Michael Fried

Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday

495 I have presented versions of this essay at a number of universities and museums in this country and abroad: École des Hautes Études in Paris, Princeton University, Städelschule in Frankfurt, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Chicago, Schaulager in Basel, Columbia University (where it was the main component of the 2005 Lionel Trilling Seminar in Criticism), University of Pennsylvania, and Johns Hopkins University (in a symposium on “The Everyday”). For their roles on those occasions I want to thank Danielle Cohn, Eric Michaud, Claude Imbert, Brigid Doherty, Daniel Birnbaum, Werner Hamacher, Margaret Rose, Walter Benn Michaels, Jennifer Ashton, Theodora Vischer, Gottfried Boehm, Ralph Ubl, Jonathan Arac, Diarmuid Costello, Gregg M. Horowitz, Mary-Beth Wetli, and (at the University of Chicago, where this material was presented as part of a seminar on recent photography) especially James Conant, Robert Pippin, Joel Snyder, and David Wellbery. A French translation of a previous version of this essay appeared under the title “Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, et le quotidien,” trans. Gaëlle Morel, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, no. 92 (Summer 2005): 4–27. My thanks to Jean-Pierre Criqui for his interest and support. 1. See Jeff Wall: Catalogue Raisonné, 1978–2004, ed. Theodora Vischer and Heidi Naef (Basel, 2005), p. 339. Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday

From Memory to Oblivion: Manet and the Origins of Modernist Painting

Manet has long been notorious for his quotations from and allusions to the Old Masters, especially in his masterpieces of the 1860s. But what has not been recognized is that a similar engagement with the art of the past characterizes the work of other leading painters in his generation. It is as if the most ambitious younger painters were all responding to a new situation, one that called for deliberate allusion to or adaptation of earlier works and styles in order that meaningful connection with painting’s past not be lost. With the advent of the Impressionists, however, the situation changed abruptly: what now became crucial was the ability of a new work of art to “sustain comparison”with works from the past whose quality was not in doubt. And this is to say that the earlier work was increasingly divested of its sense of pastness in the interests of its authority in the present. These and related developments mark the first phase of pictorial modernism.