Pictures of Fidelman is a short story collection by Bernard Malamud

Bernard Malamud

Bernard Malamud was an author of novels and short stories. Along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he was one of the great American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford...

, which gathers six stories dealing with Arthur Fidelman, an art student from the Bronx who travels to Italy, initially to research Giotto

Giotto di Bondone

Giotto di Bondone , better known simply as Giotto, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence in the late Middle Ages...

, but also with the hopes of becoming a painter. The collection, published in 1969, includes stories from Malamud's earlier collections The Magic Barrel

The Magic Barrel

The Magic Barrel is a collection of thirteen short stories written by Bernard Malamud and published in 1958. It won the 1959 National Book Award for fiction.The stories included are :*"The First Seven Years"*"The Mourners"*"The Girl of My Dreams"...

(1958) and Idiots First (1963), plus three previously unpublished stories.

The Stories

Aside from Arthur Fidelman, the only character that appears in more than one story is Bessie, his sister, a mother of five living in Levittown, who occasionally sends him money.

"The Last Mohican"

First published in The Magic Barrel; Fidelman arrives in Italy and is repeatedly accosted by Shimon Susskind, "a Jewish refugee from Israel."

"Still Life"

First published in Idiots First; Fidelman moves into a studio with Annamaria Oliovino, whom he is attracted to though she repeatedly mistreats him.

"Naked Nude"

First published in Idiots First; Fidelman finds himself working as a toilet-scrubber in a whorehouse, at the mercy Scarpio and Angelo, who convince him to forge Titian

Titian

Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/1490 – 27 August 1576 better known as Titian was an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near...

's Venus of Urbino

Venus of Urbino

The Venus of Urbino is a 1538 oil painting by the Italian master Titian. It depicts a nude young woman, identified with the goddess Venus, reclining on a couch or bed in the sumptuous surroundings of a Renaissance palace. It hangs in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence. The figure's pose is based...

 in exchange for his freedom.

"A Pimp's Revenge"

Fidelman tries to complete a painting that has tormented him for years, of himself and his mother, and though he finally manages to create a masterpiece, it does not convey what he had hoped it would.

"Pictures of the Artist"

Fidelman's stream-of-consciousness, heavy with quotations, revealing his thoughts about life, art, and truth.

"Glass Blower of Venice"

Fidelman learns about love and glass blowing, and finally returns to America.

Reception

When the book came out Anatole Broyard

Anatole Broyard

Anatole Paul Broyard was an American writer, literary critic and editor for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays and two books during his lifetime...

 of The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

 compared it unfavorably to Malamud's previous book, The Assistant

The Assistant (novel)

The Assistant is Bernard Malamud's second novel. Set in a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, it explores the situation of first- and second-generation Americans in the early 1950s, as experienced by three main characters and the relationships between them: an aging Jewish refugee...

:

What [Malamud] has done in Pictures of Fidelman is to reverse the principle of his most successful book, The Assistant. There he thrust an Italian, Frank Alpine, into the thick texture of Jewish life, where he functioned as a kind of perspective by incongruity, a green pepper in the chicken fat. Now Fidelman, a "Classical" Jew from the Bronx, is put down in Italy presumably for the same purpose.
But where Alpine learned the nobility of suffering from the Jew, Fidelman learns, as far as one can discover, nothing but pimping, glass blowing and sodomy from the Italians. And perhaps it is this poor return for his years of expatriation the robs Pictures of Fidelman of the moral breadth, the grand lugubriousness, that distinguishes Malamud's best stories.

Broyard concludes that "Malamud is too talented a writer not to make this book a joy in many of its details. But there are too many unanswered questions, too many glib capitulations to the modern canon, which absolves the author of all responsibility for his stories."