ABOUT THIS BOOK

From Manet to Gericault, Daubigny to Corot, an insightful, breathtakingly original exploration of French art and literature.

French Suite examines a range of important French painters and two writers, Baudelaire and Flaubert, from the brothers Le Nain in the mid-seventeenth century to Manet, Degas, and the Impressionists in the later nineteenth century. A principal theme of Michael Fried’s essays is a fundamental concern of his throughout his career: the relationship between painting and the beholder. Fried’s typically vivid and strongly argued essays offer many new readings and unexpected insights, examining both familiar and lesser-known French artistic and literary works.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Art critic, art historian, literary critic-historian, and poet Michael Fried is the J. R. Herbert Boone Emeritus Professor of Humanities and the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. His many books include Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews and Painting with Demons: The Art of Girolamo Savoldo, the latter also published by Reaktion Books.

REVIEWS

"French Suite displays at every moment Fried’s unmatched ability to undo the opposition between the concrete and the abstract, to see in a single painting (and even sometimes in a single detail of that painting) the presence of an entire intellectual history, and to understand that history in terms of philosophical concepts that make themselves most powerfully manifest in individual paintings. Both on subjects that have always been central to his work (e.g. Manet, Gericault) and ones that are new (e.g. Daubigny, Corot), this book is full of stunning surprises, readings that fundamentally alter your sense of what you’re seeing. And the extraordinary final essay—'The Moment of Impressionism'—gives you a new sense not only of what you’ve seen but—in relation to the whole question of formalism in art history—of what you’ve read."

— Walter Benn Michaels, professor of English, University of Illinois at Chicago

“Readers are rewarded with penetrating visual analyses of works.”

— Choice

“The storied French writers Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert join artists including Manet, Degas, Géricault, Daubigny, and Corot as subjects in this collection of musings about ‘the relationship between painting and the beholder’ by art historian Michael Fried, previously the author of many influential texts ranging from his classic essay ‘Art and Objecthood’ to his pioneering book on Diderot's art criticism.”

— Art in America

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Being Seen and Seeing: Thoughts on the Le Nains

2. Hubert Robert and the ‘Pastoral’ Conception of Painting

3. The Hand on the Page: Three Works by Théodore Gericault

4. Painting Memories: On Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846

5. Facingness Meets Mindedness: Manet’s Luncheon in the Studio and Balcony

6. Degas and Antitheatricality

7. Chapter One of L’Education sentimentale as a Work of Writing

8. Corot’s Figure Paintings and the Apotheosis of Touch

9. Unknown Daubigny

10. The Moment of Impressionism

Coda: The House at Rueil

References

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Index

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