The Brooklyn Rail

“Words,” Michael Fried writes in The Edge of the Table, his new book of prose poems, “no matter how carefully chosen and artfully arranged, can’t summon the magic.”

What can? “The reader must be made to feel, to register in mind and nerves … an impetus of intellection that otherwise would have no home in the world.”

Fried is talking about prose poems, but he might as well be speaking of his art history. His work is thought on the page. Long before his theories and histories take shape—or rather as they take shape, as they assume over decades of writing clearer and ever-more enduring form—the reader (this reader, in any case) feels they are always shimmering, all still aspiration, like the winter stars the young Fried and his friend Jack Womack saw at Mont Saint-Michel on New Year’s Eve 1960.

Those stars become the church bells Fried hears six decades later in Baltimore, chiming the “Ode to Joy” and “Amazing Grace.” The “refreshed silence” after the bells stop is, even in summer, a breath of winter air.

When he was a Ph.D. student at Harvard in the 1960s, Fried would scatter 35 mm slides on the illuminated slide table to prepare a lecture. In his “Exit Interview: Art History,” one of the two interviews with himself in the book Exit Interview, he describes his pleasure at this initial stage of creating a talk. The slides light up before him; all is still in formation. Connections appear and fade. It is a moment of “firstness,” the term he used to describe Morris Louis’s “Unfurled” paintings. Arranging the slides, he makes them into periodic tables, orders of the elements, Scrabble words going up and down and side to side. Pictures become sentences, but words are not enough, and what he is truly doing is arranging his thoughts.

Scatter is my word, not Fried’s. He says he “deposited” the slides on the slide table. Deposit has a more dignified ring. It is a slow accretion of time, like sand running through an hourglass. It is a banking, a betting, a form of down payment, or even a legal proceeding, a deposition. But scatter fits better my imagination of the scene. Spread on the table, the slides assume a formidable randomness. Anything can happen. But in a moment they come together. The tesserae of slides turn to a mosaic in the mind.

The mosaic glows but not with its own light. As if to say that the true aim of all gold is to hold the light that makes it shine—to say that the light itself is far more important than the gold that holds it. Each painting becomes—how to say it?—aware of itself under Fried’s “impetus of intellection.” His powers of thought resurrect the artist’s powers of creation until the historical protocols of scholars and curators and antiquarians—each a sexton of the dead—become a new kind of history, a history of the never-past, of ongoing life itself: of Adolph Menzel’s breezes fluttering the awnings.

This life is a pleasure, a thrill, a requirement. Writes Fried in his book After Caravaggio, speaking of Valentin de Boulogne’s Samson (1670–71): “It is as if Samson’s own physicality, indeed his own mindedness, were not wholly transparent to him, something to be taken for granted—to be simply ‘lived’—but rather were assumed by him as a burden of some sort.” So it is with Fried; so it is for his reader too.

How does an art historian engage with Fried’s sui generis work? I learned about him in a seminar taught by Bryan Jay Wolf at Yale in 1987, when I was a Ph.D. student. Wolf assigned Fried’s article on Thomas Eakins in Representations. I had written my senior thesis on Eakins at the University of Vermont, but I had never read anything remotely like Fried on Eakins’s masterwork, The Gross Clinic (1875). Dr. Gross is an unconscious variation of Diego Velázquez’s self-portrait in Las Meninas (1656). Dr. Gross’s bloody scalpel is a kind of paintbrush. The painting, like much of Eakins’s work, shifts between the “planes” of writing and painting. It all blew me away. Later that year, I asked my dad for a copy of Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane. I still have it as one of my most meaningful books, the red spine turned pink with sunlight.

I liked the chapter on Stephen Crane even better than the one on Eakins. Fried wrote of Crane portraying his own act of writing in the scenes he wrote. The upturned faces of dead Civil War soldiers evoke the flat pieces of paper on which Crane poured the colored sensations of his words. No one else I knew who read Fried’s book was quite as enthralled as me. But who cares? I had found my way.

Soon I was writing my dissertation on the American artist Frederic Remington. I had received a predoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian and moved from New Haven to Washington in June 1989, and there, looking at a Remington painting one afternoon, I had my first manifestly Friedian encounter with a work of art.

The painting is a nighttime scene. Crossing a stream, a group of riders has been shot at. Their assailants are unseen, but the gunshots spray the water and the dirt. There is general alarm. A rearing white horse especially caught my attention. With anthropomorphic fear, it stares at the gunshot erupting the water beneath its front hooves. I noticed right away that the spray of water is very painty—hardly more than inchoate brushwork. I saw that the spray matches the choppily painted mane of the horse, as well as its swishing tail. With Fried on Crane in mind, I thought of the horse as realizing suddenly that it is made only of paint, that its realism—in a sense, its very life—is a fiction, a concoction, an untruth. I saw that the realization is terrifying not only for the horse but for the artist, who acknowledged that his would-be historical paintings have no historical power: that they are, as he said, “merely paint.” A mysterious burden, a lift into clarity: I feared life, but writing about a painting of terror was pleasant.

It was not for many years that I became aware of the anagram lurking in my breakthrough painting, which is called Fired On (1907). The relation of Fired to Fried was so obvious that I missed it, yet I feel now that Fried leading me to this of all paintings was hardly an accident. To think in a measure like Fried is to be fired on, to be spurred, inspired, and attacked. It is to be in the middle of things, like Remington’s riders unable to know exactly what is going on yet composing themselves into an impromptu tableau of sharpened recognitions. It is a risky endeavor, being freed—liberated—switched “on.”

When I started teaching at Yale, having returned there as a professor in 2001, I was asked to be a visitor in an American Studies “proseminar,” a weekly meeting of first-year American Studies Ph.D. students. I assigned Fried’s chapter on Crane. My intent was to provoke, to lift the students out of what I assumed would be their rote commitment to scholarship as political commentary. I wanted them to experience the pleasure of seeing and being—of “intellection” happening on the page, just as seductively as one of Crane’s serpentine renditions of the letter “S.” Prepared for pushback, I came to the small seminar room looking out onto leafy York Street, next to the ice cream store and the pizza place, and was astounded by the level of hatred. With sharp unanimity, the students rejected Fried’s whole premise, singling out the serpentine “S” as the stupidest thing they had ever read. The world is going to hell, they informed me (this was during the Iraq War). There is no time for such nonsense.

Later, one of them sent me two of his books from his native Philippines, where he had returned to live and had become a poet. He writes of egrets dipping their feet in newly plowed earth after the rain; of girls in boots and umbrellas waiting for a storm to end and the music to begin. Looking at an old letter of recommendation, I am reminded that he wrote his dissertation on the face.

“Endings matter a lot,” Fried writes in The Edge of the Table. By a strange rhyme, the figures facing us all become the figures turning away. Initials become a sign-off. Yet by magic the man smoking his pipe and the Parisian lady with her parrot scintillate back and forth, first eclipsed like the slide tables when the art historian accidentally bumps the switch, then shining again when he turns the light back on. In scatters and deposits, the holy light—God’s departure—makes a pattern.