Absorption and theatricality :
painting and beholder in the age of Diderot /
Michael Fried.
Description
- Language(s)
-
English
- Published
-
Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1988, c1980.
- Summary
-
"With this widely acclaimed work, [the author] revised the way in which eighteenth-century French painting and criticism were viewed and understood. Analyzing paintings produced between 1753 and 1781 and the comments of a number of critics who wrote about them, especially Denis Diderot, [the author] discovers a new emphasis in the art of the time, one based not on subject matter or style but on values and effects. The particular effect [he] focuses on is that of absorption - the human figure engrossed in an activity as if in denial of an audience. He then demonstrates the importance of this issue - the need to establish the fiction that the beholder does not exist - in the evolution of French painting during the last decades of the Ancien Regime"-Back cover.
- Note
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Includes index.
Originally published: University of California Press, 1980.
- Physical Description
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xvii, 249 p. :
ill. ;
26 cm.
- ISBN
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0226262138 (pbk.)
Viewability