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"Fried compares Menzel's art with that of the 19th-century's two other great realist painters, Courbet and Eakins. Analyzing paintings, drawings and prints from all stages of Menzel's long career, he asserts that the distinctive quality of Menzel's realism is found in his concern with evoking the multi-sensory, fully-embodied relationships of persons with the universe of physical objects, tools and situations. Fried establishes connections between Menzel's work and a broad array of extra-artistic contexts, among them the writings of the empathy theorists, Kierkegaard on reflection and the everyday, Helmholtz on vision, Fontane's ""Effi Briest"", Duranty's art criticism, Simmel on modern urban life, E.T.A. Hoffmann's ""art of seeing"", and Benjamin on traces. He also explores the complex relationship between Menzel's version of ""extreme"" realism and the exactly contemporary technology of photography. The resulting work establishes Menzel as a key artist of modernity."

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Michael Fried is J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of various books of art criticism, art history and poetry, including Manet's Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s, Art and Objecthood; Essays and Reviews, and To the Center of the Earth (poems).

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