The Clemente Family

Artwork Details

Title: The Clemente Family
Artist: Eric Fischl
Date: 2005
Location: Not on view
Dimensions: 69 x 86 in. (175.3 x 218.4 cm)
Copyright: © 2005, Eric Fischl
Credit Line: Gift of the James F. Dicke Family
Mediums: oil
Mediums Description: oil on linen
Classifications: Painting
Subjects: Figure group — family
Object Number: 2013.72.3
Linked Open Data: https://edan.si.edu/saam/id/object/2013.72.3

Artwork Description

The Clemente Family is a study of the complex dynamics among parents and siblings. The painting is a composite portrait based on multiple photographs Eric Fischl took of the family over the course of two hours. Fischl depicted his friend, the painter Francesco Clemente, veiled in shadow to cast him as someone who, Fischl explained, "stands outside his own reality looking in." His wife, who is partially bathed in bright light, occupies her role as a powerful matriarch.

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Born in New York City, Eric Fischl received his B.F.A. degree from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1972. Two years later he became an assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, where he continued teaching until 1978. In the 1980s Fischl's large figurative paintings, aggressive in their confrontation with the viewer, began to receive substantial attention. Along with painting, he turned to photography and monotypes. His 1990 series of Beach paintings drew on photographic sources. Since the late 1970s, Fischl's work has been widely shown in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Canada. Solo shows of his paintings were presented at the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax, Galerie B in Montreal, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Mary Boone Gallery in New York. In 1991 Fischl exhibited his monotypes at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.

ERIC FISCHL: The way I would paint in the early paintings was I'd take a 3 x 5-inch snapshot, and I had a film loop, and I'd look at that figure, and I would like then try to paint and draw it onto the canvas. Then I'd be sitting there going, “Oh, I really wish it was turned the other way,” and then I'd have to erase it and sort of flip it around in my head, reversing what I was seeing. It became a very arduous kind of a process, and then Photoshop comes along.

In the family portrait of the Clementes, the experience of photographing them was very funny because they were not wanting to be in the same moment with each other. They were, you know, skulking around in the background or they were coming in late and had to be sort of Photoshopped into that moment or, you know, whatever. They were moving in different spaces in different ways.

Literally pulling them together for the portrait was a collage, not a frozen moment. I wanted there to be a sense of that kind of pulling together and fragmenting, that collage effect has. You'll see that there's an irrationality to space and planes in it. The bench that the two daughters are sitting on comes in at an impossible angle. There's a shift in the speed of the background from a focused one side to a blurred other side. You know, there's a scale shift that takes place between the figures and the family. All of those things, I felt, were expressive of the experience that I had in trying to capture this family.

Sculpture I arrived at much later. I began making sculpture in 1986-87, something like that.

The tragedy and trauma of 9/11 was that 3,000 people died, but you saw no bodies, so it was a disappearance. It was hard to find closure for this trauma. The only thing that we really saw was the people who jumped or fell from the buildings, and that was censored very quickly. Anyone who saw those images or saw the actual thing—that was the indelible experience. That was the one that drove home the terror and the horror of that event. I was watching it on television the way most Americans were watching it, and at some point in the midst of this horror, this tragedy, I had this very strong feeling that if artists were ever needed, now would be the time that they were needed. That began my thinking process of how would I respond to this tragedy? How would I respond to this horror?

I had this very strong feeling that we had been thrown off balance in a profound way, that we were, in fact, almost like sagebrush. We were all in the state of tumbling along, and out of it I created this sculpture called “Tumbling Woman.” I made it purposefully a female but with a sort of masculine torso as well, so that it pulled both the male and female into a singularity because to me represented all of us. But I wanted it to be a female, because the female historically brings with it ideas of nurturing and vulnerability. You know, the need and desire in men to protect, things like that. So, I felt that added to the experience that I was looking for.