Michael Fauerbach 1942-2011

"Michael D. Fauerbach, 69, died on Wednesday, April 27, 2011. The cause of death was brain cancer.

He was born and brought up in the Bronx where his propensity for art and daydreaming was apparent at an early age.

He attended the School of Visual Arts, majoring in illustration and fine art. Upon graduation, he painted during the day and loaded tractor trailers for UPS at night until he was drafted into the Army. He served from 1964 through 1966 as a radio operator in Bamburg, Germany, and unofficially, as the unit sign painter. Upon discharge, he moved to a loft on the Bowery and resumed painting. He was a founding member of the Rhino Horn Group of humanistic painters in the early 70s. He also began his 30-year career at the Metropolitan Opera from which he retired in 1997 as chief usher.

In 1979, he and his wife, Ellen moved from New York to Jersey City and in 2003, he retired full time to Denver, NY where he had been a part-time resident since 1986.

Throughout his life, Michael had an interest in both art and architecture. His work was exhibited in New York City, the Catskills, New Orleans, Jersey City and Medillin, Columbia. Primarily a painter, he also did sculpture and etchings. He drew his inspiration from the environments in which he lived. He restored an 1850s Federal-style townhouse in Jersey City and designed and built a house and out buildings in the Catskills. His buildings and cabinet work were influenced by the Shakers, Greene and Greene and Asian architectural styles filtered through his unique vision. He had a wide range of interests, a New York sense of humor and a willingness to help others.

Michael is survived by his wife of 41 years, Ellen (Kiernan); his mother, Agnes (Curnyn) of Riverdale; his sister, Susan Downes and husband, James, of Pound Ridge; brother, Kenneth and wife, Ellen Weider, of Manhattan; 12 nieces and nephews; 14 grand nieces and nephews and many friends"

Source: http://www.catskillmountainnews.com/content/michael-fauerbach

Manifesto

The Original Manifesto of Rhino Horn:

"Our art is involved with life; it is concerned with humanity, with emotion. We will not listen to explanations from or about the technically minded artist of yesterday. Just as abstract expressionism - the art of the fifties - was superseded by pop, op, hard edge, minimal and color field the art of the sixties - so now a new art, a humanistic art, will characterize the seventies. Our art owes little to what many aestheticians refer to as 11 the important technical revolution" in art. We are not concerned with making pure color or pure form the subject of the painting; we are concerned with, and express, a harsher reality - harsher, that is, than the cotton-candy world that advertising men would have all of us believe we live in. Nor does our work allow a pleasant, self-indulgent escape; for it is a product of our awareness of the state of the world we do live in. We have ignored the dictates of Madison Avenue businessmen, be they copywriters or gallery dealers, and our work has nothing to do with current aesthetics; it exists without the permission of the nail-polished artists who swish over reality. Madison Avenue has sold what is called "the art of the United States" with fantastic success, paralleled only by the success they've had in making Coca-Cola an international "buyword." Yet the current-day altarpieces won't communicate to people living beyond the fringe of stainless steel. Realize when you see our work that the so-called "thirty years of painting and sculpture" in this country has been built on a lie; it has been packaged, promoted and super-sold by ambitious critics, dealers and curators trying to build their own reputation I as they fatten their bankrolls. You are masochists, Mr. and Mrs. America, masochists or fools. Don't you see that spray-gun art insults your intelligence? Don't you see that it's a product aimed in its inoffensive decorativeness at cardboard people who live non-thinking existences? And this doesn't INSULT you? Or perhaps we overestimate you. Perhaps you are very cozy in your consumer passivity, happy only when spoon-fed or dictated to.

Some say we are too coarse for the temperament of today. These same hypocrites sit smugly in front of the daily newscasts of Vietnam. Or say our art is "hard to take." We say to hell with you! Our art won't be accepted by those who prefer a dream-world kubla-khan to an encounter with people and emotion. And yes, our art is coarse - by current aesthetic standards, that is. But is it not odd that in this age of deep and growing concern with the horrors we perpetrate on ourselves and export to other countries, in this time of political activism, that the art you laud is completely divorced from humanity and concern? Has it ever occurred to you that this art is anti-life?

Our work is strong and demanding - of all of your faculties. It has integrity in all senses of the word. We don't hand graph paper designs over to engineers and contractors to be executed; we don't give you fluorescent lights, red yellow blue, white on white, or the straightest lines in the world. We have enormous visual appetites and are as interested in the baroque and classical forms of fine art as in the novelties of 42nd Street; moreover, we are able to assimilate such opposites into a whole. The mediums we use also are culled from all sources. We don't totally ignore the new materials discovered by the artists we reject as technicians - the difference is that we incorporate these materials into a total vision of today's society instead of saying these materials themselves represent society. The struggle, the art, is to unite material with image. That technically oriented people are earnestly trying to communicate on a human level through technology is bizarre. Our exhibition is a step in a new direction. The show we have assembled is concerned with the human image. The message is not the medium. We are interested in man. The paintings and sculptures are involved with the world of knowing and feeling and questioning man; our art interprets and respects the viewer - not his products, not his technology. If the mirror we hold is too revealing, the image too harsh, the fault, dear Brutus, lies in yourself."

Rhino Horn 2010

“Our art is involved with life; it is concerned with humanity, with emotion. We will not listen to explanations from or about the technically minded artist of yesterday. Just as abstract expressionism - the art of the fifties - was superseded by pop, op, hard edge, minimal and color field the art of the sixties - so now a new art, a humanistic art, will characterize the seventies.” The first paragraph of Rhino Horn’s inaugural manifesto implied that this group of maverick figurative painters would not adhere to a business as art approach that had made art an object of consumer culture. Founded by a group of seven friends (Benny Andrews, Ken Bowman, Peter Dean, Michael Fauerbach, Peter Passuntino, Jay Milder, and Nicholas Sperakis) who had met in various locations including the Art Institute of Chicago, the artist colony of Provincetown Massachusetts, and the East and West Villages of New York City, Rhino Horn was founded with the means to eschew the cool and hip stance of the sixties art scene. This included the now manipulated bourgeois view of Abstract Expressionism and the marketing a selling of this art along with Pop and Minimalism as the “new objects” of American culture. Their first exhibition was held at the New School weeks after the Weatherman bombing just a block from the school’s location in Greenwich Village. The groups do it yourself approach to showing their work led to a series of shows that traveled throughout the country. Critics were both perplexed and taken back by the primal approach to painting.

40 years later Rhino Horn is still as relevant to the art of the underground as it was during its heyday. Although they never received the mainstream recognition that many of their peers had enjoyed, the Rhino Horn artists struggled to have their art be seen as a visual language for a Social Movement focused on humanism and a collective consciousness that celebrated the individual and the amalgamous identity that had become marginalized by popular culture. This group of artists is due for a recent survey in a time period that is as poignant now as it was then. Vietnam and communism’s red scare has been transcended by the war in the Middle East and the war against terror, but little has changed in ideology. The artwork of the Rhino Horn artists presents an alternative view of modern humanity and its self-destructive process. Today’s figurative and political art owes a deal of its messages to the rough and "vulgar" imagery of Rhino Horn. The process to re-introduce and discuss Rhino Horn will be a valuable point of inspiration that will continue the discourse of a visual language outside of mainstream culture that can be used as a basis for sociocultural reform.

This blog will be a resource for both the historical and the contemporary aspects of Rhino Horn, its members and a group of "friends" or artists who share a similar aesthetic approach to humanistic painting. Please enjoy your visit and continue to follow along as new updates are posted.

-Adam Zucker (Curator and Art Historian)