“Orientation in Viewing: The Art of Caspar David Friedrich."

ANU School of Art is proud to present in collaboration with the National Gallery of Australia and the Power Institute for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney, a public lecture by Michael Fried

“Orientation in Viewing: The Art of Caspar David Friedrich.”

In this lecture Michael Fried will offer a reading of Friedrich’s art in the light of considerations of orientation as stated by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his 1886 essay “What is Orientation in Thinking?”

Michael M. Fried is a poet, art historian, art and literary critic and is currently the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and Art History at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He has written extensively about a range of subjects, including abstract painting and sculpture since WW2, French painting and art criticism from the mid-eighteenth century to the advent of Edouard Manet, as well as about writers and artists such as Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Caillebotte, Roger Fry and Joseph Conrad. Fried has also written about Caravaggio and the transformation of Italian painting circa 1600, and more recently on the work of contemporary artists Anri Sala, Charles Ray, Joseph Marioni, and Douglas Gordon. He is currently working on a short book on Madame Bovary, to be called Flaubert’s Gueuloir.

His publications include Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Manet’s Modernism, The Moment of Caravaggio and Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon. He has also written three books of poem