Customer Reviews

Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot

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I came to this book as someone interested in new media rather than as an art historian, and I found it fascinating. Fried uses Diderot and other eighteen century art critics' writing to understand how the beholder of paintings is positioned. He uses an abundance of paintings (reproduced in good quality black and white) and citations of art criticism to show the ways in which painted characters ignore the beholder, first by being absorbed in quiet activities, and later in self-abandonment. While the beholder is clearly set apart from the represented world in history paintings, Diderot also writes about entering landscape paintings, stepping inside the world.

I found the book very readable and thought-provoking, and relevant to far more than just eighteenth century French art. Personally I will use it in relation to our current notions of immersion and interactivity.

This book is about the tension in French 18th century painting between work which is dramatically restrained on the surface and work which is more visually ebullient. The basic question is about the purpose of painting. Should painting be a portal to an internal experience for the viewer, or should painting be a form of entertainment? Fried is not judgmental about theatricality, but is much more interested in the psychology and mechanics of what he terms absorption. He explores this both through the evolved etiquette of absorption in the paintings -- the intricacies involved in showing people without exhibiting them -- and commentary about the paintings from contemporary critics. This last focuses on excerpts from Diderot, and there is a great chapter on this unique critic as well. This is genuine, as opposed to popular or overtly intellectual, art history. As a writer Fried is highly organized and readable, articulate without resorting to a an impenetrable vocabulary. He keeps the story in motion and explains clearly to the modern reader what this painting was about from the perspective of the culture that created it, also providing fascinating insights of his own. This book provides an concentrated and elegant illustration of the perennial tension in painting between form and content, sophistication and sincerity. But, much in the spirit of absorption itself during the period, Fried lets this be something the reader chooses to consider in broader terms, or not.