Absorption and Theatricality

Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot

Fried Michael

With this widely acclaimed work, Fried revised the way in which eighteenth-century French painting and criticism were viewed and understood.

Contents:

Preface
List of Illustrations
1. The Primacy of Absorption
2. Toward a Supreme Fiction
3. Painting and Beholder
Appendix A: Grimm on Unity, Instantaneousness and Related Topics
Appendix B: Two Related Texts: "The Lettre sur les spectacles and Die Wahlverwandtschaften"
Appendix C: David's Homer Drawings of 1794
Notes
Index

About the Author

Michael Fried is the J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of two previous books of poems, "Powers and To the Center of the Earth", as well as numerous works in art history and criticism, including "Art and Objecthood" and "Manet's Modernism", both published by the University of Chicago Press. In the spring of 2002 he gave the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art.

Reviews

"A reinterpretation supported by immense learning and by a series of brilliantly perceptive readings of paintings and criticism alike... An exhilarating book" – John Barrell, London Review of Books

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