Menzels Realism Fried example essay topic

Even that stupendous mass of material (how were the drawings displayed?) might not have satisfied Michael Frieds appetite for Menzel. Fried has written a mettlesome book that ranges all over the oeuvre. After Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (1987) and Courbet's Realism (1990), Fried completes a trilogy on his three great realists, by which he means that all three were intensely bodily painters. Menzel in particular created highly convincing fictions of embodiment that invite us to project ourselves as if corporeally into the works. Fried pleads the strongest case he can for the quality and significance of Menzels work.

To experience these moments of what Fried calls exchange or transfer... between persons and things you will need to rendezvous with the works, meet them face to face in the precious now. So unless you remember well the great Menzel exhibition of 1997 at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC, your pleasure in this book will be deferred until your next trip to Berlin, where most of the paintings and drawings are kept. As Fried points out, Menzels reputation, like Eakins, has been stranded in his native country along with his works. (Graham 25) In Menzels Realism Fried jumps from topic to topic, contrasting or connecting the painters work with John Ruskin's ideas about vision and drawing; with Kierkegaard's conception of everyday experience as a ground of meaning; with the empathy theory practiced by Robert Vischer and Heinrich Wolf flin; with Georg Simmel's thoughts on urban experience; with photography; and with much else. There is no cumulative argument, just a constellation of contexts. Frieds voice as always is unpretentious and stubbornly questing, and the book is a delight to read.

In reproduction, it is Menzels drawings that make the greatest impact. You can hardly tear your eyes away, as Fried puts it, from the lathery Unmade Bed, ca. 1845; Worker Eating, Several Views, 1872-74; or the precarious mountain of furniture in Moving Out of a Cellar, 1844, all in pencil; or the glowering gouaches of empty suits of armor. No less enchanting are Body of an Officer, 1873, a drawing of a Prussian soldier exhumed in a Berlin vault after a century of gaping sleep (Menzel was of course on hand, with pad), and Marks on a Urinal Wall, 1900.

The immediately winning paintings are the so-called private pictures: loose-jointed views from back windows, impressions of empty bedrooms or the flotsam of a rural backyard, pictures admired even by Julius Meier-Graeme, the Francophile critic who otherwise deplored Menzels uncouth naturalism. (F inly) The ferocious intimacy and taste for disarray in Menzels work strike us as forward pointing. But this sensibility and the meaty draftsmanship derive, I would say, from rococo masters Watteau, Fragonard, Chodowiecki, and perhaps ultimately from Rubens. Menzel spent decades illustrating the life and times of Frederick the Great (1712-86), the polymath Prussian king, military strategist of genius, and intimate of Voltaire. In these most public works- canvases for the royal and imperial courts of his own day or for industrialists, wood engravings for multi volume popular histories- Menzel dreamed an airless world of automaton like courtiers, treacherous physiognomies, periwigs and tricorn hats, and gargantuan crystal chandeliers. He was equally given to farcical anecdotes and spidery ornamental vignettes.

His historical confections were the foundation of his official patronage and all his popular affection. In the eye of the public his masterpiece was Flute Concert of Frederick the Great at Sans souci, 1850-52. Fried is unfazed by the depth of Menzels ancien regime fantasy. He looks straight through the subject matter and instead gathers the entire oeuvre under a single proposition: What Menzel was aiming at in all these works was effects of embodiment. Fried finds a hundred different phrases for the enigma of empathy: We feel Menzels imaginative projection of bodily experience; the works with their somatic tenor exert a quasi-physical pull; Menzel was activating a primal or relation to embodiment that he found in artifacts; the works make bodily valences... all but palpable; they depict bodily sensations... practically as vivid to us as our own. We know what he means, I suppose, but the accumulation of paraphrases points to a risky lack of precision, the same conceptual incompleteness that led to the demise of nineteenth-century empathy theory in the first place.