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. [1]

Michael Fried abandoned art criticism in 1977, and steered his writing toward pinpointing the trajectory and overall meaning of Modernism in art, from the 19th century to the present day. He has devoted much of his time to writing long monographs of individual artists such as Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet.

Michael Fried (born 1939, New York, New York, U.S.) is an American art critic, art historian, literary critic, and poet best known for his theoretical work on minimalist art. Fried was educated at Princeton and Harvard universities and at the University of Oxford .

His outrage fueled the writing in 1967 of “Art and Objecthood,” a document still taken by many to define the decisive issue for advanced art in the ’60s—even when, as is most often the case, those readers share neither its premises nor its conclusions.

Much acclaimed and highly controversial, Michael Fried’s art criticism defines the contours of late modernism in the visual arts. This volume contains twenty-seven pieces, including the influential introduction to the catalog for Three American Painters, the text of his book Morris Louis, and the renowned "Art and Objecthood."

Fried established his art theory and criticism with a 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood” in Artforum. It remains the essay for which he his best known.

Oct 13, 2021 · Mainly reprints of the art criticism written by the author between 1961 and 1977 Includes bibliographical references (p. 327-330) and index

Michael Freed is a Postwar & Contemporary painter. Michael Freed's work has been offered at auction multiple times, with realized prices ranging from 25 USD to 175 USD, depending on the size and medium of the artwork.

Fried is the author of numerous influential books on art, among them Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998); Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980, 1988), which won the Louis Gottschalk Prize; Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (1987); and Why Photography Matters ...

Nov 6, 2017 · For fifty years, Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” has set the terms for the discussion of minimalism, or as he prefers to call it, literalism. More than just a commentary on a controversial set of works that challenged and largely eclipsed high modernism, “Art and Objecthood” has itself remained the subject of intense debate since ...