Michael Fried
Michael M. Fried (born 1939) is a poet, art historian, art critic, and literary critic. an art critic and art historian. He is professor of Humanities and Art History at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
Contents
Life and work
He studied at Princeton University, Harvard University and Oxford University. He has written extensively about abstract painting and sculpture since World War II, about French painting and art criticism. Fried's contribution to art historical discourse involved the debate over the origins and development of modernism. Along with Fried, this debate's interlocutors include other theorists and critics such as Clement Greenberg, T. J. Clark, and Rosalind Krauss.
Fried describes his early career in the introduction to Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998). Much acclaimed and highly controversial, Michael Fried's art criticism defines the contours of late modernism in the visual arts. This volume contains twenty-seven pieces, including the influential introduction to the catalog for Three American Painters, the text of his book Morris Louis, and the renowned essay "Art and Objecthood" (1st ed., 1967). Ranging from brief reviews to extended essays, and including major critiques of Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, and Anthony Caro, these writings establish a set of basic terms for understanding key issues in high modernism: the viability of Clement Greenberg’s account of the infralogic of modernism, the status of figuration after Pollock, the centrality of the problem of shape, the nature of pictorial and sculptural abstraction, and the relationship between work and beholder. In a number of essays Fried contrasts the modernist enterprise with minimalist or literalist art, and, taking a position that remains provocative to this day, he argues that minimalism is essentially a genre of theater, hence artistically self-defeating.For this volume Fried has also provided an extensive introductory essay in which he discusses how he became an art critic, clarifies his intentions in his art criticism, and draws crucial distinctions between his art criticism and the art history he went on to write. The result is a book that is simply indispensable for anyone concerned with modernist painting and sculpture and the task of art criticism in our time.
In Art and Objecthood Fried criticised the "theatricality" of minimalist art. He introduced the opposing term "absorption" in his book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980). Drawing on Diderot's criticism, Fried argues that whenever a self-consciousness of viewing exists, absorption is compromised, and theatricality results. As well as applying the distinction to 18th-century painting, Fried employs related categories in his art criticism of post-1945 American painting and sculpture.Fried rejects the effort by some critics to conflate his art-critical and art-historical writing.
Fried revisits some of these concerns in a study of recent photography with Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008). In a reading of works by prominent art photographers of the last 20 years (Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Demand among others) Fried asserts that concerns of anti-theatricality and absorption are central to the turn by recent photographers towards large-scale works "for the wall".
Books
- Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
- Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
- Courbet's Realism, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
- Manet's Modernism Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
- Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
- Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century, Berlin London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
- Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
- The Moment of Caravaggio, Princeton University Press, 2010.
Awards
- Gottschalk Prize, 1980
- Charles C. Eldredge Prize, 1990
- Prix Littéraire Etats-Unis, 2000
