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)

Clement Greenberg: Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961–)

Collected essays which appeared originally in Partisan Review, The Nation, Commentary, and other publications.

Publisher Beacon Press, Boston
Volume 212 of Beacon paperbacks
ISBN 0807066818
278 pages

Publisher

PDF (19 MB, added on 2015-12-14)
DJVU (updated on 2012-7-18)

Camilla Gray: The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863-1922 (1962–) [EN, SC]

When the original edition of this book was published, John Russell hailed it as a ‘massive contribution to our knowledge of one of the most fascinating and mysterious episodes in the history of modern art.’ It still remains the most compact survey of sixty years of creative dynamic activity that profoundly influenced the progress of Western art and architecture.

Publisher Thames and Hudson, 1962, 1970
Revised and enlarged edition by Marian Burleigh-Motley, 1986
ISBN 0500202079, 9780500202074
324 pages

Reviews: Wladimir Weidlé (Slavic Review 1963), Vyacheslav Zavalishin (Russian Review 1963), Nina Juviler (Slavic and East European Journal 1964).

Publisher

PDF (1970 US edition, 45 MB; added on 2014-3-2)
PDF (1971 UK edition, 111 MB, no OCR; added on 2018-11-4)
PDF (1986 UK edition, 35 MB, no OCR; updated on 2012-7-17)
PDF (Serbo-Croatian, 1978, 28 MB, added on 2024-2-17)