Michael Martin Fried

Michael Martin Fried (born April 12, 1939, in New York City) is a modernist art critic and art historian. He studied at Princeton University and Harvard University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford. He is the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Art History at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States.

Fried’s contribution to art historical discourse involved the debate over the origins and development of modernism. Along with Fried, this debate’s interlocutors include other theorists and critics such as Clement Greenberg, T. J. Clark, and Rosalind Krauss. From the early 1960s, he was also close to philosopher Stanley Cavell.

Fried was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985 and the American Philosophical Society in 2003.

Books in order of publication:

Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Awarded 1980 Gottschalk Prize.

Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Awarded 1990 Charles C. Eldredge Prize.

Courbet’s Realism Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Manet’s Modernism Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. French translation awarded 2000 Prix Littéraire Etats-Unis.

Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

The Moment of Caravaggio Princeton University Press, 2010.

Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

Flaubert’s “Gueuloir”: On Madame Bovary and Salammbô London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.

Another Light: Jacques-Louis David to Thomas Demand London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.

After Caravaggio London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

What Was Literary Impressionism? Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2018.

Painting with Demons London: Reaktion, 2021.

French Suite: A Book of Essays London: Reaktion, 2022.