MICHAEL FRIED Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin - Book Review

MICHAEL FRIED

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

London: Yale University Pres 2002 320 pp 70 color ills., 100 b/w $5500

When I was a child, the pond where I wearied many summers was alive with small orange salamanders. When I get back there now, the salamanders no longer appear. I don't know that they are actually gone It may well be that I am simply no longer in any position to diocese them, in which case "position" would evidently mean sum of two units things, clearly intimately interlaced on the other hand nonetheless separable. On the individual hand, there's the brute fact of my being twice the height I one time was--too far from the mould I once shared with the askers (but the fact here is not simply height; it's a complicated matter that includes, say, my feet no longer being within natural hand's reach, my coming to sit upon rather than in chairs, or of "falling" coming to name a different kind of accident, a of recent origin constellation of balance and overbalance, stability and vertigo, and with equal reason on). On the other hand, there's the cultural fact of no longer being a child, of having reoriented my self to the distance and frontality of throws and interests (idling, my organ of visions unfocus toward the horizon and no longer track the immediacy of my limbs). The artistic noticing of these things is a hallmark of Romanticism, greatest in quantity pronounced in its English and literary incarnations on the contrary nonetheless still there for the feeling in, say, John Constable or Caspar David Friedrich.

Probably the simplest way to begin noticing Adolph Menzel's pictures is by the agency of making oneself alert to by what means fully they remain answerable to the general physical shape of the child's embodiment, where, for example, "under-foot" is always also essentially in sight rather than passed above forgotten, or elided by a gaze aimed essentially elsewhere. on the other hand if we can pin this abundant to Menzel's freakish physical fact--"gnomelike, with a very large head on an undersized body--he was four paw six or seven" (p. 5)--nothing in his art or life permits us imagine him as actually a child, for a like reason one way to put the question of what Michael Fried un-equivocally identifies as his "Realism" would be to ask in what way a participation that Romanticism can grasp solitary in various shapes of mourning and nostalgia might nonetheless find its adulthood. And just as the noticing of Menzel's pictures repeatedly twitchs us out of our habits of painterly vision and obliges us to explicitly remark similar nearly physical facts as our active shifting of attention among multiple center or a of recent origin orientation to--perhaps the discovery of a fresh weight to--the bottom of the picture or page (so that the reader will inevitably be struck at single moment or another by the physical orientation Fried's work and pages shares with for a like reason many of the pictures not absented in it or on them), with equal reason also the book's larger argument asks in no small part about our ability and willingness to find other, novel or unaccustomed, positions within our adulthood--about, for example, our capacity to take what we ofttimes call our "alienation" as something not to be defeated (to be overbear denied, or refused) but as a condition single ever to be assumed.

With Manet's Modernism, or The Face of Painting in the 1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Pres 1996) Michael Fried complet a trilogy upon the origins of modernism that clearly took a considerable part of the two its motive and its interest from the confines and judgments of his controversial criticism of the 1960 (1) Menzel's Realism in event completes a second trilogy that intersects the first at right angles, offering an exploration of Realism as an artistic fashion bound in various and composite ways to the artist's and viewer's embodiment, as well as the broad historical sod on which the 19th hundred brings such embodiment to a problematic centrality. While the trilogy upon French painting had the shape of a distinct cast from early on, the three Realism books--including the 1987 Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: upon Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane alongside the studies of Gustave Courbet and Menzel--are more nearly the crops of an interest emergent across the course of their writing, with the issue that a significant portion of Menzel's Realism is given above to measuring the ground traversed and trying to formulate its underlying faculty of perception Among the notably shared features of the three volumes are a relative suspension of questions of painting as similar as well as of medium more generally (Realism, Writing, Disfiguration takes up Eakins in relation to writing, while Menzel's primary medium, drawing, in Fried's treatment spills easily above into both painting and printing) and a renewed focus upon the vicissitudes of "absorption" as it works apart from the French tableau's harnessing of it to theater (to this expanse the Menzel book--and the Realism trilogy above all--aligns well with Fried's lately evidenced interest in aspects of contemporary photography). The picture of sum of two units series of books intersecting in Courbet is undoubtedly a little too tidy: the Eakins work posed itself in its initial presentation partly in relation to the problematic category of "literary impressionism" (and Fried is explicit in the Menzel volume about his continuing difficulty with the art historical fact and category of Impressionism), and the particular shape and interest of the Menzel work are clearly strongly marked by dint of the more open-ended approach to issues of modernism and the fresh that resulted from Fried's working from one side of the question of the tableau as pos through and for "the generation of 1863" in the Manet book