Emanuel “Manny” Farber died at 91 in his home in Leucadia, Calif., Aug. 18, 2008.

Born in 1917 in Douglas, Farber left when he was 15 years old. His father ran a dry good store here. In July 2005, Farber visited Douglas and his boyhood home on 1100 8th Street and A Avenue. A documentary film crew was shooting a film on Farber’s life and work.

Farber walked about the city, remembering sites and places that were special to him during his boyhood in Douglas. One of his 70 or so paintings, titled “Birthplace: Douglas, Ariz.,” can be found in a book that details Farber’s life as painter and critic. The book is titled “Manny Farber About Face.”

During the Great Depression Farber chose not to get a job with WPA when he was in California. “It was too easy,” he said. “Instead I went into carpentry.”

In 1938 he began his apprenticeship in the carpenters’ and joiners’ union.

In 1942 he moved to Greenwich Village, where he began his career as critic, writing first about art then movies for the New Republic. There he met writers such as Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Saul Bellow, David Bazelon, Walter Evans, Jean Stafford, Bob Warshow, James Agee and Mary McCarthy. A few years later he would meet painters like Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and William Baziotes.

As a critic and painter he has contributed to the discourse for more than 50 years.

About Face, the book about Farber, demonstrates the confluence of these two aspects of his life, revealing how his writings and film critiques became part of the composition, detail, and color in his paintings.

Farber remained outside current trends in contemporary art, preferring to create work that was about his own personal painting process. In the 1970s he turned away from abstraction to narrative painting, incorporating themes and materials reminiscent of his childhood experiences in movie theaters such as “School Boy Taffy,” in which he paints a 23 by 21 oil painting of a Cracker Jack box, Bit-O-Honey candy bars and School Boy Taffy.  In the 1980s, he began painting on a table so that he could have a bird’s eye view of his subjects.

He attended the University of California at Berkeley for a short period before transferring to Stanford University. He took his first art classes at Stanford and after graduation continued his art studies at the California School of Fine Arts and the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design.

In 1939 he moved to Washington, D.C. with his first wife Janet Terrace. They moved to New York City in 1942, where he wrote for “The New Republic” first as an art critic and later as a film critic. He went on to write for other publications throughout his career including “Time,” “The Nation" and "Artforum."

Farber divorced his first wife and married Marsha Picker. The couple had one child, Amanda, in 1957. Farber developed his painting while living in New York and had his first one-man gallery exhibition in 1957.

Farber's second marriage ended and he married again in the late 1960s to Patricia Patterson, an artist with whom he collaborated on large abstract paintings.

In 1970 the couple moved to Southern Calif., where Farber taught at the University of Southern California in San Diego (1970-1987). Farber continues to write film critique and paint.

Kent Jones, accompanied Farber to Douglas during the film shoot in 2005. Jones is the editor-at-large for Film Comment and the associate director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

“Manny was a great influence to me,” Jones said, while they were staying at the Gadsden Hotel.