| 1 | Name: | Dr. Michael Fried | |
| Institution: | Johns Hopkins University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2003 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1939 | ||
Michael Fried received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1969 and continued at Harvard as assistant and associate professor of fine arts. In 1975 he joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University and is currently the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities. Michael Fried has combined pioneering work in the history of art with groundbreaking art criticism. He is also a poet. His early criticism of the work of Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, and Anthony Caro, among others, helped to define modernist art of the 1960s in ways that are still influential. His Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot revolutionized the study of 18th century French art. Through close, extensive analysis of both paintings and literary and dramatic texts, Dr. Fried came to a new understanding of the painting as tableau, and of the role of the beholder, thereby changing an entire field of inquiry. There followed a series of closely argued monographs around the theme of realism, which were devoted to the work of Courbet, Eakins, and Manet. Dr. Fried's sustained critical thinking about realism has now extended to German 19th century painting with the publication of his book on Adolf Menzel. Dr. Fried's A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art on the subject of Caravaggio inspired both the scholarly audience and the more general public. Today, he is one of a handful of historians working successfully across national and chronological boundaries. Michael Fried is the author of Morris Louis (1971); Powers (poems, 1973); Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980, awarded 1980 Gottschalk Prize); Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (1987, awarded 1990 Charles C. Eldredge Prize); Courbet's Realism (1993); To the Center of the Earth (poems, 1994); Manet's Modernism or The Face of Painting in the 1860s (1996); Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998); Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (2002); The Next Bend in the Road (poems, 2004); and Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008). He was awarded the 2000 Prix Littéraire Etats-Unis/France, given to a book that contributes to mutual understanding between the two cultures. In 2004 he received a Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2003. | |||