Michael Fried

Nineteen Fifty-Nine

“Michael, you’ve gone from boy strength
to man strength,” Frank said to me approvingly.
But he was wrong. When we wrestled it took less than half a
minute
before he was sitting on my chest.
Frank rose disappointed. He preferred a challenge.
One sweltering late afternoon in New York Darby obliged him—
still close friends, they went at each other like mortal enemies
for a solid hour
as I sat and watched, appalled.
Earlier that day we had driven to beneath the Brooklyn Bridge
and walked around, and smoked cigars, and felt shiningly
alive. The sixties hadn’t yet begun
but we knew with utmost certainty that whatever was coming to
pass (until then without us)
we three would have a hand in it. Frank first of all—
“These paths lead only into painting,” Carl Andre wrote about his
stripes
later that year. And they did, they did,
as far as they went.

Michael Fried is the J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent books are Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin and The Next Bend in the Road (poems). He is currently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where he is completing a book on Caravaggio. In 2004 he received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award.

Critical Inquiry Volume 34, Number S2, Winter© 2008 by The University of Chicago.
0093-1896/08/34S1-0001$10.00