Professional Documents
Culture Documents
4879French Suite : A Book of Essays Michael Fried full chapter instant download
4879French Suite : A Book of Essays Michael Fried full chapter instant download
4879French Suite : A Book of Essays Michael Fried full chapter instant download
Michael Fried
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/french-suite-a-book-of-essays-michael-fried/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
https://ebookmass.com/product/essays-in-analytic-theology-
michael-rea-2/
https://ebookmass.com/product/space-region-society-geographical-
essays-in-honor-of-robert-h-stoddard-michael-r-hill/
https://ebookmass.com/product/french-phrase-book-teach-yourself-
books/
https://ebookmass.com/product/planning-time-and-self-governance-
essays-in-practical-rationality-michael-e-bratman/
Data communications & networking with TCP/IP protocol
suite Behrouz A. Forouzan
https://ebookmass.com/product/data-communications-networking-
with-tcp-ip-protocol-suite-behrouz-a-forouzan/
https://ebookmass.com/product/read-think-french-premium-the-
editors-of-think-french-magazine/
https://ebookmass.com/product/read-think-french-premium-the-
editors-of-think-french-magazine-2/
https://ebookmass.com/product/read-think-french-premium-third-
edition-the-editors-of-think-french-magazine/
https://ebookmass.com/product/architects-of-assurance-cloud-
compliance-for-the-c-suite-bhargav-kumar-konidena/
French Suite
FRENCH
SUITE
A Book of Essays
Michael Fried
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Preface 7
Introduction by Stephen Bann 11
1 Being Seen and Seeing: Thoughts on the Le Nains 21
2 Hubert Robert and the ‘Pastoral’ Conception of Painting 49
3 The Hand on the Page: Three Works by
Théodore Gericault 83
4 Painting Memories: On Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846 117
5 Facingness Meets Mindedness: Manet’s Luncheon in
the Studio and Balcony 157
6 Degas and Antitheatricality 189
7 Chapter One of L’Education sentimentale as
a Work of Writing 226
8 Corot’s Figure Paintings and the Apotheosis of Touch 249
9 Unknown Daubigny 278
10 The Moment of Impressionism 325
Coda: The House at Rueil 359
References 367
Acknowledgements 414
List of Illustrations 415
Index 423
Preface
T
he ten essays and a coda in this book were written over
four years, from 2016 to 2020. At the outset there was no
plan to make a book; rather, the first two essays, on the
brothers Le Nain and Hubert Robert, were drafted in response to
exhibitions of works by those artists: the Le Nains in Fort Worth,
Texas, and Lens, France (I was fortunate enough to visit both), and
the Robert at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc (a ver-
sion of that exhibition had taken place shortly before in Paris, but
I didn’t catch it). Neither essay was intended for publication and
both went into a desk drawer when they were finished. The Corot
essay was inspired by the outstanding 2018 exhibition of paintings
of women by that master also at the National Gallery of Art, but
by then I had the present book in mind.
The Hubert Robert essay was written in Munich, where my
wife Ruth Leys and I spent six months between January and June
2017 thanks to a generous fellowship from the Carl Friedrich von
Siemens Stiftung; in Munich, too, I finished writing the essay on
Manet’s Luncheon in the Studio and the Balcony, which I gave as a
public lecture at the Stiftung that spring. Again, I had no plan to
publish it other than in this book, but when approached by the jour-
nal Res for a special issue edited by Marika Knowles and Christopher
Wood I agreed to its appearing there.
The essay on three works by Gericault was written during the
summer of 2019, in the first place to pursue certain thoughts that
7
french suite
had come to me in Munich in front of the painter’s heroic land-
scape, Morning, in the Neue Pinakothek. In that essay I go on to
discuss Gericault’s Epsom Derby, a painting I had always found
compelling but had previously dealt with only very briefly. And I
close with some remarks on the superb and moving late (in effect,
final) drawing-plus-watercolour of the artist’s left hand, done on
his deathbed. From the first, I envisioned the essay going into the
present book.
The essay on the role of memory (or memorability) in Baudelaire’s
Salon of 1846 first appeared in a slightly different version in Critical
Inquiry in 1984. As French Suite took shape, I decided to update it
for a new readership.
Having published a book-length study of Madame Bovary and
Salammbô in 2012, I had for some time wanted to make a brief inter-
vention in the critical literature on Flaubert’s third major novel,
L’Education sentimentale. The result is the essay on the first chapter
of the latter, which I hope will be felt to throw stylistic light on the
novel as a whole.
Three additional essays, on Degas and antitheatricality, Charles-
François Daubigny and the inception of Impressionism, as well as
a short coda on Manet’s late House at Rueil, were written during the
spring and summer of 2020, expressly for this book.
So much by way of introduction, except for the following:
In the course of making their way through this book, readers
will encounter a certain amount of repetition from essay to essay,
along with a few quotations of passages from previous books by
me, chiefly as concerns my account of various issues that I regard
as central to the main current of pictorial development in France
between the middle of the eighteenth century and the advent of
Manet and his generation in the 1860s, and indeed beyond. These
issues, I need hardly specify for anyone at all familiar with my writ-
ing, turn on the question of the relation between painting and the
beholder, and find a crucial intellectual source in the writings on
drama and painting of the great philosophe Denis Diderot of the
1750s and ’60s. My point in acknowledging such repetition (the
Raft of the Medusa turns up more than once, as does the fraying of
8
Preface
9
french suite
Western music – not a comfortable profession for a Japanese scholar
to follow during the Second World War.
Beyond that, the Bridgestone canvas made a powerful impres-
sion on me – so powerful that I found it continually coming to mind
during the years that followed. Not surprisingly, then, I had hoped
to include an essay on Cezanne and music radiating out from that
painting in the present book. But the subject defeated me.1
10
Introduction
Stephen Bann
11
french suite
and sculpture defeat theater.’ What he advocated in particular was
the course taken by a number of contemporary American artists in
the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism. His exhibition catalogue,
Three American Painters, published in 1965, had focused on the paint-
ings of Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Frank Stella. I hinted
in my review that his critical position was ‘not far from that of
[Clement] Greenberg’. In effect, he had endorsed in an article of
1962 the leading American art critic’s thesis that the ‘irreducible
essence of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conven-
tions or norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness’. In
retrospect, it might be deemed significant that Fried added a rider
of his own to Greenberg’s judgement: ‘broad outline correct . . .
certain qualifications that can be made’.
One way of summing up the present collection of essays would
be to regard it as Fried’s newest set of ‘qualifications’ bearing on this
central issue. Arriving at a definitive judgement on the ‘essence of
pictorial art’ might well extend to covering a high proportion of
a single life’s work. But more than half a century after he wrote
these words, he can certainly no longer be categorized as a ‘for-
malist’ critic. The point is that he took an early decision to become
an art historian of a particular kind, intent from the first predomi-
nantly (though by no means solely) on following the development
of French pictorial art from the mid-eighteenth century onwards,
and following the logic of a guiding concept that set him apart from
virtually all the other specialists in the field.
This commitment involved granting an unprecedented degree
of attention to the writings of critics as they emerged in each succes-
sive period, and patiently unpicking the criteria of the judgements
that were being deployed. This was not an easy task in the initial
stages, since French libraries and museums held no systematic
records of what emerged by the end of the eighteenth century as a
genre of writing omnipresent in newspapers and magazines pub-
lished throughout the nation. I can recall him once observing that
it would have been a terrible waste of time trawling through the vast
stock of critical material only to arrive at the discovery that it was
‘flatness’, after all, that was of paramount importance! What did
12
Introduction
13
french suite
further in this essay with tentative suggestions about the forward-
looking implications of the paintings of Robert in particular: ‘[I]t
almost seems as though The Finding of the Laocoön comprises sepa-
rate elements that not quite fifty years later will be fused together
in the supreme pictorial masterpiece of French Romanticism.’
Anyone who is aware of Fried’s writing on French nineteenth-
century art will recognize the reference to Gericault’s Raft of the
Medusa, exhibited at the 1819 Paris Salon. The present collection
also contains a substantial tribute to Gericault’s achievement,
which takes the form of examining some ‘exceptional’ but relatively
neglected works. Suffice it to say that Fried’s interpretations of
Morning: Landscape with Fishermen (1818) and Epsom Derby (1821)
offer unexpected dividends and certainly measure up to his esti-
mate of the central importance of the artist.
Absorption and Theatricality served as a stepping stone to the
re-evaluation of the subsequent history of French painting, since
the concepts developed with regard to Diderot could be carried
forward into the century that followed. By 1980 Fried had indeed
already begun to publish work on the mid-nineteenth-century
painter Gustave Courbet, heralding the appearance in 1990 of the
major study Courbet’s Realism. Consistent with his earlier intuitions,
he prepares the ground for Courbet by tracing the two alternative
modes of the ‘absorptive’ and the ‘theatrical’ in the prior devel-
opment of French painting. He underlines the extreme use of
absorption in the Raft of the Medusa, whose shipwrecked crew
Gericault has ‘depicted largely from the rear, which further empha-
sizes their ostensible obliviousness to our presence’. He also selects
for comment the paintings of Paul Delaroche as epitomizing ‘the
enthusiastic embracing of the most explicit forms of theatricality
by a younger generation of history painters’. A pointer to his broad
knowledge of the print culture of the Romantic period is the inclu-
sion of the popular lithograph from 1839 by Aimé de Lemud, Maître
Wolfram, which anticipates the absorptive atmosphere of Courbet’s
ground-breaking early work An After Dinner at Ornans (1848–9).
Fried notes in the Preface to Courbet’s Realism that, in spring
1987, he was giving seminars on Courbet at the Ecole des Hautes
14
Introduction
15
french suite
et Théorie de l’Art’, over which Marin and Damisch presided, lay
apart from the Paris universities and was untypical in its generous
reception of Anglo-American scholars. Manet’s Modernism encoun-
tered a negative response from various quarters. An acknowledged
Manet expert such as Pierre Georgel had already taken a stand on
‘the obligatory divorce between art and politics’, and dismissed
consideration of what was at stake in such works as his Execution of
Maximilian. The prominent sociologist Pierre Bourdieu took occa-
sion to dispute Fried’s claim of Manet’s kinship with the historian
Jules Michelet and proclaimed it to be a case of ‘erudite’s paranoia’.
He defended this claim with the preposterous argument that there
was no work by Michelet among the books that Manet left behind.
Such peremptory dismissals of Fried’s work have recently been ques-
tioned by French art historian Bruno Chenique, and the Michelet
connection has been proved by new documentary evidence.
Courbet’s Realism (1990) and Manet’s Modernism (1996) conclu
sively demonstrated the efficacy of Fried’s historical method in
clarifying the issues at stake in the revolutionary development of
mid-nineteenth-century French painting. Not before the com-
pilation of the present set of essays did he again concentrate so
exclusively on the French scene, and here the range is extended to
involve other key artists, proposing what is in effect a new approach
to the genesis of the subsequent phenomenon of Impressionism.
But in addition to the essays on the Le Nain brothers, Hubert
Robert and Gericault already mentioned, there are two contri-
butions that stand somewhat apart in being devoted to literary
achievements of the mid-century.
Fried published the first version of his essay on Baudelaire’s
Salon de 1846 in 1984, and endorsed in particular Baudelaire’s fas-
cinating justification of the crucial role played by memory in the
transmission of pictorial motifs. He underlines here that this
contention was little discussed at the time, but he is right to claim
that historians of French nineteenth-century painting who wrote
subsequently have corroborated the vital role played by ‘memora-
bility’. In his ‘Chapter One of L’Education sentimentale as a Work of
Writing”’, Fried picks up on a long-standing interest in Flaubert
16
Introduction
17
french suite
the genre of portraiture and the higher level of achievement that
qualifies a work to be accepted as a ‘tableau’. Continuing and enrich-
ing this debate about the options of the mid-century is Fried’s
discussion of ‘antitheatricality’ in the work of Degas. The biblical
subject chosen for his early history painting Daughter of Jephthah
(1859) implicitly anticipates the painting–beholder relationship as
being fatal. Yet his subsequent Portraits in an Office (1873) can still
be regarded as ‘a tour de force of absorption’.
The following two essays on Corot and Daubigny are concerned
with artists who were prominent in the practice of landscape. Yet
in Corot’s case, Fried takes advantage of a recent exhibition of his
figure paintings to consider this neglected aspect of his achieve-
ment. One issue that arises with these works is that they achieved
an absorptive mode at a stage when ‘straightforward depiction of
absorbed states and actions had lost much of its power to per-
suade’. Fried argues convincingly that much of their ‘charm’ arises
from a sort of ‘doubleness’: absorption in the double sense ‘not
just of being beheld but of being observed closely by the painter’.
He goes on to analyse what he calls ‘the apotheosis of touch’ in the
treatment of the faces.
In the case of Daubigny, it is indeed the production of his land-
scapes that is scrutinized. Fried dismisses conventional appraisals
that categorize his work as a bridge between the Barbizon School
and the Impressionists, or credit him with the vague role of ‘inspir-
ing Impressionism’. Instead, he underlines Daubigny’s distinctive
use of the panoramic format, which induces a bodily inflected
‘deliberately paced scanning of the scene’. He calls attention to
the way in which Daubigny’s individuality is assessed in the illumi-
nating criticism of Castagnary, but he also records Frank Stella’s
revealing comments on Daubigny’s method of painting.
‘The Moment of Impressionism’ is fittingly included as the last
essay in French Suite. Fried begins by quoting Théodore Duret’s for-
mulation that the Impressionists were ‘the product of a regular
evolution of the French school’. This provides an opportunity to
restate the main argument contained in the earlier books already
cited here, through which ‘the dialectical continuity of French
18
Introduction
19
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
KONEEN EREHDYS
*****
»Hm, enpä tiedä kuinka sanoisin», vastasi isä Brown. »En tällä
kertaa voi ajatella mitään tässä maailmassa, mikä huvittaisi minua
vähemmän. Ja jollei tasavallan oikeamielinen suuttumus viimein
saata sanomalehtimiehiä sähkötuoliin tuollaisten sepustusten vuoksi,
en osaa käsittää, mikä teitäkään siinä huvittaisi.»
»Te arvelitte, että hän oli tuo karannut vanki», huomautti isä Brown
yksinkertaisesti, »koska te olitte lukenut sanomalehdistä tänä
aamuna, että vanki oli karannut.»
»Ja sen», huusi hän, »aioin juuri antaa teille. Minä asetin koneen
juuri siihen kuntoon, että se saattoi todistaa saman asian jälkeenpäin
toisella tavoin. Ja kone on oikeassa, sir.»
Ovi lensi auki. Juuri äsken oli Greywood Usher tullut siihen
johtopäätökseen, että isä Brown mahdollisesti oli hullu, nyt alkoi hän
miettiä, että hän itse oli hullu. Hänen yksityishuoneeseensa
murtautui ja syöksyi mitä saastaisimpiin ryysyihin puettu mies,
rasvainen luuhkahattu aivan vinossa päässä, hänen toisessa
silmässään vilahteli konnamainen, vihreä ilme, ja molemmat silmät
kiilsivät kuin tiikerin silmät. Muut osat hänen kasvoistaan olivat
näkymättömissä, koska ne peitti takkuinen parta ja viikset, joitten läpi
vain nenä oli päässyt tunkeutumaan ja jotka vielä sen lisäksi oli
kiedottu likaiseen, punaiseen kaulaliinaan. Herra Usher kehui
nähneensä useimmat valtion villeimmistä roistoista, mutta hän ei
muistanut koskaan nähneensä tällaista variksenpelätiksi puettua
pavianiapinaa. Mutta ennen kaikkea ei hän koskaan, rauhallisen,
tieteellisen olemassaolonsa aikana ollut kuullut tuon näköisen
miehen puhuttelevan häntä ensiksi.