Eric Fischl has become the painter laureate of American anxiety in the '80s. From the moment he exhibited Sleepwalker, 1979, his image of a teenage boy resentfully masturbating in a suburban wading pool, Fischl has zeroed in with unblinking curiosity on the discontents of the White Tribe whose territory stretches from Scarsdale to Anaheim: unreachable kids, grotesque parents, small convulsions of voyeurism and barely concealed incestuous longing.
This is the suburb as failed Eden, noted by two out of three American sociologists and not a few novelists. But Fischl's project is not to embroider cliches on it. Rather he finds images...
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