Manny Farber, an iconoclastic stylist who achieved prominence in two careers -- as a painter of abstract canvases and still-lifes and as a film critic admired for his canny, muscular writing and advocacy of such directors as Sam Fuller, Howard Hawks and R.W. Fassbinder -- has died. He was 91.
An emeritus professor of art at UC San Diego, where he taught from 1970 to 1987, Farber died of bone cancer Monday at his home in the north San Diego County community of Leucadia, a family spokeswoman said.
Although he shifted his energies full time into painting 30 years ago, Farber remained a hero to a younger generation of film connoisseurs and critics, who cite the enduring effect of his writings, particularly the 1962 essay "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art."
A jeremiad on glitzy, pretentious Hollywood productions (he once famously called "Casablanca" "Casablank"), the essay proclaimed Farber's preference for actors and directors whose art "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."
Thus he praised John Wayne and Jason Robards as termite actors and, in other cultural arenas, Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald as termite writers.
Admirers of Farber observed that his own career arcs reflected the "termite behavior" he extolled.
He was a carpenter who turned scraps of wood into sculptures, a critic with a highly visual sensibility who regarded movies as spatial inventions, and an artist who stopped writing about films and instead conveyed his ideas about them in paintings.
"The painting and the criticism were all part of the same continuum," said Peter Rainer, movie critic for the Christian Science Monitor. "He saw things so powerfully and so individually."
As Farber once explained: "What I'm doing in painting is pretty much creating movies. I'm lining up objects and lining up paths through the painting, pretty close to the way a movie director makes a movie."
His work, through all its phases, reflected a bristling intellect, that of someone who was "less a pedant than a hipster," critic J. Hoberman wrote in an appreciation this week in the Village Voice. "He had superb taste and fantastic range."
He was born Emanuel Farber on Feb. 20, 1917, in Douglas, Ariz., a copper-mining town near the Mexico border where his Russian Jewish immigrant parents ran a dry goods store. He moved with his family to Vallejo, Calif., in 1932.
