The ostensible subject of this new book is the work of the great French realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). But what Michael Fried, a much-lauded academic art historian and director of the Humanities Institute at the Johns Hopkins University, has given us is only remotely concerned with Courbet. His real subject is the perpetuation of a certain florid species of contemporary academic “criticism.” Courbet appears merely as the occasion, the raw material, for the exercise of Professor Fried’s critical lucubrations.

Not that this comes as a surprise. Anyone who has followed Professor Fried’s career knows that he has long since abandoned art criticism per se—criticism, that is, whose chief purpose is to understand and illuminate works of art—in order to devote his considerable talents to chic academic theory-mongering. Courbet’s Realism is the summary of his recent efforts in this direction.

As usual, Professor Fried operates with a formidable criticus apparatus, and he has obviously devoted an immense labor to this study. And yet, if one didn’t know better, one might think he was attempting a comic impersonation of contemporary academic pedantry. Almost a quarter of the book is given over to notes: long, arcane notes, notes that wander and digress, that include lengthy passages from Hegel and Marx and Walter Benjamin in German, from Jacques Lacan in French—notes, in short, that in many cases have absolutely nothing to do with the painting of Gustave Courbet. Near the beginning of the book, Professor Fried tells us that he is convinced that “Courbet himself was largely unaware of the aspects of his work I focus on.” This is perhaps the only unexceptionable statement in the entire volume.

Savor this representative footnote: “It’s tempting to compare the feminization of the phallus/paintbrush in the Young Women on the Banks of the Seine with the implied castration of the dead roe deer and indeed of the passive hunter in The Quarry, an almost exactly contemporary work. Cf. Jacques Derrida’s speculations on the interplay between phallic and floral imagery in the writings of Jean Genet in Glas, passim.” It’s no use objecting that there is neither paintbrush nor phallus in the bucolic painting of young women by the Seine; nor that The Quarry depicts a hunting scene, not a grotesque Freudian melodrama; nor indeed that all such speculation would be utterly anathema to the earthy, conspicuously non-metaphysical Courbet. For Professor Fried, the fact that a painting’s subject is prosaic is only an added spur to his overworked faculty for fantasy.

In the end it is a macabre kind of bookish fantasy, not scholarship, not criticism, that animates Courbet’s Realism. As such, the book is a veritable inventory of fashionable academic topics and rhetorical tics. Everything’s here: a pinch of deconstruction, a large measure of sexual politics, a positive obsession with issues of power and domination, all mixed and stirred in Professor Fried's deadpan academic prose. Did you know that Courbet's realist painting was fundamentally an “allegory of its own production”? That in A Burial at Ornans the depicted shovel “may be likened to the painter’s brush”? That Courbet had a "propensity for calling into question the ontological impermeability of the bottom framing-edge"? Would you have guessed that Courbet’s realist paintings provide “an archetype of the perfect reciprocity between production and consumption that Karl Marx in the ‘General Introduction’ to the Grundrisse posited”? Or that Courbet—yes, Courbet—had latent feminist, indeed, “feminine” tendencies?

In the context of this book, mention of Marx necessarily reminds one of that sage’s comment about history repeating itself first as tragedy, then farce. Which prompts the question: is it farce or tragedy that has been the “latent tendency” of Professor Fried’s work all along?

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 9 Number 1, on page 79
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