Theatricality and Absorption, Two Concepts by Michael Fried
- Art d'Histoire
- May 28
- 4 min read
During the second half of the French eighteenth century, the relationship between a canvas and its public changed.
The Rococo style, then dominant, began to provoke a profound rejection due to its character being judged as artificial and superficial. The heart of the problem lay in the place accorded to the person viewing the work: should the painting address them directly, or, on the contrary, ignore them to exist by and in itself?
Michael Fried was one of the great historians of the second half of the 20th century to develop a theory of modernity based on the place the spectator occupies in relation to a work.
The Rupture with Artifice: The Rejection of Theatricality
To understand the evolution of French painting of this era, one must first grasp the concept of theatricality, vigorously combated by Denis Diderot.
A composition is said to be theatrical when the characters appear to be overacting their emotions with the explicit aim of seducing and attracting the attention of the public—a posture that destroys the dramatic illusion. If the painted character is conscious of being observed, they lose all sincerity, reducing noble pictorial art to the level of mere entertainment or a work of propaganda.
Coming from the world of the avant-garde of Abstract Expressionism where modernity in art becomes ontological, Michael Fried had, at the end of the 1960s, criticised an exhibition of sculptures by Donald Judd and Tony Smith for their theatricality; a concept taken from Denis Diderot that he would develop and oppose to that of absorption.
To preserve the autonomy and authenticity of a work, the artist must imperatively establish a distance from their audience. The characters appearing on the canvas must evolve without ever suspecting the presence of an external gaze, at the risk of freezing the action and ruining the subject at hand—a requirement that critics, and first and foremost Diderot, applied to works such as Roman Charity by Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée.
Absorption, a New Relationship to the Spectator
To counter the temptation of theatricality and facticity, painters of the second half of the eighteenth century developed a pictorial solution that Fried calls "absorption."
The figures are so deeply concentrated on an occupation, a thought, or an emotion, that they totally forget the existence of the outside world—that of the spectator.
The dynamic of absorption generates a paradox. By visually excluding the person looking at the canvas, by transforming them into a mere voyeur of an intimate scene, the painting actually invites them to immerse themselves more intensely in the represented universe.
This distancing thus has an inclusive counter-effect; the public unites with the work in silent contemplation.
Two Aesthetic Conventions: Dramatic or Pastoral
Absorption can be implemented in two distinct ways.
First, through the dramatic convention inherent to intimate genre scenes.
The artist captures attention through empathy. Paintings like The House of Cards by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin or The Little Lazyboy by Jean-Baptiste Greuze can illustrate this model.
The physical exclusion of the public is compensated for by a powerful emotional connection with the figures absorbed in their tasks.
Second, through the pastoral convention, a process that functions spatially rather than emotionally.
In the face of a landscape such as View of the Gulf of Naples by Claude-Joseph Vernet or View of the Port of Ripetta, Rome by Hubert Robert, the spectator is no longer kept at a distance by emotional contagion but by geography. Their existence in front of the painting is denied because they are virtually invited to enter the interior of the pictorial space to move through it, thus becoming a full participant in the composition.
The influence of this aesthetic tradition, based on the negation of the presence of the public, structured French classical painting for a long time. The paradigm eventually collapsed in the middle of the nineteenth century with the moderns. Michael Fried, a specialist moreover in the compositions of Courbet and Manet, shows how modernity in painting can be read as the conscious liquidation of the principle of absorption.
By fully assuming that a painting is an object designed specifically to be looked at, and by breaking the unity of the canvas, works like Olympia or The Old Musician by Édouard Manet definitively turned their backs on this eighteenth-century heritage and opened the way to modern art.
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