Art and Objecthood

Much acclaimed and highly controversial, Michael Fried's art criticism defines the contours of late modernism in the visual arts. This volume contains twenty-seven pieces, including the influential introduction to the catalog for "Three American Painters", the text of his book "Morris Louis", and the renowned "Art and Objecthood". Originally published between 1962 and 1977, they continue to generate debate today. These are uncompromising, exciting, and impassioned writings, aware of their transformative power during a time of intense controversy about the nature of modernism and the aims and essence of advanced painting and sculpture.

Ranging from brief reviews to extended essays, and including major critiques of Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, and Anthony Caro, these writings establish a set of basic terms for understanding key issues in high modernism: the viability of Clement Greenberg's account of the infralogic of modernism, the status of figuration after Pollock, the centrality of the problem of shape, the nature of pictorial and sculptural abstraction, and the relationship between work and beholder. In a number of essays Fried contrasts the modernist enterprise with minimalist or literalist art, and, taking a position that remains provocative to this day, he argues that minimalism is essentially a genre of theater, hence artistically self-defeating.

For this volume Fried has also provided an extensive introductory essay in which he discusses how he became an art critic, clarifies his intentions in his art criticism, and draws crucial distinctions between his art criticism and the art history he went on to write. The result is a book that is simply indispensable for anyone concerned with modernist painting and sculpture and the task of art criticism in our time.


Contents:

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
An Introduction to My Art Criticism

Part 1: 1966-77
Shape as Form: Frank Stella's Irregular Polygons (1966)
Morris Louis (1966-67)
Jules Olitski (1966-67)
Art and Objecthood (1967)
New Work by Anthony Caro (1967)
Ronald Davis: Surface and Illusion (1967)
Two Sculptures by Anthony Caro (1968)
Recent Work by Kenneth Noland (1969)
Caro's Abstractness (1970)
Problems of Polychromy: New Sculptures by Michael Bolus (1971)
Larry Poons's New Paintings (1972)
Anthony Caro's Table Sculptures, 1966-77 (1977)

Part 2: 1965
Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (1965)

Part 3: 1962-64
Anthony Caro (1963)
Frank Stella (1963)
New York Letter: Oldenburg, Chamberlain (October 25, 1962)
New York Letter: Louis, Chamberlain and Stella, Indiana (November 25, 1962)
New York Letter: Warhol (December 25, 1962)
New York Letter: Johns (February 25, 1963)
New York Letter: Hofmann (April 25, 1963)
New York Letter: Noland, Thiebaud (May 25, 1963)
New York Letter: Hofmann, Davis (December 5, 1963)
New York Letter: Kelly, Poons (December-January 1963-64)
New York Letter: Judd (February 15, 1964)
New York Letter: De Kooning Drawings (April 25, 1964)
New York Letter: Olitski, Jenkins, Thiebaud, Twombly (May 1964)
New York Letter: Brach, Chamberlain, Irwin (Summer 1964)
Writings by Michael Fried, 1959-77, Exclusive of Poetry

Index of Names in "An Introduction to My Art Criticism"