KAREN WILKIN
299
ter the landscape; we are forced to pick our way through sentences such as,
"[b]ut for contemporary critics the issue of Courbet's Realism, like that of
realism generally, was ideologically overdetermined in ways that foreclosed
the possibility that his paintings might be seen in other than the most lit–
eral, positivist, and materialist terms," or "[n]othing better illustrates the
particular historicity of Manet's endeavor in the first half of the 1860s than
its dependence on the altogether contingent availability-as well as the
equally contingent combinability--of those two 'foreign' representational
technologies." But it's worth the effort. Growing in Fried's tangled under–
brush of academic prose are patches of stunning insight, dazzlingly
expressed. Discussing a pair of remarkable details in
Le
Dejeuner sur l'herbe,
the bullfinch "captured" in mid-flight and the rapidly stroked frog, Fried
notes that both images are emblematic of speed, of what he calls "instan–
taneousness", one of "speed of
seeing,
capable of freezing the bird visually
in flight" and the other of "speed of
rendering,
expressed in the dashing, cal–
ligraphic brushwork." But, he notes, the relationship (and therefore the
implications) of these small, but significant elements in Manet's early, prob–
lematic masterpiece are more nuanced and richer than these observations
suggest; "the juxtaposition of the two motifs in the
Dijeuner
insists on the
mutual
entanglement
of eye and hand, seeing and rendering, as against any
clear-cut distinction between them."
Such insights and occasional rapier turns of phrase leap off the page
and make up for the effort of wading through Fried's far from straightfor–
ward explications of his reading of Manet. But what really redeems even
the most turgid academic passages in
Manet's Modernism
is Fried's obvious
dependence on passionate scrutiny of actual works of art in formulating his
conclusions. I hope I do not compromise Fried's respected position in the
academic world by pointing out that it is clear that he is stimulated and
deeply moved by paintings and sculptures and that he spends time looking
at them-long and hard-in the flesh. (One of the most eminent and
inventive artists working today describes Fried as
"exciting
in the studio.")
His meticulous examination of context, his analysis of aesthetic values, and
his exploration of artists' and critics' intentions are
all
(unfashionably)
informed not by an ideologically-based
parti pris,
but by things discovered
during attentive, loving confrontations with works of actual art.
Ultimately, of course, Fried has set himself an impossible goal-to see
Manet freshly, informed by the ideas, desires, and prejudices of the artist's
own era, as those who saw him for the first time might have seen him. We
know too much. Too much has happened since
Le
Dejeuner sur l'herbe
was
first exhibited, too many alternative readings have been attached to Manet,
and too many threads extracted from his work by subsequent artists. And
as Fried himself points out, the model of the evolution of modernism
