He briefly attended UC Berkeley before transferring to Stanford University, where he began to study art. After a year, he enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco.
Hoberman called him a "congenital maverick," a disposition that appeared in full reign by his college years.
Shirking the Works Project Administration, the Depression-era program that employed many starving artists, Farber decided to become a carpenter and spent the next few decades earning a living as a construction worker in Washington, D.C., and later in New York.
But he continued to create art and in 1942 began writing about it for the New Republic. He wrote one of the first favorable reviews of Jackson Pollock.
When the New Republic's legendary film critic, Otis Ferguson, died in action in World War II, Farber shifted to the movie beat.
It was an exciting time to make the switch, as writers such as Ferguson and James Agee were changing film criticism in the 1940s.
When Agee left the Nation to write scripts in Hollywood in 1949, Farber took his place.
In time, Farber's film criticism would be published in other journals, including Artforum, Time, Commentary and Film Comment.
His work was mentioned in the same breath with that of Agee and Ferguson and, later, with two other influential critics, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris.
In 1971, 45 of his essays were compiled in a collection titled "Negative Space."
Reissued in 1998 by Da Capo Press, it contains work that was produced in collaboration with his third wife, artist Patricia Patterson, who also contributed significantly to his paintings.
In addition to Patterson, he is survived by a daughter from a previous marriage, Amanda Farber of San Diego, and a grandson.
Farber was credited with coining the phrase "underground films." It was the subject of a 1957 essay that went starkly against the grain of mainstream film criticism by discerning the artistry of such action film directors as Hawks and William Wellman.
His greatest contribution as a film critic was the way he wrote, using language that Rainer described as racy, pungent, vernacular and personal. He said Richard Widmark had "the look of a ham that has been smoked, cured and then coated with honey-colored shellac," and he compared Gregory Peck to "an ironing board."
