Barry Schwabsky

One of the subtlest and most entrancing of Bridget Riley’s early paintings, Static 2 (1966), consists of a field of black spots arranged in a pure grid, 25 by 25, across a white square. Static, as the title says, and yet the painting isn’t inert: a lovely sense of inner movement is conveyed by the way the spots, which are not pure circles but mildly oval, are systematically shifted...

Michael Fried, who is also a poet, has a dense, self-questioning, fervent prose style. Somewhat perversely he has, over the last three decades – that is, since his doctoral dissertation on Manet was printed as a special issue of Artforum in 1969 – put this prose to the service of art-historical scholarship. It might have been otherwise. While still in his twenties Fried had become...