Michael Fried is a poet of the utmost integrity. -- J. M. Coetzee No one sees paintings better than Michael Fried, or thinks as persistently or with such philosophical depth about such seeing, about the very possibility of pictorial meaning. -- Robert B. Pippin One of the most powerful and influential critical minds of our time. -- Michael Clune Throughout the 240 prose poems, the interviews and the essays, a singular voice emerges. In the prose poems especially, Frieds recollections of a life in art express an intensity of commitment to art (and to friendships that often have art at their center) that, I would wager, is unparalleled in all the postwar years. Frieds memories . . . Are lyrical, graceful, and quite beautiful. -- Robert B. Pippin Everything I know about arthow to look, how to think about what I see, and how to mine the relay between object and beholderI learned from Michael Fried. It would be impossible to imagine the course of art-critical and art-historical thought in this century without [ him]. -- Patricia L. Lewy Praise for Fried's Essays:
[ Michael Fried was] responding to new painting and sculpture as if everything depended on itas if sifting the bogus, the time-serving, the shocking, the contemporary from the actually difficult and beautiful was a calling. -- T. J. Clark * Brooklyn Rail * Praise for Fried's Poems:
"Fried is [ now] better than ever, bearing witness here, as always, to his luminous intelligence and imagination. Hes a great writer with a compelling literary personality." William E. Cain
Frieds work is thought on the page. Alexander Nemerov
Like his writing on art, his poetry thrills through cadence, lyric, and the force of intentionan expressive valence as convincing as it is moving. Patricia L. Lewy
A remarkable book. Nicholas Delbanco * Brooklyn Rail * Praise for Fried's Interviews:
[ T]he essence of the basic argument is to describe a spark that jumped between his brilliantly impetuous thinking of 1967 and, to begin with at least, my own ambitions. [ N]othing remotely like it had been articulated before. -- Jeff Wall * Brooklyn Rail *
