Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin - Hardcover

Fried, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300092199 ISBN 13: 9780300092196

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2002

Synopsis

Adolf Menzel was one of the most important German artists of the nineteenth century, yet he is scarcely known outside his native land. In this book a leading art historian argues that Menzel deserves to be recognized not only as one of the greatest painters and draftsmen of his century but also as a master realist whose work engages profoundly with an extraordinary range of issues-artistic, scientific, philosophical, sociopolitical. Michael Fried has written the first book in English to explore Menzel's large and fascinating oeuvre, and in so doing has made the artist's stupendous achievement accessible to a wide audience at last.

Fried compares Menzel's art to that of the nineteenth century's two other great realist painters, Courbet and Eakins. Analyzing paintings, drawings, and prints from all stages of Menzel's long career, he asserts that the distinctive quality of Menzel's realism is found in his concern with evoking the multi-sensory, fully embodied relationships of persons with the universe of physical objects, tools, and situations. Establishing connections between Menzel's work and a broad array of extra-artistic contexts, Fried has created a work of compelling originality, one that for the first time establishes Menzel as a key artist of modernity.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Fried is J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of various books of art criticism, art history, and poetry, including Manet's Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s; Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews; and To the Center of the Earth (poems).

From the Back Cover

"A brilliant, fascinating, and immensely readable book."-Alex Potts, University of Reading

Reviews

This terrific study by Johns Hopkins Humanities professor Fried is, in effect, two books, both of enormous importance and value. The first is a pioneering and thorough (if idiosyncratic) critical biography of Adolf Menzel (1815–1905), a great 19th-century realist painter still too little-known outside of his native Germany. The second is the present culmination of Fried’s hugely ambitious attempt, begun with 1988’s Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot, to rewrite the history of art since the Enlightenment. While the ultimate success or failure of Fried’s larger project (previous volumes have dealt with such artists as Courbet and Eakins) will undoubtedly be a matter of debate for decades to come, its sweeping scale and conceptual daring give this volume an unexpected polemical intensity. Against the primarily optical drift of Impressionism and the criticism it engendered—the privileging of isolated transcendent visual moments, or "holistic act(s) of seeing"—Fried posits an art of embodiment, in which the artist constructs images reflecting not only the other senses, but the movement of the subject through time and space. Menzel’s vast oeuvre and broad range of treatment and subject have worked against his acceptance into the mainstream canon, but his career is given convincingly coherent shape not only by Fried’s inspired close readings of individual paintings and drawings (beautifully reproduced in 70 color and 100 b&w illustrations), but by his meticulous unraveling of the artist’s relationships with the intellectual currents of 19th-century Berlin. The richly allusive aesthetic writings of Soren Kierkegaard, for example, the Danish philosopher who was a contemporary of Menzel’s, are brought forward with rare intelligence and appropriateness. Menzel himself is a compelling figure—very small in stature, and seized with great ambition both as artist and professional man. Fried shows him bringing to the drawing of a pair of binoculars the same clarity of purpose as he does to a domestic interior or a huge history painting. Menzel’s voracious engagement with the world is both contextualized and shared by Fried, who at one point, writing about his subject’s magisterial sketch of a bicycle, confesses his wish to reach into the drawing and ring it. It is precisely this kind of passionate, intimate and informed advocacy that makes Menzel’s Realism not only a great work by a critic at the top of his game, but a stirring humanist document.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0300092199
• ISBN 13: 9780300092196
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320