Michael Fried, in Manet’s Modernism (1996), proposes the concept of “facingness” as characterizing the relationship between painting and beholder in Édouard Manet’s art in the 1860s. In this paper, by analyzing Fried’s understanding of the status of the beholder in front of Manet’s paintings, I place Manet in Fried’s historical view of painting, and clarify his conception of the fundamental condition of pictorial modernism. First, I examine how Fried responds to Clement Greenberg’s and T. J. Clark’s interpretation of pictorial modernism and proposes his concept of “facingness” against their reading of Manet’s paintings. Second, by centering on Fried’s analysis of the existence of the beholder, I interpret Manet’s “facingness” as situating the beholder in a double bind of absence and presence in front of the painting. Third, in light of Michel Foucault’s formalist approach to Manet, I show how Fried and Foucault agree on the undecidability of the status of the spectator in front of Manet’s paintings. Finally, I conclude that Fried understands one of the origins of pictorial modernism as the status of the beholder in a dilemma between absence and presence, from which the spectator as the self-mobilized and autonomous agent can emerge.