466
PARTISAN REVIEW
strange or wild in a work is ignored or explained away, Fried's goal
mi ght be said to be
to
restore the craziness or eccentricit y to the
works he examines. Thus he attempts to counter "the blandly nor–
malizing bias" of realism and genre study with a heightened ap–
preciation of what he calls, at different points , the "obsessions," the
"calculated aggressions," the "monstrosity," or the "disturbance" of
the works he examines. There are many ways this might be done.
Fried tries to shift our attention back from the genre to the imagina–
tion of the individual artist, to restore to the critical description of
the object a sense of the pressure of the idiosyncratic individual im–
agination engaged in a vexed and ambivalent act of creation .
As I have already suggested, there could be no more valuable
task for a critic to perform , especially within the realm of nineteenth–
century American art criticism. Fried is not alone in his attempt to
save the artists he loves from the cozy and complacent misreadings
of overfamiliarity. Among the younger generation of critics , Bryan
Jay Wolf and David Lubin are engaged in comparable efforts to save
American art from the bland read ings of previous American art
criticism.
But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, not in the noble
intentions of the cook, and one moves through Fried's essay with a
rising appreciation of the failure of his effort. The problem arises not
with his general critical goal, which borders on being heroic, but
with his particular means of achieving it. As the language I quoted
above would suggest, Fried finds what he calls a thematics of vio–
lence, aggression , and distortion in Eakins's work. But the principal
violence documented in his book , unfortunately , is the violence his
own language and procedures do to the works he examines.
Consider the following di scussion of the figure who has come to
be accepted as that of the mother of the patient on the operat ing
table in Eakins's
The Gross Clinic.
She sits off to one side of the central
space in obvious grief and pain , as her son is operated on. Here is
Fried's account of her:
... the extrem ity of a ffect expressed in her left hand's viole nt
con torti on is apprehended by the viewer as a threat - a t a
minimum, an offense- to vision as such , though simulta neous ly
the viewer's attent ion is drawn , as if aga inst its will , to the thin
gold wedding band on th e fourth finger of that hand . This is a
further instance of th e amb ivalence or dividedness I have already
attributed to the viewer's relation to
The Gross Clinic.
(The of–
fense to vision is compounded by what almost seems a hint of
