Fried discusses Menzel's realism in next Katz lecture

Michael Fried will speak on Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in 19th-Century Berlin when he delivers the Solomon Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities. The lecture will be at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 16, in 220 Kane Hall. It is free and open to all faculty, staff, students, and the public.

Adolph Menzel (1815-1905), one of the two foremost German painters of the 19th-century (the other being Caspar David Frederick), has at last begun to be recognized outside Germany as an artist of the highest importance. But there is little consensus, in Germany or elsewhere, as to the meaning of his achievement. This isn't surprising. His work is vast and diverse, ranging from nearly Impressionist spontaneity to a series of paintings of the life and deeds of the 18th-century Prussian monarch and military leader Frederick the Great. Also, the student of his art is faced with the problem of what to make of his several thousand drawings.

Ambidextrous Menzel drew all the time, often on sketchbooks of various sizes that he carried with him in special pockets sewn into his coats. The result is a body of work whose composition differs radically from that of the well-known French painters who until now have dominated our conception of a modernist pictorial career. And yet, according to Fried, it can be argued that Menzel deserves to be seen as a titanic figure on a par with the greatest of his contemporaries. Fried's lecture will present a wide range of Menzel's works and will make a case for Menzel's unique artistic and historical importance.

Fried is the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. He received his doctorate in fine arts from Harvard University and taught at Harvard before moving to Johns Hopkins in 1975. He is the author of Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane; Courbet's Realism; Manet's Modernism, or The Face of Painting in the 1860s; and Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. ¶