Fry, Roger

Fry, Roger (1866–1934). British critic, painter, and designer, born in London into a distinguished Quaker family. Although he gave up Christian beliefs in adulthood, his Quaker upbringing influenced his character in many ways, notably in his respect for truth, his industriousness, and his sense of social responsibility. In 1885–8 he studied natural sciences (botany was his speciality) at King's College, Cambridge, graduating with a first-class degree. By this time, however, art was already replacing science as his main interest (to his parents' dismay), and over the next few years he travelled to France and Italy to study art (briefly at the Académie Julian in 1892) and began to build up a reputation as a writer and lecturer (and a more modest one as a painter). Kenneth Clark writes that he was ‘by common consent, the most enthralling lecturer of his time'. His success in this field depended partly on his mellifluous voice; George Bernard Shaw said it was one of only two he knew that was worth listening to for its own sake—the other was that of the actor Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson. From 1901 to 1906 Fry was the regular art critic of the Athenaeum, a prestigious literary review. This helped to make his name known in the USA and in 1906 he was appointed curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, where he worked until 1910 (immediately after accepting this post he was offered the directorship of the National Gallery, London, but he turned it down as he felt bound to honour his agreement with New York). He had won his scholarly reputation writing on Italian Old Masters (his first book was on Giovanni Bellini, 1899), but in the year he took up his New York appointment he began to be strongly drawn to Cézanne and he developed into his period's most eloquent champion of modern French painting. In this role he waged ‘a long and often thankless crusade … to lift English art out of its besetting provincialism’ ( Dennis Farr, English Art 1870–1940, 1978).

After his return to London in 1910 Fry organized two exhibitions of Post-Impressionist painting at the Grafton Galleries (1910 and 1912) that are regarded as milestones in the history of British taste. They attracted an enormous amount of publicity and comment, much of it unfavourable; the establishment view was expressed by the eminent painter Sir William Blake Richmond (1842–1921), who wrote that ‘Mr Fry must not be surprised if he is boycotted by decent society'. Many people thought that Fry was a charlatan or possibly even insane (his wife unfortunately was insane—she had been committed to an asylum in 1910—which prompted the unkind idea that her condition had somehow infected him). Certain young artists were immensely impressed by the exhibitions, however, and Fry became an influential figure among them. They included Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, both of whom worked for the Omega Workshops, which Fry founded in 1913.

Fry kept up a steady output of writing and lecturing for the rest of his life and also continued to work seriously as a painter (he always regarded this activity as a central part of his career); at the time of his death he was Slade professor of fine art at Cambridge University. His books include monographs on Cézanne (1927) and Matisse (1932) as well as several collections of lectures and essays, including Vision and Design (1920) and Transformations (1926). The Cézanne book is described by John Rewald in his History of Impressionism as ‘the first good study of Cézanne's artistic evolution'. In his writing Fry—like his friend Clive Bell—stressed the formal qualities of works of art (see FORMALISM), and this outlook made him responsive to African and other non-European art. However, his range of sympathy towards avant-garde was limited. He did not care for Expressionism or for German art in general (it was too emotional for his intellectual temperament) and he said of the Futurists: ‘All they do is to paint the confusion of the brain in a railway journey.’ In spite of these limitations and the initial opposition to his ideas, he probably did more than anyone else to awaken public interest in modern art in England. Kenneth Clark called him ‘incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin’ and said: ‘In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry.’ Clark was unimpressed with Fry's work as a painter, however: ‘his hand was heavy and lifeless … the chief merit of his paintings is a naive earnestness which is sometimes rather touching.’ Fry's painting was sometimes experimental (his work included a few abstracts), but his best pictures are fairly straightforward naturalistic portraits; his sitters included several of his Bloomsbury Group friends (examples, including a self-portrait, are in the National Portrait Gallery, London), and towards the end of his life he occasionally did commissioned portraits. In 1976 an exhibition of his portraits was held at the Courtauld Institute Galleries, London, and the Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield. In her introduction to the catalogue, Frances Spalding is more generous than Kenneth Clark in her evaluation of Fry as a painter: ‘If the portraits painted during the last fourteen years of his life are stylistically less adventurous than those of the previous decade, they are often richer in human value. They reveal an intelligence and lack of rhetoric that gives them a freshness and immediacy of effect.’