Fry, Roger Eliot

views updated

Roger Eliot Fry, 1866–1934, English art critic and painter. A champion of modern French schools of art, he introduced Cézanne and the postimpressionists to England. From 1905 to 1910 he was curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1933 he was made Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge. Interested in all eras, he consistently stressed the importance of analyzing the formal qualities within a work of art. His writings include Vision and Design (1920), Transformations (1926), Cézanne (1927), and an outstanding collection, posthumously published, Last Lectures (1939).

See his letters, ed. by D. Sutton (2 vol., 1973); biography by V. Woolf (1940).