Fried, Michael. MANET'S Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860's. 647 pp., 16 color and 200 b&w figures. 4to, cloth. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996.
The final volume in a trilogy of books by Michael Fried exploring the roots and genesis of pictorial modernism. The author places Manet in the context of his time and his contemporaries( including Fantin-latour, Legros, and Whistler), focusing on aspects of his work that have been minimized or ignored. Fried's conclusions offer a new understanding of the way in which the Impressionist simplification of Manet's acheivement has determined subsequent interpretations of his modernism.