Art critic, art historian, literary critic-historian, and poet Michael Fried is the J. R. Herbert Boone Emeritus Professor of Humanities and the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. His many books include The Moment of Caravaggio.
This study by the director of Johns Hopkins University's Humanities Center consists of two lengthy essays offering provocative interpretations of two masters of realism. Fried first examines minutely Eakins's famous The Gross Clinic in terms of explicit and implicit references to the act of writing, a concern Fried finds present in many Eakins compositions. In the second section, Fried focuses on the disturbing images of supine, staring bodies depicted repeatedly in Crane's writings, which, Fried believes, reveal an authorial preoccupation with the process of writing as the act of inscribing signs on paper. Fried's discourse on these thematic tensions raises questions of analysis that will intrigue both art historians and literary critics. Starr E. Smith, Georgetown Univ. Lib., Washington, D.C.
Ask a Question About this Product More... |