Michael Fried (art critic)
Encyclopedia
Michael Fried is a Modernist
art critic
and art historian. He studied at Princeton University
and Harvard University
and was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford University. He is currently the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities
and Art History
at the Johns Hopkins University
, Baltimore, Maryland
, United States.
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. Since the early 1960s, he has also been close to philosopher Stanley Cavell
.
and through him Walter Darby Bannard
. In 1958 he wrote a letter to Clement Greenberg
expressing his admiration for his writing and first met him in the Spring of that year. In September 1958 he moved to Oxford, Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, and then to London
in 1961-2, where he studied philosophy part-time at University College, London, under Stuart Hampshire
and Richard Wollheim
. In 1961 Hilton Kramer
offered him the post of London correspondent for the journal Arts. In the fall of 1961 Fried began his friendship with the sculptor Anthony Caro
; Caro had invited him to write the introduction to his Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition in 1963.
In the late summer of 1962, Fried returned to the U.S, where he combined studying for a Ph.D in art history at Harvard with writing art criticism, initially for Art International, and curating the exhibition Three American painters: Kenneth Noland
, Jules Olitski
, Frank Stella
at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum
.
had betrayed Modernism's exploration of the medium by becoming emphatic about its own materiality as to deny the viewer a proper aesthetic experience. Minimalism (or "literalism" as Fried called it) offered an experience of "theatricality" rather than "presentness"; it left the viewer in his or her ordinary, non-transcendent world. The essay inadvertently opened the door to establishing a theoretical basis for Minimalism as a movement based in phenomenological
experience.
Stephen Melville accepts that Fried is right to draw attention to the fear since the time of Diderot that art is threatened by the forces of theatricality, entertainment, kitsch
, and mass-culture, but he argues that Fried's analysis is limited by accepting on its own terms the response of art to this threat. Melville maintains that theatricality is a necessary condition of art and that absorption is itself theatrical. Martin Puchner holds that Fried's distinction rests on a Modernist resistance to interference from the public sphere and a defence of the artist's control over the external circumstances of reception.
In a somewhat surprising turn, Fried revisits these concerns via a study of recent photography—Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (London and New Haven 2008). In a reading of works by prominent ‘Art’ photographers of the last twenty 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.".
, Gustave Courbet
, Adolph Menzel, and painting in the late 18th century.
Fried is a poet, having written The Next Bend in the Road, Powers, and To the Center of the Earth.
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
and art historian. He studied at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
and Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
and was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford University. He is currently the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....
and Art History
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
at the Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
, Baltimore, Maryland
Maryland
Maryland is a U.S. state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware to its east...
, United States.
Fried's contribution to art historical discourse involved the debate over the origins and development of modernism
Modern art
Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...
. Along with Fried, this debate's interlocutors include other theorists and critics such as Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...
, T. J. Clark
T. J. Clark (historian)
Timothy James Clark often known as T.J. Clark, is an art historian and writer, born in 1943 in Bristol, England.-Life and work:Clark attended Bristol Grammar School. He completed his undergraduate studies at St. John's College, Cambridge University, he obtained a first-class honours degree in 1964....
, and Rosalind Krauss. Since the early 1960s, he has also been close to philosopher Stanley Cavell
Stanley Cavell
Stanley Louis Cavell is an American philosopher. He is the Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University.-Life:...
.
Early career
Fried describes his early career in the introduction to Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998), an anthology of his art criticism in the 60s and 70s. Although he majored in English at Princeton it was there that he became interested in writing art criticism. While at Princeton he met the artist Frank StellaFrank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
and through him Walter Darby Bannard
Walter Darby Bannard
Walter Darby Bannard , also known as Darby Bannard, is an American abstract painter.Bannard attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Princeton University, where he struck up a friendship and working relationship with Frank Stella, which continued after graduation and eventuated in the extreme...
. In 1958 he wrote a letter to Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...
expressing his admiration for his writing and first met him in the Spring of that year. In September 1958 he moved to Oxford, Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, and then to London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
in 1961-2, where he studied philosophy part-time at University College, London, under Stuart Hampshire
Stuart Hampshire
Sir Stuart Newton Hampshire was an Oxford University philosopher, literary critic and university administrator. He was one of the antirationalist Oxford thinkers who gave a new direction to moral and political thought in the post-World War II era.Hampshire was educated at Repton School and at...
and Richard Wollheim
Richard Wollheim
Richard Arthur Wollheim was a British philosopher noted for original work on mind and emotions, especially as related to the visual arts, specifically, painting...
. In 1961 Hilton Kramer
Hilton Kramer
Hilton Kramer is a U.S. art critic and cultural commentator.Kramer was educated at Syracuse University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Indiana University and the New School for Social Research. He worked as the editor of Arts Magazine, art critic for The Nation, and from 1965 to 1982,...
offered him the post of London correspondent for the journal Arts. In the fall of 1961 Fried began his friendship with the sculptor Anthony Caro
Anthony Caro
Sir Anthony Alfred Caro, OM, CBE is an English abstract sculptor whose work is characterised by assemblages of metal using 'found' industrial objects.-Background and early life:...
; Caro had invited him to write the introduction to his Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition in 1963.
In the late summer of 1962, Fried returned to the U.S, where he combined studying for a Ph.D in art history at Harvard with writing art criticism, initially for Art International, and curating the exhibition Three American painters: Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School...
, Jules Olitski
Jules Olitski
Jules Olitski was an American abstract painter, printmaker, and sculptor.-Early life:Olitski was born Jevel Demikovski in Snovsk, in the Russian SFSR , a few months after his father, a commissar, was executed by the Russian government...
, Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum
Fogg Art Museum
The Fogg Museum, opened to the public in 1896, is the oldest of Harvard University's art museums. The Fogg joins the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum as part of the Harvard Art Museums....
.
Art and Objecthood
In his essay, "Art and Objecthood," published in 1967, he suggested that MinimalismMinimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
had betrayed Modernism's exploration of the medium by becoming emphatic about its own materiality as to deny the viewer a proper aesthetic experience. Minimalism (or "literalism" as Fried called it) offered an experience of "theatricality" rather than "presentness"; it left the viewer in his or her ordinary, non-transcendent world. The essay inadvertently opened the door to establishing a theoretical basis for Minimalism as a movement based in phenomenological
Phenomenology (psychology)
Phenomenology is an approach to psychological subject matter that has its roots in the philosophical work of Edmund Husserl. Early phenomenologists such as Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty conducted their own psychological investigations in the early 20th century...
experience.
Absorption and theatricality
In "Art and Objecthood" Fried criticised the "theatricality" of Minimalist art. He introduced the opposing term "absorption" in his 1980 book, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Drawing on Diderot's aesthetics, Fried argues that whenever a consciousness of viewing exists, absorption is sacrificed, and theatricality results. As well as applying the distinction to Eighteenth Century painting, he also uses it to assess post-1945 American painting and sculpture, which he values to the extent to which they are liberated from theatricality. Fried is dismissive of critics who wish to conflate his art-critical and art-historical writing.Stephen Melville accepts that Fried is right to draw attention to the fear since the time of Diderot that art is threatened by the forces of theatricality, entertainment, kitsch
Kitsch
Kitsch is a form of art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art or a worthless imitation of art of recognized value. The concept is associated with the deliberate use of elements that may be thought of as cultural icons while making cheap mass-produced objects that...
, and mass-culture, but he argues that Fried's analysis is limited by accepting on its own terms the response of art to this threat. Melville maintains that theatricality is a necessary condition of art and that absorption is itself theatrical. Martin Puchner holds that Fried's distinction rests on a Modernist resistance to interference from the public sphere and a defence of the artist's control over the external circumstances of reception.
In a somewhat surprising turn, Fried revisits these concerns via a study of recent photography—Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (London and New Haven 2008). In a reading of works by prominent ‘Art’ photographers of the last twenty years (Bernd and Hilla Becher
Bernd and Hilla Becher
Bernard "Bernd" Becher , and Hilla Becher, née Wobeser , were German artists working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures.- Biography :Bernd Becher was born in Siegen...
, Jeff Wall
Jeff Wall
Jeffrey "Jeff" Wall, OC, RSA is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs and art-historical writing. Wall has been a key figure in Vancouver's art scene since the early-1970s...
, Andreas Gursky
Andreas Gursky
Andreas Gursky is a German visual artist known for his enormous architecture and landscape color photographs, often employing a high point of view...
, Thomas Demand
Thomas Demand
Thomas Demand, in full Thomas Cyrill Demand, is a German sculptor and photographer. He currently lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles, and teaches at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg.-Education:...
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.".
Selected bibliography
In more recent years, Fried has written several long and complex histories of modern art, most famously on Édouard ManetÉdouard Manet
Édouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....
, Gustave Courbet
Gustave Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement , with the Barbizon School and the Impressionists...
, Adolph Menzel, and painting in the late 18th century.
- Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Awarded 1980 Gottschalk Prize.
- Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas EakinsThomas EakinsThomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator...
and Stephen CraneStephen CraneStephen Crane was an American novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism...
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Awarded 1990 Charles C. Eldredge Prize. - Courbet's Realism Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
- Manet's Modernism Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. French translation awarded 2000 Prix Littéraire Etats-Unis.
- 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.
Fried is a poet, having written The Next Bend in the Road, Powers, and To the Center of the Earth.
See also
- His website at Johns Hopkins University http://www.jhu.edu/~humctr/michaelfried.html
- Arni Haraldsson Fried’s Turn. FillipFillipFillip is a Vancouver-based contemporary art publishing organization formed in 2004. It publishes a magazine as well as books of critical writing...
. Book Review. 2010 - A short interview at Johns Hopkins Magazine http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0698web/arts.html
- 'Internal Structures of Meaning', review of The Moment of Caravaggio in the Oxonian Review
- Geoff Dyer on Michael Fried in the New York Times Book Review, 24 July 2011