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

Manet's Modernism elaborates on "Manet's Sources," a celebrated essay Michael Fried first published in Artforum in 1969. Now, as then, Fried's aim is to recover the "original meaning of Manet's art." But there's an obvious complication: coming more than a century after Manet, Fried won't be able to perceive the "original meaning" without a determined search. Something, however, impresses him immediately - a feeling he trusts but realizes he must also resist - his consciousness of a self-contained formal excellence, the quality that leads critics to credit Manet with reinventing painting as an autonomous medium. In the name of history, Fried challenges this formalist evaluation, arguing that what we customarily find in Manet derives not from necessity but from circumstance - the formalism is real enough, but we focus on it because we've been primed to do so. For Fried, there remains something behind it, something equally forceful, but now occluded.

Fried identifies the source of the problem: many of Manet's most articulate early supporters were also Impressionism's first champions (among them, Theodore Duret and Emile Zola), but Manet himself was no Impressionist. The critics imposed on his art a set of then emergent, now familiar, modernist values, conceiving the process of painting as a remedy for modernity's psychological malaise. They regarded certain features of Manet's technique - broad flat tones, accentuated brushwork, unruly perspective - as indications of a self-sufficient pictorial order, independent of restrictive convention, and adequate to the most personal vision. Manet and his formalist art became emblems of freedom - artistic, social, spiritual.

Whether or not formal principles transcend history, belief in the supreme value of such principles is contingent. Manet's production of an art that so convincingly fits a formalist paradigm doesn't mean he intended it that way. An art and its historical evaluation can proceed out of sync. Yet that gives no license to critics who would employ new interpretive frames arbitrarily. Indeed, Fried rejects two recent interpretive fashions that have resisted the old formalist readings. The first he labels "the low-wattage social history of art" popular during the 1970s and '80s. Although he excludes the work of T. J. Clark (and presumably certain others) from this company of dim bulbs, he nevertheless notes Clark's failure to provide a "sense of [Manet's] engagement with a constantly evolving network of artistic issues," precisely Fried's own concern. Understand the art before you understand the society, is Fried's lesson; do it the other way round and art becomes no more than an illustration to scholarship. French art historian Jean Clay exemplifies the second fashion - interpreting Manet through the language of "later developments and theories (Pop Art, Benjamin on aura)," a misapplied postmodernism that puts ideas ahead of art.

So Manet's "original meaning" can have little to do with the concerns of the social historian (at least as they are commonly exercised) and escapes the barrage of concepts and comparisons applied by newer, anachronistic methods in art history. This leaves Fried with a program that will seem traditional, but the specifics of his case are surely not. His strategy is threefold: he studies paintings with a remarkable eye for the defining details, arguing, for example, that pictorial "facing" (the most striking and intense relationship of beholding, often associated with portraiture) is to Manet what flatness is to Impressionists; he discerns evidence of sensitivity to such details through an exhaustive reading of nineteenth-century art reviews, word by word; and he also reconstructs Manet's generational identity. But does it all work?

The problem with Fried's inventive visual analysis is that there's always more to be observed. A case in point: a hand gesture - recognizable as that of holding or supporting one's chin - appears in two figures Fried investigates at some length, Courbet's Man with the Leather Belt and the central woman in Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe. In Courbet's case alone is the hand significant for Fried, and in this painting the gesture is empty; the hand assumes the position of holding, but is metonymically displaced to the side of the face, holding nothing. Fried sees something different: Courbet's depicted gesture is miming the position of the painter's actual hand as it would have been painting the image with a brush. An intriguing notion - yet the gesture remains clearly that of holding a chin and not a brush, as comparison with Manet's Dejeuner shows. Given that Fried's argument dwells on faces, "facing," portraiture, and touch, the gesture of touching a face ought to be noted, even when displaced. Had Fried acknowledged this understanding of the hand's position, and then claimed it was irrelevant to his concerns, I might still doubt the argument but would give more credence to the presentation.

Perhaps such omissions in reading pictures are masked by excesses in reading texts. Fried extracts telling characterizations and phrasing from obscure passages of art criticism, a method which often works to great advantage. He finds, for example, that Edmond Duranty evaluated Alphonse Legros' paintings similarly to Manet's in that they gave a "feeling of modern life." This supports Fried's contention that Manet and Legros, along with Henri Fantin-Latour and James McNeill Whistler, shared a special sensibility and constituted their own "generation of 1863." But sometimes, as when Fried investigates written statements by Legros himself, who he admits was "almost illiterate," he pushes interpretation beyond appropriate limits. Legros' brief and isolated remarks on a rarefied distinction between parts and wholes inspires in Fried a complicated speculative argument with little redeeming incisiveness.

Fried suggests that the "generation of 1863" participated in a paradigm shift - or perhaps it's merely a frisson in pictorial history - as they crossed between "Courbet's corporeal realism and the ocular realism of the Impressionists." Here Fried uses description of pictorial modes and their liminal, transitional stages to articulate what others would analyze as a social phenomenon, the formation of a collective identity. Fried creates the "generation of 1863" out of a self-regulating pictorial history, no more grounded in material or political conditions than zeitgeist is. Even as he extends his unconventional account of Manet's artistic motivations, the structure of that very account assumes a contained, formalist character.

Manet's Modernism doesn't necessarily improve upon its origins in "Manet's Sources." That essay concentrated on Manet's references to older art, identifying them ingeniously, and offering a nuanced rationale for the artist's choices. It showed Manet to have presided over a comprehensive program that included subtle allusions to the issues raised by Jules Michelet and Theophile Thore, public intellectuals who promoted the politics of international harmony and cultural universalism - a political modernism to accord with worldwide economic and social progress. Manet's odd combinations of motifs from different cultural traditions could be related to this universalism as could aspects of his equalizing or non-hierarchical style (in his pictures, figures and their environments receive like handling). Despite the brilliance of its synthesis, "Manet's Sources" was ridiculed as much as it was praised since so many of the visual connections seemed far-fetched. After all these years they still do, as Fried himself admits in certain cases, even as he reprints his 1969 essay along with rejoinders to his critics. This material constitutes the first two of the five central chapters of Manet's Modernism.

The passion of "Manet's Sources" now elicits the author's curious half-apology regarding its time of composition: "I wouldn't be surprised if the reader came to feel that some of the emotional climate of that devastating year [1968] made its way into the writing." One does feel emotion in this work - specially in the wonderfully generative allusions to the politics of Michelet and Thore. It's a moment when art connects to the rest of human endeavor. In his new chapters Fried briefly defends the documentation behind his "political reading" but fails to elaborate on his searching social insights, as if to distance himself from them. For all its intellectual energy, Manet's Modernism, as it advances from chapter to chapter, becomes increasingly hermetic and technical. I don't want to suggest that Fried is wrong to criticize the tautological nature of much social history of art, nor the distracted, self-indulgent mood of much of what passes for postmodernist criticism; but his own project - a concerted exploration of issues of pictorialism and beholding - has become needlessly self-limiting.

Richard Shill is Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and director of the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin.