Michael Fried: 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 Art and Objecthood. Originally published between 1962 and 1977, they continue to generate debate today. These are 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.

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.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1998
Art History series
ISBN 0226263193, 9780226263199
333 pages

Publisher

PDF (10 MB, updated on 2019-6-9)

Sol LeWitt: Photo Grids (1977)

A work by an American conceptual and minimalist artist. A book of forty six plates, each with nine color photographs taken and arranged in a tic tac toe grid by the artist with an eye to pattern. Subjects include paneled doors, window panes, gates and fences, cement and mosaic floors, metal bridgework, etc. Three years later LeWitt published Autobiography, which used the same grid format to tell the story of his daily life.

Publisher Paul David Press, 1977
50 pages
via The Dor (at Archive.org)

PDF (updated on 2012-7-15)

Charles Harrison, Paul Wood (eds.): Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (1992) [English, French]

“This volume provides comprehensive representation of the theories, which underpinned developments in the visual arts during the twentieth century. As well as writings by artists, the anthology includes texts by critics, philosophers, politicians and literary figures. The content is structured into eight broadly chronological sections, starting with the legacy of symbolism and concluding with contemporary debates about the postmodern.”

Publisher Blackwell, 1992
Reprinted 1999
ISBN 0631165754, 978-0631165750
1220 pages

Review: Patricia Railing (Art Book, 2004).

Publisher

Art in Theory 1900-1990 (English, 1992, 13 MB, updated on 2015-9-5)
Art en théorie 1900-1990 (French, 1997, 24 MB, added on 2016-6-26)