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.
Michael Fried
Professor Emeritus of the Humanities
Academy Professor, Johns Hopkins University
michaelmfried@gmail.com
Curriculum Vitae
Gilman 222
410-516-7618
What Was Literary Impressionism?
- 2018 , Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
- Role: author
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After Caravaggio
- 2016 , Yale University Press
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Promesse du Bonheur
- 2016 , David Zwirner Books/NONSITE
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Another Light: Jacques-Louis David to Thomas Demand
- 2015 , Yale University Press
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Flaubert’s “Gueuloir”: On “Madame Bovary” and “Salammbô”
- 2012 , Yale University Press
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Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon
- 2011 , Yale University Press
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The Moment of Caravaggio
- 2010 , Princeton University Press
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Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before
- 2008 , Yale University Press
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The Next Bend in the Road
- 2004 , University Of Chicago Press
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Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin
- 2002 , Yale University Press
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Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews
- 1998 , University Of Chicago Press
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Manet’s Modernism: or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s
- 1998 , University Of Chicago Press
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To the Center of the Earth
- 1994 , Farrar Straus & Giroux
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Courbet’s Realism
- 1990 , University Of Chicago Press
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Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot
- 1988 , University Of Chicago Press
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Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane
- 1987 , University Of Chicago Press
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Powers
- 1971 , Littlehampton Book Services Ltd
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