French Suite

Art critic, art historian, literary critic-historian and poet, Michael Fried is the J. R. Herbert Boone Emeritus Professor of Humanities and the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. His many books include Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998) and Painting with Demons: The Art of Gerolamo Savoldo (Reaktion, 2021).

The storied French writers Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert join artists including Manet, Degas, Géricault, Daubigny, and Corot as subjects in this collection of musings about "the relationship between painting and the beholder" by art historian Michael Fried, previously the author of many influential texts ranging from his classic essay "Art and Objecthood" to his pioneering book on Diderot's art criticism. - Art in AmericaReaders are rewarded with penetrating visual analyses of works . . . Recommended. - ChoiceThis book of essays by Michael Fried covers a selection of the painting and literature of France, focussing on the nineteenth century and Impressionism together with an argument about the evolution of French art which led to it . . . Fried goes into great depth about the 'formal' aspects of paintings, characteristically drawing rigorously on responses from contemporary critics of his chosen period and 'The Moment of Impressionism' in particular presents some fascinating ideas. - Christian Kile, SehepunkteFrench Suite displays at every moment Michael Fried’s unmatched ability to undo the opposition between the concrete and the abstract, to see in a single painting (and even sometimes in a single detail of that painting) the presence of an entire intellectual history and to understand that history in terms of philosophical concepts that make themselves most powerfully manifest in individual paintings. Both on subjects that have always been central to his work (e.g. Manet, Gericault) and ones that are new (e.g. Daubigny, Corot), this book is full of stunning surprises, readings that fundamentally alter your sense of what you’re seeing. And the extraordinary final essay – “The Moment of Impressionism” – gives you a new sense not only of what you’ve seen but – in relation to the whole question of formalism in art history – of what you’ve read. - Walter Benn Michaels, Professor of English, University of Illinois at Chicago