Michael Fried - Early Career

Early Career

Fried describes his early career in the introduction to Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998), an anthology of his art criticism in the 60s and 70s. Although he majored in English at Princeton it was there that he became interested in writing art criticism. While at Princeton he met the artist Frank Stella and through him Walter Darby Bannard. In 1958, he wrote a letter to Clement Greenberg expressing his admiration for his writing and first met him in the Spring of that year. In September 1958, he moved to Oxford, Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, and then to London in 1961-2, where he studied philosophy part-time at University College, London (UCL), under Stuart Hampshire and Richard Wollheim. In 1961 Hilton Kramer offered him the post of London correspondent for the journal Arts. In the fall of 1961, Fried began his friendship with the sculptor Anthony Caro; Caro had invited him to write the introduction to his Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition in 1963.

In the late summer of 1962, Fried returned to the U.S, where he combined studying for a Ph.D in art history at Harvard with writing art criticism, initially for Art International, and curating the exhibition Three American painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum.