fischl, Bad Boy, 1981

Fig.2  Eric Fischl, First Sex, 1981

Fig.3   Eric Fischl, Sister's Turn, 1982

Bret Easton Ellis

There is something strangely unsettling about an Eric Fischl painting. At first, we may think we have entered a world of pleasure: a sunlit bedroom, a swimming pool, a beach, a suburban garden, beautiful bodies at leisure. His paintings can appear warm, sensual and even languorous. Yet the longer we look, the more that apparent ease begins to dissolve. Something is slightly wrong. A gesture is too ambiguous, a glance too distant, a body too exposed. What initially looks like erotic pleasure becomes something psychologically more complicated. Looking at Fischl’s paintings from the eighties I feel as if I stepped into a world of the novels written by Bret Easton Ellis.

Fig.4  Eric Fischl, Slumber Party, 1983

Fig.5  Eric Fischl, Dog Days, 1983

Fig.6  Eric Fischl, Scenes from a Private Beach, 'Women', 1982

Fig.7  Eric Fischl, Birthday Boy, 1983

Intriguing Painter of Eroticism

Fischl's eroticism has little to do with the uncomplicated celebration of the naked body. His people are not simply nudes. They are people who happen to be naked, and there is an important difference. Their nakedness makes them vulnerable. It exposes not only the body, but the complicated territory of desire, embarrassment, loneliness and fantasy. This is perhaps what makes Fischl such an intriguing painter of eroticism. He is interested less in the sexual act itself than in everything surrounding it: anticipation, aftermath, curiosity, voyeurism, uncertainty. His paintings often feel as though we have entered a room at precisely the wrong, or perhaps the most revealing, moment.

Fig.8  Eric Fischl, Boys at Bat, 1980

Fig.9  Eric Fischl, Late America, 2016

Fig.10   Eric Fischl, American Hula, 2020

The Bed As a Theatrical Stage

A bed is particularly important in his work. It is supposed to be the most intimate place in a home, associated with sleep, love, illness and private life. Yet in Fischl's paintings it becomes almost a theatrical stage. People lie upon it, sit beside it, enter rooms containing it. Something has happened, or is about to happen, but the painting refuses to explain exactly what. This uncertainty is essential. Fischl gives us fragments rather than stories. We are made to construct the narrative ourselves. Who are these people? What has happened between them? Are they lovers? Strangers? Friends? Is the moment innocent, erotic, melancholy, or all three at once? The viewer becomes a participant in the process of imagining.

Fig.11  Eric Fischl, The Old Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog, 1982

In Premium more about one of Fischl's most notorious paintings, why his eroticism feels so different from conventional erotic art, an extensive review of his "Late America" and "American Hula" piece, the meaning in the use of the colors, and the unsettling secret at the heart of Fischl's eroticism.

Click HERE for a profound study of Eric Fischl's erotic work "The Krefeld Project "

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