The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century

For over seventy years the sociology of professions has revolved around empirical generalizations drawn from four modern exemplars of nineteenth century Britain and United States: law and medicine, science and engineering. We identify qualities constitutive of professionalism in an occupation during the ancien regime, on the Continent, and in a field unrelated to the four just noted: seventeenth century French painting and sculpture. These constitutive qualities point to the significance of a distinctively structural and institutional approach to the sociology of professions.

Download Full-text

Review. Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century. Frascina, Francis, Nigel Blake, Briony Fer and Tamar Garb

French Studies ◽

10.1093/fs/49.2.209-a ◽

1995 ◽

Vol 49 (2) ◽

pp. 209-209

Author(s):

B. WRIGHT

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

French Painting

Download Full-text

‘A Supreme Fiction’: Michael Fried and Art Criticism

Journal of Visual Culture ◽

10.1177/1470412917700931 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 16 (1) ◽

pp. 89-102

Author(s):

Alison Green

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Art Criticism ◽

18Th Century ◽

Theory And Practice ◽

French Painting ◽

Supreme Fiction ◽

Historical Writings ◽

Prior Relationship

One of the striking aspects of the trenchant legacy of Michael Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’ is its status as a piece of art criticism. Widely perceived as difficult and personal, philosophical and explicatory, doxa or sermon, the essay stands out. To explore its singularity, this article compares Fried’s conception of the period criticism of 18th-century French painting in his book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980) and the method of criticism enacted in ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) which he saw as connected. The author pursues this and other crossings between Fried’s art historical writings and art criticism, tracking it to an extended endnote in Fried’s Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (2002). ‘Art and Objecthood’ is a key essay in this story aimed at Fried’s thinking about criticism, its history, theory and practice. Doing this matters because it puts the critic in a particular relation to art and to Fried’s idea of an ‘ontologically prior relationship between painting and the beholder’.

Download Full-text