Summary of Roger Fry
Roger Fry was Britain's most influential art critic during the first half of the twentieth century. He was, in point of fact, something of a polymath, showing a vast cultural range and an upper level of attainment as a painter, designer, broadcaster and curator. But it is for his legacy to art criticism and art history that Fry remains most admired. It was Fry who invented the term Post-Impressionism, and it was he who did more than any other individual to introduce contemporary French art to the British public. Fry was co-founder of one of Britain's most established art journals, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, while his own painting reflected the influence of his great hero, Paul Cézanne. Having become a member of the famous Bloomsbury Group, he established a design workshop - The Omega Workshops - to rival that of William Morris and his Arts and Crafts Movement. Towards the end of his career Fry added a series of radio broadcasts for the BBC and a professorship at Cambridge University to his already imposing résumé.
Accomplishments
- Fry was amongst the first British art critics to advocate the importance of French modernism. Swimming against a tide of academic opinion, he saw a true artistic authenticity in their work and, with great verve and erudition, he defended the crude "child-like" qualities of the group that he would name the Post-Impressionists.
- Rejecting the tradition in art criticism established by John Ruskin through which the aesthetic judgement rested on the critics' moral position in relation to the work(s) under scrutiny, Fry formulated a more objective form of analysis. He demonstrated a more technical, more objective, approach to art criticism that focused on the way the psychology of the artist in question evolved in the style of his paintings.
- Through his Omega Workshop, Fry brought the decorative colors and designs of the Post-Impressionists and Cubists into interior design. There were obvious similarities between what Fry was trying to achieve and the goals of his predecessor William Morris. But Fry's Omega project was motivated by nothing more than to transfer fine art into the sphere of everyday living, whereas Morris's anti-industrialization Arts and Crafts Movement saw itself as part of a bigger social project.
- Fry did more than any other of its senior contributors to establish the critical integrity and credibility of the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs. Through the magazine, and indeed through his series of broadcasts on the BBC, Fry widened the geographic scope of Western art history by bringing Chinese and African art into its historiography.
Biography of Roger Fry
Roger Eliot Fry was the son of the Judge, Edward Fry. He and his two sisters (Joan and Margery) were raised in a wealthy Quaker family in the Highgate area of North London. He was educated at Clifton College and King's College Cambridge where he joined the so-called "Cambridge Apostles". The Apostles were (are) a secret society (founded in 1820 by George Tomlinson, the future First Bishop of Gibraltar) that met on Friday evenings to discuss topics such as truth, religion, art and ethics. The Apostles have included some of the most influential men in British public life including (John) Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Lytton and James Strachey, GE Moore and Rupert Brooke. It was as an Apostle that Fry fostered his interest in art and several members of the Bloomsbury Group were former Apostles including Fry, Keynes, Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.
