Eric Fischl
Whitney Museum of American Art / Mary Boone Gallery
The photosleaze painterliness of Eric Fischl’s canvases, full of grandiose passages and minutiae in precarious equilibrium, seemed impermeable under the glare of the museum lights. The scenes revealed themselves as less vulgarly Freudian—less full of suburban psychology—and more art-historically resonant, and thus in a more deconstructive mode than originally perceived. Fischl’s paintings of affluent society’s suffering are not simply topped off with gratuitous allusions to American realism but theoretically toy with the conventions of realism: physiognomic reading of physiological detail, and