Publication date:
24 February 2017Length of book:
218 pagesPublisher
Bucknell University PressDimensions:
236x158mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781611487855
In this memoir, Sascha Feinstein recounts life with his father, Sam Feinstein, who was both a brilliant
artist and a hoarder of monumental proportions. He collected only uncollectible objects—artifacts that
required him to give them importance—and at the time of his death in 2003, his hoarding had fundamentally
destroyed all three of his large homes. Despite this, Sam Feinstein was a remarkable painter and art teacher. This strange double helix of creativity and destruction guides these collage-like reflections. Like his students’ canvases—paintings inspired by enormous still lifes constructed from the world’s refuse—this book incorporates myriad sources in order to create a more layered experience for the reader. The final result is the depiction of a painter with the highest artistic ideals who nevertheless left behind an incalculable amount of physical and emotional wreckage.
artist and a hoarder of monumental proportions. He collected only uncollectible objects—artifacts that
required him to give them importance—and at the time of his death in 2003, his hoarding had fundamentally
destroyed all three of his large homes. Despite this, Sam Feinstein was a remarkable painter and art teacher. This strange double helix of creativity and destruction guides these collage-like reflections. Like his students’ canvases—paintings inspired by enormous still lifes constructed from the world’s refuse—this book incorporates myriad sources in order to create a more layered experience for the reader. The final result is the depiction of a painter with the highest artistic ideals who nevertheless left behind an incalculable amount of physical and emotional wreckage.
Family wreckage is often hidden, abiding in unshared memories. For good or ill, much of Feinstein’s past was all too tangible. His father, Sam, an artist and teacher, rescued and hoarded discards, which slowly formed massive mounds that destroyed all three of his large homes. His seemingly worthless collectibles were important because he deemed them so, perhaps, writes his son, because of Sam’s Ukrainian-refugee background, which was ‘saturated with loss and recovery, financial tragedy and constant regrowth’ and made him ‘covet free, discarded artifacts.’ Ultimately, Feinstein had to dismantle and cart away a forest of choking wisteria, dead trees, and poison ivy as well as broken furniture, hardened cement chunks, and other junk Sam had used artistically from his Cape Cod house, along with masses of animal excrement from a shed. In all, 30 tons of refuse had at be removed to save the structures. Feinstein’s chronicle of this demanding effort is an uncompromising, philosophical, and powerful excavation and analysis of one family’s history and dynamics.