Volume 28, Number 11 · June 25, 1981
Out of the Picture
By Francis Haskell
Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot
by Michael Fried
University of California Press, 249 pp., $11.50 (paper)
How much can we learn about the art of the past by reading about the attitudes of contemporaries to it? Though not much stressed, this is the first and among the most significant of the questions raised by Michael Fried's book. Absorption and Theatricality is ostensibly devoted to a short period in the history of eighteenth-century French painting but it is in fact also concerned with far wider issues. We know very little about how the 'general public' reacted to art exhibitions before the end of the nineteenth century, and the few comments we can overhear from a remoter past do not, in general, encourage confidence that many fresh insights are to be learned from them. Thus in 1775 a writer tells us that 'adorable, heavenly, divine, prodigious, detestable, pitiful' were the most common adjectives used of the pictures on view at the Salon; two years later 'frightening' (effrayante) became a fashionable word with which to praise a specially telling likeness. Anyone who attends private exhibitions today will recognize that after two centuries the vocabulary of art appreciation remains remarkably unchanged.
Review, 2982 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |