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
abook that is simply indispensable for anyone concerned with modernist
painting and sculpture and the task of art criticism in our time.
