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This boxed set is a unique publishing event that brings together three interrelated volumes by one of the most influential and distinguished scholars currently at work in the humanities. In studies of painters as varied as Caravaggio, Fragonard, and Matisse, Michael Fried has transformed the ways in which we understand artistic form and technique, while his exceptionally insightful literary-critical work has been enriched by his own practice as a highly accomplished poet. This new collection of Fried’s writings is imbued with the distinctive combination of perceptiveness, imagination, and analytical rigour that he has brought to bear on aesthetic artefacts throughout his career. It also serves as a very personal record of its author’s intellectual and critical formation.
The first volume, The Antithetical Imperative and Other Essays, places some of Fried’s most recent work alongside selections from his earlier writings. Ranging in topic from Manet to Pollock, these essays exemplify the acumen and aesthetic sensitivity that make their author one of the great critics of our time. The second volume, The Edge of the Table: Prose Poems, is a collection of exquisitely constructed prose poems accompanied by photographs by James Welling. Finally, the third volume, Exit Interview, is an autobiographical text that, as well as retracing the development of the arguments and ideas that informed such groundbreaking works as Absorption and Theatricality and Manet’s Modernism, proves wonderfully attentive to both the personal and institutional contexts of intellectual labour.
— J. M. Coetzee
No one sees paintings better than Michael Fried, or thinks as persistently or with such philosophical depth about such seeing, about the very possibility of pictorial meaning.
— Robert B. Pippin
One of the most powerful and influential critical minds of our time.
— Michael Clune
Throughout the 240 prose poems, the interviews and the essays, a singular voice emerges. In the prose poems especially, Fried’s recollections of a life in art express an intensity of commitment to art (and to friendships that often have art at their center) that, I would wager, is unparalleled in all the postwar years. Fried’s memories . . . Are lyrical, graceful, and quite beautiful.
— Robert B. Pippin
Everything I know about art—how to look, how to think about what I see, and how to mine the relay between object and beholder—I learned from Michael Fried. It would be impossible to imagine the course of art-critical and art-historical thought in this century without [him].
— Patricia L. Lewy
Praise for Fried's Essays:
[Michael Fried was] responding to new painting and sculpture as if everything depended on it—as if sifting the bogus, the time-serving, the ‘shocking,’ the ‘contemporary’ from the actually difficult and beautiful was a calling.
— T. J. Clark
Praise for Fried's Poems:
"Fried is [now] better than ever, bearing witness here, as always, to his luminous intelligence and imagination. He’s a great writer with a compelling literary personality." — William E. Cain
“Fried’s work is thought on the page.” — Alexander Nemerov
“Like his writing on art, his poetry thrills through cadence, lyric, and the force of intention—an expressive valence as convincing as it is moving.” — Patricia L. Lewy
“A remarkable book.” — Nicholas Delbanco
Praise for Fried's Interviews:
“[T]he essence of the basic argument is to describe a spark that jumped between his brilliantly impetuous thinking of 1967 and, to begin with at least, my own ambitions. … [N]othing remotely like it had been articulated before.”
— Jeff Wall