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Product Description
Manet's Modernism is the culminating work in a trilogy of books by Michael Fried exploring the roots and genesis of pictorial modernism. Fried provides an entirely new understanding not only of the art of Manet and his generation but also of the way in which the Impressionist simplification of Manet's achievement had determined subsequent accounts of pictorial modernism down to the present. Like Fried's previous books, Manet's Modernism is a milestone in the historiography of modern art.
"Beautifully produced. . . . [Fried's] thought is always stimulating, if not provocative. This is an important book, which all students of modernism, in the broadest sense, will find rewarding."—Virginia Quarterly Review
"An astonishing piece of scholarship that will cause readers to rethink their understanding of Manet's influence, ambition, and achievement."—Gary Michael, Bloomsbury Review
"An audaciously brilliant book, long awaited and as essential reading for philosophers as for art historians."—Wayne Andersen, Common Knowledge
"Art history of the highest originality and distinction."—Arthur C. Danto, New York Times Book Review
Amazon.com Review
Our current understanding of the paintings of Manet is so heavily filtered through the lens of Impressionism that in many ways, his contributions to art history have been obscured. Called the "first modernist," his paintings marked a break with the past and paved the way for what we've come to accept as modern art in the treatment of the canvas as a flat surface. But during his time, Manet's modernist innovations were the object of ridicule. "It's flat, it isn't modeled," said Courbet of the nude in the painting Olympia. "It's like the Queen of Hearts after a bath." In Manet's Modernism, Michael Fried has set out to see Manet as his contemporaries would have seen him and to gain a more accurate reading of Manet's place in history.
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