Michael Fried is a poet, art historian, art critic, and literary critic.  He has written extensively about abstract painting and sculpture since World War II, about French painting and art criticism from the mid-eighteenth century to the advent of Edouard Manet and his generation (and beyond), about Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane, about the great nineteenth-century German painters Caspar David Friedrich and Adolph Menzel, about Charles Baudelaire, Joseph Conrad, and Søren Kierkegaard, about Gustave Flaubert’s novels Madame Bovary and Salammbô, about Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jeff Wall, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Demand, Luc Delahaye, James Welling, and other contemporary “art” photographers, about Caravaggio and the transformation of Italian painting around 1600, and about the contemporary artists Anri Sala, Charles Ray, Joseph Marioni, and Douglas Gordon (among others).  He has long been engaged by prob­lems of modern­ism, abstraction, realism, theatri­cality, objecthood, self-portraiture, embodiedness, and the everyday.  Thinkers who particularly interest him include Diderot, Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and Cavell.  He is cur­rently writing two books, After Cara­vaggio, on var­ious Italian painters working between 1610 and 1630, and Almay­er’s Face: Studies in Literary Impres­sionism, on a number of British and American writers between 1890 and 1914.  A new collec­tion of poems, Promesse du Bonheur, awaits pub­lication.