Manny Farber is gone at 91. He was, is, one of the supreme critics of the young film medium as well as a painter of wide, mysterious canvases, dispersed yet full of dense, messy detail: impossible, like Manny, to pull together.

He was a marvelous man: prickly, but, at least in later years, generous-spirited and strangely, almost compulsively self-deprecating. He was by then in artist (not critic) mode, and spent most of his days brooding over his paintings in his Southern California studio, working beside his wonderful wife and partner, Patricia Patterson.