Three American Painters

A reconsideration of the significance of Michael Fried’s early critical writing, as articulated in his introduction for the publication that accompanied the 1965 exhibition Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella and a visual summation of the artists, many of them photographers, endorsed by Fried over the six decades since.

This is the catalogue intended to accompany the canceled exhibition that had been scheduled to take place in summer 2024, Three American Painters, Then and Now, which was to be: first, a recreation of the 1965 exhibition curated by critic and art historian, Michael Fried, and second, a survey of the artists, many of them photographers, that Fried has critically endorsed since then. Likewise, the essays collected in this book recognize a through line from Post-Painterly abstraction of the 1960s to the contemporary artists, who, according to Fried, impose their artistic intentions with a similar rigor and self-criticality. The art produced by these contemporary artists shares something with the motivations of modernist painting in the 60s and 70s, described by Fried in 1965 as “akin to the complexity of moral experience – that is, of life itself, but life lived as few are inclined to live it: in a state of continuous intellectual and moral alertness.” At a moment when literally authorless AI-generated prose is proliferating, the question of what constitutes a work of art and the role that the artist plays in that determination has taken on a renewed urgency. Fried’s abiding emphasis on artistic intent thus both retains and regains its relevance.