French Suite: A Book of Essays

Description

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, Corot, Daubigny and the Impressionists in the later nineteenth century. A principal theme of the essays is a fundamental concern of Fried's throughout his career: the relation between painting and beholder. Fried's typically vivid and strongly argued essays offer many new readings and unexpected insights, transforming our understanding of both familiar and lesser-known French artistic and literary works.

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 (1998) and Painting with Demons: The Art of Girolamo Savoldo (Reaktion, 2021).

"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