Enfilade

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Michael Fried, with an introduction by Stephen Bann, French Suite: A Book of Essays (London: Reaktion Books, 2022), 356 pages, ISBN ‏: ‎ 978-1789146042, $45.

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.

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.

C O N T E N T S

Preface
Introduction by Stephen Bann

1  Being Seen and Seeing: Thoughts on the Le Nains
2  Hubert Robert and the ‘Pastoral’ Conception of Painting
3  The Hand on the Page: Three Works by Théodore Géricault
4  Painting Memories: On Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846
5  Facingness Meets Mindedness: Manet’s Luncheon in the Studio and Balcony
6  Degas and Antitheatricality
7  Chapter One of L’Education sentimentale as a Work of Writing
8  Corot’s Figure Paintings and the Apotheosis of Touch
9  Unknown Daubigny
10  The Moment of Impressionism
Coda: The House at Rueil

References
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Index