About the Author

Michael Fried is the J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of two previous books of poems, Powers and To the Center of the Earth, as well as numerous works in art history and criticism, including Art and Objecthood and Manet's Modernism, both published by the University of Chicago Press. In the spring of 2002 he gave the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art.