Michael Fried

Much acclaimed and highly controversial, Michael Fried's art criticism defines the contours of late modernism in the visual arts. This volume contains 27 pieces--uncompromising, exciting, and impassioned writings, aware of their transformative power during a time of intense controversy about the nature of modernism and the aims and essence of advanced painting and sculpture. 16 color plates. 72 halftones.

Essays and Reviews

Art and Objecthood

Stephen Shore

Joel Sternfeld

Christy Lange

Stephen Shore's photographs of ordinary America have had an extraordinary impact. Shore spent the 1970s crisscrossing the continent to assemble his two best known bodies of work. American Surfaces and Uncommon Places These photographs focused on the minutiae of modern life, unveiling the exceptional beauty to be found in banality and, in the process, pioneering the two most important photographic idioms of the past thirty years the diaristic snapshot (later taken up by such artists as Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans) and the monumentalized landscape (as practiced by such photographers as Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky) Shore was also one of the first art photographers to work in colour, capturing the sky blues, mustard yellows and avocado greens of a nation whose chromatic enthusiasm occasionally outstripped its taste. Less well known are Shore's earlier works While still in high school in the mid-1960s he undertook a three-year project shooting Andy Warhol's legendary studio, the Factory, at its creative peak, featuring a revolving cast of characters that included the Velvet Underground, Nico, Edie Sedgwick and of course Warhol himself Soon afterward, inspired by the intellectually fertile late-1950s New York art scene, Shore produced a body of conceptual work seldom exhibited but fully engaged with the revolutionary ideas shaking the foundations of modern art. These works are fascinating not only for their contribution to the redefinition of the art object but also for the way they prefigured much of Shore's work to fallow, including American Surfaces and Uncommon Places. Since the 1970s Shore has continued to expand his repertoire, moving effortlessly between black and white and colour, landscape and portraiture, large format and small in so doing, he has proven himself to be one of contemporary art's most vital photographers As fellow photographer Joel Sternfeld writes in the Focus section, 'What may ultimately be at stake in his pictures is the pure condition of sight itself.'

From the late 1970s onward, serious art photography began to be made at large scale and for the wall. Michael Fried argues that this immediately compelled photographers to grapple with issues centering on the relationship between the photograph and the viewer standing before it that until then had been the province only of painting. Fried further demonstrates that certain philosophically deep problems—associated with notions of theatricality, literalness, and objecthood, and touching on the role of original intention in artistic production, first discussed in his contro­versial essay “Art and Objecthood” (1967)—have come to the fore once again in recent photography. This means that the photo­graphic “ghetto” no longer exists; instead photography is at the cutting edge of contemporary art as never before. Among the photographers and video-makers whose work receives serious attention in this powerfully argued book are Jeff Wall, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Luc Delahaye, Rineke Dijkstra, Patrick Faigenbaum, Roland Fischer, Thomas Demand, Candida Höfer, Beat Streuli, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, James Welling, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Future discussions of the new art photography will have no choice but to take a stand for or against Fried’s conclusions.

Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before

A major reevaluation of Caravaggio from one of today's leading art historians This is a groundbreaking examination of one of the most important artists in the Western tradition by one of the leading art historians and critics of the past half-century. In his first extended consideration of the Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573-1610), Michael Fried offers a transformative account of the artist's revolutionary achievement. Based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts delivered at the National Gallery of Art, The Moment of Caravaggio displays Fried's unique combination of interpretive brilliance, historical seriousness, and theoretical sophistication, providing sustained and unexpected readings of a wide range of major works, from the early Boy Bitten by a Lizard to the late Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. The result is an electrifying new perspective on a crucial episode in the history of European painting. Focusing on the emergence of the full-blown "gallery picture" in Rome during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth, Fried draws forth an expansive argument, one that leads to a radically revisionist account of Caravaggio's relation to the self-portrait; of the role of extreme violence in his art, as epitomized by scenes of decapitation; and of the deep structure of his epoch-defining realism. Fried also gives considerable attention to the art of Caravaggio's great rival, Annibale Carracci, as well as to the work of Caravaggio's followers, including Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and Valentin de Boulogne. Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.

The Moment of Caravaggio

Anri Sala is one of the most gifted and accomplished visual artists of his generation. Michael Fried first encountered Sala's video, film and installation art in 2005 and has been following his work since. This collection of essays focuses on what Fried identifies as a few major and recurring themes in Sala's work, such as the treatment of absorption and the overarching issues of anti-theatricality and presentness. Throughout the book, which is illustrated with numerous colour stills from Anri Sala's videos, Fried pursues a highly personal approach of combining extremely fine-grained structural and thematic readings of individual works with philosophical and theoretical reflections often drawing on major thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition, including Ludwig Wittgenstein and the eighteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Schiller. Fried also provides unique insight into his own renowned critical and theoretical work, which has exercised such great influence in art history and criticism for nearly sixty years. Employing in these moments a conversational tone, speaking directly to the reader in his own voice about his own work, he reviews the genesis and development of his theories and critical constructs in light of Anri Sala's videos, creating a highly productive back and forth between Sala and the contemporary art world on the one hand and Fried's often more historical studies and concepts on the other. For readers of Michael Fried, the result is not only a stimulating discussion of Sala and the artistic and theoretical tradition in whose light his work can be viewed, but also a vital reflection on Fried's own foundational ideas, how they came to be and how they are relevant today.

"1395 Days without Red" and Other Videos

Anri Sala

"Fried put forward a highly original, beholder-centered account of the evolution of a central tradition in French painting from Chardin to Courbet."--P. [4] of cover.

Or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s

Manet's Modernism

Michael P. Manns

Gerhard Rogler

Seit 2007 gibt es den Modellstudiengang Medizin an den Hochschulen in Aachen, Berlin, Bochum, Hannover, Heidelberg, Köln, Witten und Göttingen. Die in 17 Themenblöcke gegliederte Lehre folgt der Approbationsordnung für Ärzte, die Prüfungen sind den einzelnen Modulen zugeordnet. Das Lehrbuch Gastroenterologie ist das erste Buch zum Lernen im Modul. Gut verständlich wird das gesamte Organsystem dargestellt: von der Anatomie bis zur Therapie. Das Buch ist geeignet für Medizinstudenten und für Ärzte in der Aus- und Weiterbildung.

Magen-Darm-Trakt

El autor realiza una lectura de La cámara lúcida de Roland Barthes, descubriendo afinidades entre ésta y algunos motivos centrales para su propio pensamiento (principalmente los formulados en su célebre Arte y objetualidad de 1967). Cuestionando la recepción más extendida del texto barthesiano, que se ha centrado casi siempre en el punctum como catalizador de una respuesta subjetiva en el espectador, Fried reenmarca este concepto en una tradición de antiteatralidad que se remonta hasta Diderot y de la que él mismo es su principal exponente contemporáneo.

El Punctum de Roland Barthes

Recopilación de textos fundamentales en la crítica del arte moderno y de artículos sobre los principales representantes de la pintura moderna estadounidense, que, según el autor, determina el espacio de la modernidad. Se muestra el conflicto entre la figura como propiedad fundamental de los objetos y la figura como médium de la pintura, si las pinturas o los objetos en cuestión se perciben como pinturas o como objetos, y qué es lo que determina su identidad como pinturas al enfrentarse a la exigencia de que se conserven como figuras.

ensayos y reseñas

Arte y objetualidad

"A highly original and gripping account of the works of Eakins and Crane. That remarkable combination of close reading and close viewing which Fried uniquely commands is brought to bear on the problematic nature of the making of images, of texts, and of the self in nineteenth-century America."—Svetlana Alpers, University of California, Berkeley "An extraordinary achievement of scholarship and critical analysis. It is a book distinguished not only for its brilliance but for its courage, its grace and wit, its readiness to test its arguments in tough-minded ways, and its capacity to meet the challenge superbly. . . . This is a landmark in American cultural and intellectual studies."—Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University

On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane

Realism, Writing, Disfiguration

Rosalind E. Krauss

Jane Gallop

Carol Mavor

Shawn Michelle Smith

Gordon Hughes

Jay Prosser

Paola Cortés Rocca

Victor Burgin

Margaret Olin

Roland Barthes's 1980 book Camera Lucidais perhaps the most influential book ever published on photography. The terms studiumand punctum,coined by Barthes for two different ways of responding to photographs, are part of the standard lexicon for discussions of photography; Barthes's understanding of photographic time and the relationship he forges between photography and death have been invoked countless times in photographic discourse; and the current interest in vernacular photographs and the ubiquity of subjective, even novelistic, ways of writing about photography both owe something to Barthes. Photography Degree Zero,the first anthology of writings on Camera Lucida,goes beyond the usual critical orthodoxies to offer a range of perspectives on Barthes's important book. Photography Degree Zero(the title links Barthes's first book, Writing Degree Zero,to his last, Camera Lucida)includes essays written soon after Barthes's book appeared as well as more recent rereadings of it, some previously unpublished. The contributors' approaches range from psychoanalytical (in an essay drawing on the work of Lacan) to Buddhist (in an essay that compares the photographic flash to the mystic's light of revelation); they include a history of Barthes's writings on photography and an account of Camera Lucidaand its reception; two views of the book through the lens of race; and a provocative essay by Michael Fried and two responses to it. The variety of perspectives included in Photography Degree Zero,and the focus on Camera Lucidain the context of photography rather than literature or philosophy, serve to reopen a vital conversation on Barthes's influential work. Contributors: Geoffrey Batchen, Victor Burgin, Eduardo Cadava, Paolo Cortes-Rocca, James Elkins, Michael Fried, Jane Gallop, Gordon Hughes, Margaret Iverson, Rosalind E. Krauss, Carol Mavor, Margaret Olin, Jay Prosser, Shawn Michelle Smith

Reflections on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida

Photography Degree Zero

La peinture française, de Chardin à Fantin-Latour, n'a cessé de s'interroger sur la place problématique du spectateur : doit-elle supposer que quelqu'un se tient devant le tableau ou, au contraire, afin d'échapper à une théâtralité fausse - au sens où Diderot dénonçait dans un certain théâtre une construction artificielle dénuée de toute existence propre en dehors de la présence du public -, faire comme s'il n'y avait plus personne pour le regarder ? Clôture du tableau par la représentation de personnages vus de dos et saisis dans des activités qui les absorbent totalement au point de sembler ignorer la présence du spectateur et du peintre (Greuze, Chardin ou Millet) ; intensité dramatique d'un moment unique ou dédramatisation d'une action déliée (David) ; tentative de fuir le spectateur (Géricault) déplacement enfin, du peintre lui-même dans la peinture (Courbet) vers le milieu du XIXe siècle, toutes ces réponses à l'antithéâtralité, devenues des procédés, sont épuisées. C'est alors qu'au sein de la génération de 1863 - Legros, Fantin-Latour et Whistler notamment -, année du salon des Refusés, Edouard Manet fonde la tradition moderne. Loin de se définir, comme on le croit trop souvent depuis Matisse, par son absence de profondeur ou son extrême dimension visuelle - ce qui caractérise plutôt les impressionnistes -, le modernisme de Manet se marque d'abord dans ses allusions répétées aux maîtres anciens, son désir d'une universalité transcendant les styles nationaux comme les spécificités des genres, et ça volonté, enfin, de briser le cercle de l'antithéâtralité. En inventant le portrait-tableau - conjugaison de deux genres jusqu'alors distingués l'un de l'autre par la critique : le tableau, qui se laisse pénétrer dans ses parties organiques, et le portrait, qui doit frapper le spectateur -, Manet joue à la fois sur le face-à-face et sur la capacité qu'a le tableau à soutenir le regard, désormais jugé inéluctable, du spectateur. Tout l'art contemporain, jusqu'aux années soixante, au moins, n'aura de cesse de se colleter avec cette nouvelle place du spectateur.

Le modernisme de Manet ou le visage de la peinture dans les années 1860

A leading art critic and historian offers a new and revolutionary analysis of Flaubert's literary style

On Madame Bovary and Salammbô

Flaubert's "gueuloir"

"In America today there is no lyric work more compelling and well made than To the Center of the Earth," Allen Grossman wrote ten years ago of Michael Fried's last collection of poetry. Fried's new book, The Next Bend in the Road, is a powerfully coherent gathering of lyric and prose poems that has the internal scope of a novel with a host of characters, from the poet's wife and daughter to Franz Kafka, Paul Cézanne, Osip Mandelstam, Sigmund Freud, Gisèle Lestrange, and many others; transformative encounters with works of art, literature, and philosophy, including Heinrich von Kleist's "The Earthquake in Chile," Giuseppe Ungaretti's "Veglia," and Edouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe; and, running through the book from beginning to end, a haunted awareness of the entanglement of the noblest accomplishments and the most intimate joys with the horrors of modern history.

The Next Bend in the Road

"'This book,' Michael Fried's work opens, 'was written not so much chapter by chapter as painting by painting over a span of roughly ten years.' Courbet's Realism is a magnificent work and its very first sentence brings us up against the qualities of mind of its author, qualities that make it as impressive as it is. It allows us to reconstruct the keen eye, the commitment to perception, the gift of rapt concentration, the conviction that great paintings are not necessarily understood easily, and the further conviction that a great painter deserves to get from us as good as he gives. By drawing on these qualities, Fried achieves something out of reach for all but a handful of his colleagues. In his writing, art history takes on some of the character of art itself. It is driven by the same stubborn resolve to open our eyes."—Richard Wollheim, San Francisco Review of Books Courbet's Realism is clearly a major contribution to the highly active field of Courbet studies. . . . But to contribute here and now is necessarily also to contribute to central debates about art history itself, and so the book is also—I hesitate to say 'more importantly,' because of the way object and method are woven together in it—a major contribution to current attempts to rethink the foundations and objects of art history. . . . It will not be an easy book to come to terms with; for all its engagement with contemporary literary theory and related developments, it is not an application of anything, and its deeply thought-through arguments will not fall easily in line with the emerging shapes of the various 'new art histories' that tap many of the same theoretical resources. At this moment, there may be nothing more valuable than such a work."—Stephen Melville, Art History

Courbet's Realism

The result is an entirely new understanding not only of the art of Manet and his generation but also of the way in which the Impressionist simplification of Manet's achievement had determined subsequent accounts of pictorial modernism down to the present. Like Fried's previous books, Manet's Modernism is a milestone in the historiography of modern art.

With this widely acclaimed work, Fried revised the way in which eighteenth-century French painting and criticism were viewed and understood. "A reinterpretation supported by immense learning and by a series of brilliantly perceptive readings of paintings and criticism alike. . . . An exhilarating book."—John Barrell, London Review of Books

Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot

Absorption and Theatricality

This is a groundbreaking examination of one of the most important artists in the Western tradition by one of the leading art historians and critics of the past half-century. In his first extended consideration of the Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573-1610), Michael Fried offers a transformative account of the artist's revolutionary achievement. Based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts delivered at the National Gallery of Art, The Moment of Caravaggio displays Fried's unique combination of interpretive brilliance, historical seriousness, and theoretical sophistication, providing sustained and unexpected readings of a wide range of major works, from the early Boy Bitten by a Lizard to the late Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. And with close to 200 color images, The Moment of Caravaggio is as richly illustrated as it is closely argued. The result is an electrifying new perspective on a crucial episode in the history of European painting. Focusing on the emergence of the full-blown "gallery picture" in Rome during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth, Fried draws forth an expansive argument, one that leads to a radically revisionist account of Caravaggio's relation to the self-portrait; of the role of extreme violence in his art, as epitomized by scenes of decapitation; and of the deep structure of his epoch-defining realism. Fried also gives considerable attention to the art of Caravaggio's great rival, Annibale Carracci, as well as to the work of Caravaggio's followers, including Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and Valentin de Boulogne.

Michael Fried

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