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PARTISAN REVIEW
posited by Clement Greenberg is both clear and powerful, with its empha–
sis on the gradual reduction of illusionistic pictorial space until the painting
became all surface, a view seductively expressed in Greenberg's metaphor of
the gradual "silting up" of space by the repetitive touches of Impressionism.
But to see Manet's art only as prefiguring what happened after
Impressionism, only as pointing to the future-to concentrate on the effect
of his quest for "expressiveness, instantaneousness, and strikingness"–
without taking into account his relationship to his precursors and his
contemporaries, is both to underestimate and distort Manet's achievement.
Fried ends
Manet's Modernism
by attempting to sum up his own view
of the painter of
Olympia
and
Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe.
Typically, he sets his
observations in the context of the pronouncements of some of Manet's
admirers who wrote about him after his death at the age of fifty-one in
1883: Theophile Duret in the preface to the catalogue for the posthumous
exhibition and sale of the contents of Manet's studio in 1884 and George
Moore in an article written in 1898. Fried writes: " ...without endorsing
Duret's 'intrinsic quality of painting itself' (although as a young critic I
embraced similar ideas), and without subscribing to the excesses of
Moore's vision of Manet as involved only with quality (although standing
before individual canvases I too have marveled at a touch that seemed to
be concerned with nothing more), my continued stake in Manet rests
importantly on the conviction that Manet's best paintings 'sustain compar–
ison'-Duret's phrase seems exactly right-with those of the great painters
who preceded him. To the extent that that belief became central to a cer–
tain reflection on painting only in the wake of Impressionism, the mind of
this book remains divided."
It is possible to follow the course of modernism along a clear path that
leads from Impressionism via Cezanne to Cubism and Matisse and then to
a good deal of the abs tract painting of the 1960s that Fried himself wrote
about illuminatingly at the beginning of his career-abstract painting made
a neat century after Manet painted some of his most radical pictures.
Fried's new mapping presents us with an alternative route that leads up to
and through the terrain of modernism, not across its flat plains, but up and
down a lot of steep hills. It's hard work following this newly blazed trail,
but the views are impressive and they offer genuinely fresh perspectives.
