Michael Fried
I’ve counted them up and it turns out I’ve published nine articles in CI along with several responses to critics. The earliest of the articles, on Courbet’s After Dinner at Ornans and Stonebreakers, appeared in 1982; those that followed discuss Courbet’s Burial at Ornans, Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846, Almayer’s Folly and other fictions by Joseph Conrad, Manet in his generation, Caravaggio, Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and Jeff Wall’s photograph Adrian Walker, Artist . . . in the light of a fascinating passage from Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value. Before discovering CI (indeed before CI) I was at a loss. From the start of my career as an art historian, such as it was in those early days, I realized that nothing I was likely to write would ever be acceptable to an “official” journal of art history like The Art Bulletin or The Burlington Magazine. For one thing, I couldn’t operate rhetorically without the first person, an absolute no-go in those distinguished organs. And for another, my whole style of argument, the claims I was making about Manet and his citations from previous art or the primacy of considerations of beholding and theatricality in Diderot’s criticism and the art of David and his successors, or (especially) my conviction that Courbet’s realism is to be understood as the product of an attempt by the artist to paint himself “all but corporeally” into his paintings were too foreign to the norms of the field to be taken seriously, much less find their way into such publications. I did take advantage of my friendship with Phil Leider, then editor of Artforum, to publish in that unlikely venue both “Manet’s Sources: Aspects of His Art, 1959-1865” and “Thomas Couture and the Theatricalization of Action in 19th-Century Painting” in 1969 and 1970 respectively, but for obvious reasons that was hardly an ideal solution. But in 1969 and 1970 CI didn’t yet exist, so what was one to do?
I’m not certain about this, but my intuition is that what made my CI possible, and in time comparable journals like Representations, was the widespread use of photo offset lithography, which meant that illustrations became feasible without having to engrave a plate, with all the expense that the latter course of action entailed. And starting in 1979 CI was edited by Tom Mitchell, whose dissertation and first book was on William Blake’s “composite art” and who would go on to write on a host of visual subjects in the years to come. I had met Tom, who made it clear that he would welcome submissions from me, and starting with my writing on Courbet I took maximum advantage of this. And of course publishing in CI meant not only getting one’s work into print but also reaching an audience not confined to the narrow and repressive field that art history then was, a liberation I found intoxicating. Simply put, my career, such as it has been, owes a huge debt of gratitude to CI and its editors, Tom and Joel Snyder above all, a debt I am glad to have this opportunity to acknowledge.
Michael Fried is is the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Art History at the Johns Hopkins University. He is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
In the Moment 