Michael Fried opens these two lectures by showing how some of Jean-Louis David's major works of the 1780s, in particular Bélisaire demander l'aumône (1781) and Le Serment des Horaces (1785), illustrate an anti-theatrical conception of painting that Diderot was the first to formulate in his major texts of the 1760s, notably Écrits sur le théâtre (1757-58) and Salons. For Diderot, the painter's primary task is to construct a picture showing characters entirely absorbed in what they are doing, thinking or feeling, and thus indifferent to or oblivious of the viewer's presence in front of the painting. To put it a little differently, the very fact that a painting is made to be looked at - the primordial convention governing painting - raises, according to Diderot, a fundamental problem for the very pursuit of art, since the painter must establish in his work a kind of radical separation between the "world" of the painting and the "world" of the viewer, who must in fact be treated as if he didn't exist. David's history paintings of the 1780s are a perfect illustration of this project, which perhaps explains the extraordinary force with which they imposed themselves on Salons audiences at a key moment in the evolution of pictorial art.
It is striking, then, that David, from the extraordinary Sapho, Phaon et l'Amour (1809) onwards, adopted a seemingly opposite strategy, showing figures who seem to be specifically addressing the viewer - indeed, about to step out of the picture and into the viewer's space, as in Amour et Psyché, a work from 1817.
Michael Fried examines these so-called anacreontic paintings in order to assess what these compositions reveal about the state and transformations of French painting during the Napoleonic era and beyond. In this respect, it appears that David's strategy of ostensible confrontation with the viewer bears a certain resemblance to the paintings by Édouard Manet circa 1860-65 - with the difference, of course, that while canvases such as Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia had a powerful influence on the emergence of modernism, historically speaking, David's anacreontic paintings led nowhere. They remain, however, objects of intense fascination, and it is only by taking them seriously and trying to understand how they mark a radical break with the logic of earlier history painting, that we can hope to fully appreciate the challenge that awaited the next great French painter, Théodore Géricault.
