French Suite: A Book of Essays

by Michael Fried, Stephen Bann (Introduction)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789146042
Publisher:	Reaktion Books, Limited
Publication date:	10/24/2022
Pages:	356
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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 The Moment of Caravaggio.


Stephen Bann, CBE, is professor emeritus of the history of art and a senior research fellow at Bristol University. His recent books include Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of Nineteenth-Century France and Stonypath Days: Letters between Ian Hamilton Finlay and Stephen Bann 1970-72.

Table of Contents

Preface 7

Introduction Stephen Bann 11

1 Being Seen and Seeing: Thoughts on the Le Nains 21

2 Hubert Robert and the 'Pastoral' Conception of Painting 49

3 The Hand on the Page: Three Works by Théodore Gericault 83

4 Painting Memories: On Baudelaire's Salon of 1846 117

5 Facingness Meets Mindedness: Manet's Luncheon in the Studio and Balcony 157

6 Degas and Antitheatricality 189

7 Chapter One of L'Education sentimentale as a Work of Writing 226

8 Corot's Figure Paintings and the Apotheosis of Touch 249

9 Unknown Daubigny 278

10 The Moment of Impressionism 325

Coda: The House at Rueil 359

References 367

Acknowledgements 414

List of Illustrations 415

Index 423

Editorial Reviews

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

"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