Roger Fry

British art critic and scholar

• Born: December 14, 1866
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: September 9, 1934
• Place of death: London, England

Fry was the preeminent critic, scholar, and lecturer of art in England in the first decades of the twentieth century, bringing his vast knowledge of art not only to the academic world but also the reading public.

Early Life

Roger Fry was born in London, England. He was his parents’ second son; they also had seven daughters, with whom Roger was reared. Their home was No. 6, The Grove, in Highgate and included a beautiful garden in which the children enjoyed many hours. The family moved to a larger house next door when Roger was six, and the garden was lost.

Roger’s parents were Quakers who maintained strict discipline in their home. His father, Edward Fry, was a lawyer who had a simple, dignified lifestyle in which austerity was the key and most entertainments were discouraged. Edward Fry was successful in his career; in 1877 he became a judge and was knighted. In April of 1859, he had married Mariabella Hodgkins, also of Quaker background.

As a small boy, Fry was physically and emotionally close to his mother. He strove to please her and win her love; she demanded absolute obedience of all of her children. The household, unfortunately, held little affection or happiness for the boy and his siblings.

Fry’s strict upbringing, and his rebellion against it, had much influence on his adult life. His parents were reserved and held back their emotions; the household rules were limiting and inflexible, and created much anxiety and sometimes resentment among the children. Fry, conversely, grew to be resilient and flexible in his emotions and beliefs. Once outside his home, as a young adult, Fry pursued excitement and enjoyment in life (but never to any harmful excess). He did not, however, abandon the Quaker emphasis on hard work and the idea of judging all aspects of life for oneself (sometimes he bravely stood apart from public opinion). He retained his natural curiosity all of his life and was a constant sightseer wherever he traveled.

As a young student, Fry was encouraged to pursue the sciences, an area of study that interested his father. The youth had an early interest in botany, but he also did some watercolors, an art form in which his mother had had some success. By age eleven, Fry was ready to begin his formal education; he was sent to St. George’s School in Ascot, where physical punishment was practiced on a regular basis. Fry was frightened by this violent aspect of the school; he also suffered from frequent headaches and colds, and longed for his mother’s company.

In 1881, Fry entered Clifton College in Bristol, where Christian values and intellectual development were equally emphasized. He proved to be a good scholar at Clifton. By October of 1885, Fry had passed the entrance examinations for Cambridge, and he entered King’s College to read in the natural sciences. Then, through the friendships Fry developed among the Apostles at Cambridge, his interest turned to philosophy and art. Fry’s final choice of a career in art further alienated him from his father.

Life’s Work

After he was graduated from Cambridge, Fry trained as a painter with Francis Bate at Applegarth Studio in Hammersmith, early in 1889. Bate himself was a naturalistic painter, a style that would always be reflected in Fry’s own paintings (despite other influences in his career).

In 1891, Fry took his first extended trip to Europe; he mainly visited Italy, where he voraciously studied the art and architecture. This was the beginning of his numerous stays on the Continent to pursue art scholarship. He would also become a frequent visitor to France, where he loved to sketch and paint the beautiful, colorful landscape, especially in the Provence region. In January of 1892, he went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian for two months; the style taught there, however, was very conventional and lacked innovation, so Fry quickly tired of it. In this period, Fry himself was especially fond of the paintings of the old masters, and he tried to imitate their methods in his own works.

On December 3, 1896, Fry’s life changed when he married Helen Coombe, who had done some painting herself. They were quite poor when they met, yet they were determined to build a life together. Unfortunately, Helen was mentally unstable, and by 1910 she was sent to an asylum. At the time he met Helen, Fry was starting his career as a lecturer; he began by offering Cambridge extension courses in 1894. Fry was universally regarded as an outstanding lecturer; he had great enthusiasm, charisma, a beguiling voice, and a sound knowledge of art. Until the end of his life, his lectures would have full audiences, whom he fascinated.

In 1899, Fry published his first work of art criticism, a monograph on Giovanni Bellini. Shortly thereafter, he published a series of his lectures on Italian art for the Monthly Review. In 1901, he became the art critic for the Athenaeum, a leading literary periodical in Edwardian England. Throughout this period at the turn of the century, Fry deeply admired classical art; he did not have high regard for contemporary art.

Fry’s ideas on the relative worth of various eras in art would change fairly radically in the next few years. In 1905 and 1906 in France, he first saw some paintings by Paul Cézanne but was not really impressed by them. By 1910, with the assistance of Desmond MacCarthy, Fry was on the Continent collecting new paintings for a fall show at the Grafton Galleries in London. He had recently resigned from a position as a buyer of European artworks for the Metropolitan Museum in New York, a position he had held since 1905. Although Fry had a considerable influence in that job, greatly increasing the museum’s holdings in classical art, his truly great influence resulted from his fall, 1910, art exhibition in London. Titled “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” this show created a furor of anger and protest from the press and the public. The paintings, by such artists as Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin, were too avant-garde for the staid British; the public felt that their entire system of values, including perhaps their morals, was now under attack. None of the styles of past, revered painting, such as that of James Abbott McNeill Whistler in England, had any relationship to the bright colors and odd forms in the post-Impressionists’ pieces. The public condemned Fry but flocked to the exhibition at the amazing rate of four hundred people each day. Fry, fearlessly and in keeping with his new conviction of the worth of modern art, mounted a second post-Impressionist show in 1912. This show focused more on the works of Pablo Picasso, André Derain, and Henri Matisse.

Fry’s next significant achievement came in a different area of art. In 1913, he decided that the British citizenry was being duped into buying poorly made and badly designed objects to furnish their homes. Also, he noticed that several young, struggling artists were in need of steady work. From these observations, Fry formulated his idea for the Omega Workshops. This group, including himself, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and several others, designed and produced a wide array of furnishings using bold concepts and bright colors. They made such items as wall hangings, rugs, china, chairs, dresses, desks, and fabrics; wealthy British matrons formed their main clientele, although even George Bernard Shaw contributed funds to the group. Finances were always rather poor for the Omega Workshops, and World War I took some of their finest artists and craftsmen. The outbreak of the war also affected Fry as a Quaker and, therefore, a pacifist. In 1915, he was persuaded by his sisters Ruth and Margery to join them in France, where they did relief and rescue work. Fry believed that his absence from the Omega Workshops was obviously justified, yet his leadership was missed there. By 1919, Fry had to dissolve the firm.

During the years that the Omega was at its height, Fry also became influential in the Bloomsbury Group of artists, writers, and critics. He had met and developed a friendship with Clive and Vanessa Bell in 1910; they were both immediately taken with his great excitement and enthusiasm over art, combined with his breadth and depth of knowledge on the subject. Fry became a part of their circle of friends and intellectuals, although he was almost fifteen years their senior. All admired him, including Virginia Woolf (Vanessa Bell was her sister), who wrote Roger Fry: A Biography (1940). In her descriptions of Fry, Woolf summarizes his appearance in 1910: He wore glasses, but one could see his intense eyes shining behind them; his hair was graying, but his eyebrows were black and bushy; his face was weathered and lined, yet animated; his voice was full of emotion; and his large hands were restless.

In the years after World War I, Fry wrote his two most famous and important books of art criticism, Vision and Design (1920) and Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art (1926). Each book had a profound effect on art criticism in England and elsewhere; Fry called for a de-emphasis on content in art evaluation and a focus on form instead. He wished to explore and to appreciate art from new perspectives. His emphasis was on the analyses of form, color, rhythm, and texture of paintings to judge their quality and aesthetic effect.

Although Fry continued to paint and exhibit his own works, he found less favor as an artist than he did as an art critic and scholar. His favorite subjects for his paintings were landscapes and portraits (most often of friends). His books in the last years of his life, including Cézanne: A Study of His Development (1927), continued to be highly acclaimed and quickly became classics in art literature. In 1933, he was appointed to the prestigious position of Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge, an honor most people thought should have been accorded him years earlier. There he continued his successful lecturing to crowds of enthralled students. A book of his class lectures appeared as Last Lectures (1939).

In September of 1934, Fry fell, broke his pelvis, and slipped into a coma. On September 9 he died of sudden heart failure in a London hospital. He was survived by his two children, Julian and Pamela.

Significance

Fry was full of energy and love for art. His enthusiasm for great works of art (of all eras and peoples) remained throughout his life. This great excitement was passed on to innumerable artists and scholars in Great Britain and worldwide. Among noted British art critics, Clive Bell was Fry’s most famous disciple (and ally during the bitter abuse the public gave Fry over the post-Impressionist shows in 1910 and 1912). Fry also enjoyed a long career as an essayist for leading British journals, including The Nation and Burlington Magazine.

As an artist, Fry did not make such an important impression. The majority of his paintings, while technically astute and structurally accurate, do not exude any spark of genius. Several of his portraits are noteworthy and of lasting value for their depictions of famous Englishmen of Fry’s era; among these are his portraits of Edward Carpenter, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Iris Tree, and Edith Sitwell.

Fry’s mastery of so many diverse periods of artistic production by various cultures is amazing. He absorbed, through travel and by diligent study, a vast knowledge of the art of Italy, France, Greece, Asia, India, Africa, and America. He synthesized his knowledge well, often discussing in his lectures the influence of one era on another and the similarities among a variety of artists. He was able to bring his great learning and love of art to the public in concise and entertaining form. For that he will be remembered and revered.

Bibliography

Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Examines Virginia Woolf’s involvement with Fry and the other members of the Bloomsbury Group, describing how they developed their concepts of modernism.

Bell, Clive. Old Friends: Personal Recollections. New York: Harcourt, 1957. Bell wrote this memoir when he was seventy-five years old, yet his memory served him well. Here he reveals his affection for his friends, including Fry and other members of the Bloomsbury Group, as well as candidly discussing his relationships with them.

Edel, Leon. Bloomsbury: A House of Lions. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. Edel skillfully shows how the lives of the major Bloomsbury members, including Fry, interlocked (in both their personal relationships and their careers). This narrative ends in 1920, however, and so some important events are omitted. The book reads as if it were a novel.

Fry, Roger E. Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays in Art. 1926. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968. Fry exhibits his excellent art scholarship and encloses it in a smooth essayist’s style. He devotes a small section to the abstract question “What is aesthetics?” Fry also reveals great insights into art in these essays. He courageously expresses some of his unpopular opinions on modern art.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Vision and Design. 1920. New ed. Edited by J. B. Bullen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Fry writes here as an artist as well as an art critic. The selections included date back to the turn of the century and represent some of his best ideas on art. He reiterates throughout these essays that art’s meaning can be found in its form, not its content.

Grassi, Marco. “Reflections on Taste.” New Criterion 23, no. 4 (December, 2004): 24-28. Focuses on Fry’s art criticism and his aesthetics.

Shone, Richard. Bloomsbury Portraits: Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Their Circle. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976. Shone’s discussion of Fry concentrates on the years 1910 and after, when he was befriended by Clive and Vanessa Bell. Fry’s contributions to art are also analyzed by Shone. This book contains a large number of valuable illustrations mostly of paintings by the circle and furnishings from the Omega Workshops.

Spalding, Frances. Roger Fry: Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. This is the first biography of Fry to appear since Woolf’s of 1940. The author is extremely thorough in detailing Fry’s personal as well as professional life. She analyzes his own achievements as a painter at various points in his long career. Spalding also clearly explains Fry’s views on aesthetics.

Woolf, Virginia. Roger Fry: A Biography. 1940. New ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Woolf evaluates the life and work of one of her closest friends in a brilliant style. She carefully analyzes Fry’s ideas on art and quotes liberally from his writings. She is clearly greatly sympathetic to Fry.