Roger Fry
By PROFESSOR ANTHONY BLUNT
OF the generation that grew up after the First World War Roger Fry exercised an influence which was only com- parable in the field of art with that which Ruskin had exerted in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The vision, the mode of thought, even the vocabulary of any young . intellectual interested in painting at that time was profoundly affected by Fry's articles and by the rare volumes of collected essays which he produced. But as a painter we were not encouraged—I had almost said allowed—to take him very seriously. "How extraordinary," we said, "that a man of such imaginative perception in front of pictures, of such clarity of mind in analysing his feelings, of such prophetic vehemence in conveying them to his audience, should produce such dull paintings ! " Nowadays, I believe, many of his followers of the twenties might take a very different view. They might venture to disagree with many of his dogmatic statements on theory, and place a higher value than before on his paintings; and, above all, they might see a closer connection between the two aspects of his work, painted and written. It would be absurd to maintain that the visitor to the exhibi- tion of Fry's paintings and drawings organised by the Arts Council at St. James' Square is going to be faced with a supreme artistic experience. Fry himself would have been the first to laugh at such an idea; but he will find there, at any rate in the best works, certain qualities which are not altogether common in English painting of the last hundred years—control of design, integrity of vision and of execution and an all-pervasive seriousness of intention. The reverse of this medal is equally obvious. The integrity sometimes leads to a puritanical self- abnegation, and hence to a certain dryness; the seriousness is not always sustained by imaginative fire, so that some of the late portraits, for instance, are academically dull; and a hesi- tant eclecticism to some extent overlays the artist's vision, with the paradoxical result that, although Fry's greatest passion was for French art, the paintings in which he seems to be most individual have a curiously English quality, presumably for the very reason that in them he was not so consciously following the methods and precepts of his gods.
Fry's influence as a critic was mainly based on his writings on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French painting; but it must not be forgotten that he began his career as a scholar of Italian Renaissance art. His early book on Giovanni Bellini is a fine flower of that tradition of English scholarship, which combines the humanism of John Addington Symonds with the new scholarship of Morelli. It is a work of history and at the same time of artistic analysis; it defines the qualities of Bellini's painting, human, literary and formal, and explains the complex whole which these elements make up in terms of the social, intellectual and artistic situation in Venice.
The same method was followed by Fry in various articles on Italian painting particularly in one on Giotto published in 1901 and later reprinted in Vision and Design. But by the time that this volume of essays was published (1921) Fry's attitude had so profoundly changed that he thought it necessary to print in a footnote a sort of recantation of certain ideas which he had expressed. In the original article he had analysed at some length Giotto's expression of the dramatic idea, and had implied that this interest might have inspired the artist to the creation of form and that it might be bound up with the value of the form. He ends the note with the sentence : "It now seems to me pos- sible by a more searching analysis of our experience in front of a work of art to disentangle our reaction to pure form from our reaction to its implied associated ideas."
This footnote represents the parting of the ways for Fry. His later writings may be divided into two categories : the purely theoretical, in which he seeks to isolate, analyse and explain his reaction to pure form; and the critical, in which he writes about individual paintings in a manner brilliantly per- ceptive but often in contradiction to his explicitly stated doc- trines. His theoretical writings may be said to represent the almost puritanical side of his character, which is also apparent in his paintings. Ha ■ Ina focussed his attention on the purely formal qualities of a painting, he pursued them with a passion and an intensity which have an almost religious quality. When in Vision and 'Design or in Transformations he analyses his reactions to certain types of works of art, he seems to have arrived at a state of mind in which he is almost unaware of all the other implications of a painting; or rather in which he is aware of them but able to think them away completely.
Seen at a distance, this deliberate exclusion of so many of the qualities in a work of art may seem wilful; but it served a vitally useful purpose, and was the logical result of Fry's enthusiasm for the more recent manifestations of French art. What seemed at that time essential, and what really was essen- tial, in the later Cdzanne and the work of the Fauves was their emphasis on the elements of spatial construction and flat pattern in painting; and for a critic whose primary object was a crusade in favour of these artists it was not only explicable but almost desirable that he should emphasise these qualities to the exclusion of others. The result was a series of essays which, while it is possible now to have reservations about the absolute validity of their conclusions, did more than any other writings to make the work of the advanced French painters intelligible to the English public, and formulated the doctrines lying behind their works more clearly than has been done by any other critic.
Moreover one of the proofs of Fry's intellectual flexibility and sensibility was that, when he was faced with works of art which did not altogether fit in with his doctrines, he instantly recognised the qualities of the works of art and disregarded the doctrines. This is perhaps most evident in his Characteristics of French Art, in which many pages are devoted to a brilliant and sensitive analysis of the French attitude towards life, to the manner in which this attitude is expressed in French paint- ing and sculpture from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, and to many other questions which are certainly not those of pure form, but which convey with great vividness the qualities of French art. It is probably significant that, of all Fry's works, those chosen for republication recently were not his more abstract essays but the three short books which he wrote on French, Flemish and English art, in all of which his brilliant and sensitive analyses of individual works of art form the most important part.
The problem remains, however, of how Fry's ideas would have developed if he had lived longer. It would be as imper- tinent to suggest precisely what might have taken place as it is to speculate on the probable evolution of an artist who died before his allotted time. But the evidence of the last works, particularly the Characteristics of French Art, suggests the conclusion that Fry's ideas were as capable of change at the time of his death as they had ever been, and that had he lived he might have abandoned some of the more doctrinaire tenets of his pure-form theory and have tended towards a new synthesis in which the humanism of his earlier period might have been fused with the subtlety and wisdom of his later years.
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