Manet's Modernism, or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s

Manet's Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s is the culminating work in a trilogy of books by Michael Fried exploring the roots and genesis of pictorial modernism. Building on his earlier studies of the central antitheatrical tradition within Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment French painting, Fried argues that previous accounts of Edouard Manet as the first modernist painter are based on a simplistic reading of the situation Manet inherited and, partly as a result, fail to grasp the specificity, complexity, and ambition - also the deeply problematic nature - of his epochal paintings of the 1860s