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THE AESTHETIC THEORIFS OF ROGER FRY:

A RE-EVALUATION
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Leslie Cavell Garelick

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THE AESTHETIC THEORIES OF ROGER FRY:
A‘RE-EVALUATION

By

Leslie Cavell Garelick

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS
Department of History of Art

1985

.i)
{‘x
(it,

ABSTRACT

THE AESTHETIC THEORIES 0F ROGER FRY:
A RE-EVALUATION

By

Leslie Cavell Garelick

Roger Fry is considered one of the foremost formalists of the
twentieth century. But for most of his life. Fry was not a formalist,
as this thesis attempts to prove. I survey Fry's aesthetic theories
from 1900 to 1934. In the early theory (1900-1914), the criterion for
artistic success is whether a painting adequately conveys the artist's
emotion: thus truth to the imaginative demands of the artist replaces
truth to nature. The distinction between the "actual" and “imagina-
tive" life is sharpened during his formalist years (1915-1924); the
aesthetic emotion must be a response to form alone. I surveyed
important unpublished essays 0f the twenties and thirties in which
Fry rejects the formalist aesthetic. This late aesthetic defines
painting's "double nature": plastic design combined with psycho-
logical insight. A re-evaluation of Fry's theories may be useful

for postmodernist criticism.

 

Illustration 1. Roger Fry seated in an Omega chair. Photograph
taken by Robert Tatlock, c. 1920.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

King's College, Cambridge, holds a number of unpublished
manuscripts and personal papers of Roger Fry, the Fry Papers. The .
late manuscripts have proved essential in establishing Fry's thorough
rejection of the formalist aesthetic in the late twenties. I wish
to thank Michael Halls, modern archivist at King's, who was entirely
accommodating in allowing me to study the Fry Papers during the summer
of 1984. Through him and Pamela Diamand (Fry's daughter), I was
given permission to quote from the papers. Mrs. Diamand was kind
enough to discuss her father with me on a number of occasions in 1984,
and to show me her large collection of his paintings, for which I
thank her. I also thank Mr. and Mrs. Igor Anrep and the staff at the
Tate Gallery Archive in London, for allowing me to inspect their
respective collections of papers related to Fry.

I wish to express gratitude to my thesis advisor, Professor
Linda Stanford, especially for her editorial suggestions. I also

thank my committee, Professors Molly Teasdale Smith and Eldon Van

Liere for their good advice.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS .

A Chapter

INTRODUCTION .

II. THE EARLY THEORY APPLIED, 1902-1914: POST-IMPRES-
SIONISM . . . . . .
Notes--Chapter II
III. THE MIDDLE THEORY, 1915-1924: FORMALISM
Notes--Chapter III .
IV. THE LATE THEORY, 1926-1934: PAINTING'S DOUBLE NATURE .

Notes--Chapter IV

CONCLUSION
Notes--Conclusion

BIBLIOGRAPHY .

The Fry Problem .

THE EARLY THEORY, 1902- 1909. ART AS EMOTIONAL
EXPRESSION . . . . . . . .

Notes--Chapter I

iv

Page

23

25
41
44
59
61
78
80
83
84

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustration Page
1. Roger Fry seated in an Omega Chair . . . . . . ii
2. Roger Fry: The Pool, Exh. 1899. . . . . . . . 19

3. Henry Matisse: The Dance (First Version), early
1909 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

4. Still-life with a basket by Paul Cézanne . . . . 49
5. Roger Fry: South Downs, 1914 . . . . '. . . . 52
6. Rembrandt van Rijn: Titus at his Desk, 1655 . . 64

7. Martyrdom of Saint Flavia and Saint Placid by
Antonio Correggio . . ._ . . . . . . 75

8. The Three Philosophers by Giorgione . . . . . . 77

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

 

 

 

Illustration

1. Roger Fry seated in an Omega Chair

2. Roger Fry: The Pool, Exh. 1899.

3. Henry Matisse: The Dance (First Version), early
1909 . . . . . . . . . .

4. Still-life with g_basket by Paul Cézanne

5. Roger Fry: South Downs, 1914

6. Rembrandt van Rijn: Titus at his Desk, 1655

7. Martyrdom of Saint Flavia and Saint Placid by
Antonio Correggio . . .

8. The Three Philosophers by Giorgione .

 

Page
ii

19

35
49
52
64

75
77

INTRODUCTION

The Fry Problem

 

Kenneth Clark has said that "in so far as taste can be changed
by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry."1 This refers to Fry's
sponsorship of Post-Impressionism in England. Fry Organized the
first large-scale London exhibition of the paintings of Gauguin, Van
Gogh, and Cezanne, and such artists as learned from them in the
years preceding 1910--such as Rouault, Derain, and Matisse.2 Fry
coined the term "Post-Impressionism“ in titling this first exhibition

Manet and the Post-Impressionists.

 

Although the art was fiercely derided by many, it immediately
influenced progressive British artists, including Wyndham Lewis,
Duncan Grant, and Fry himself. The artists were also influenced by
Fry's explanation of Post-Impressionist form. The forms had beauty
and significance, said Fry, apart from any associations they might
have with the actual world. Fry became so interested in formal design
that he rarely analyzed a work of art with anything else in mind.

This included works by old masters such as Fra Angelico and Rembrandt.

Because of the importance of his work in formal analysis, Fry
is best known for the formalist aesthetic which dominated his writings
between the years 1915 and 1924. It is widely assumed that Frquas a

formalist throughout his mature career, or at least that if he held

any other view, his expression of it was haphazard and subordinate to
his interest in pure form. These assumptions are not only problematic;
my thesis is that they are clearly false.

Others have contributed to a new understanding of Fry's
aesthetics. Frances Spalding's 1980 biography of Fry is helpful as a
starting point. Spalding's rigorous presentation of facts, dates, and
events in Fry's life first brought to my attention the late aesthetic
theory of Fry, propounded between 1926 and his death in 1934. This
theory recognizes that apart from purely formal design in the pictorial
arts, there exist designs in which representational elements enter into
the aesthetic experience proper. Fry refers to these representational
elements interchangeably as psychological, emotional, or literary; I
follow him in this.

Spalding also discusses the aesthetic theory held by Fry before
his introduction to Post-Impressionism, a theory given its fullest
expression in his 1909, "An Essay in Aesthetics." Fry was forty-three
in 1909, and well into his mature career. Spalding interprets this
essay as a failed attempt at a formalist theory; this is not the case,
I would argue, since Fry did not seriously take up formalism for
another six years. Rather, the essay is a fully formulated explanation
of art and of the aesthetic experience, and provides the basis for
both his middle and late theories.3

In his two-volume Letters of Roger Fry, published in 1972,

 

Denys Sutton mentions Fry's change of mind in the late twenties; he says
it is only in 1934 that Fry fully accepts nonformal elements in paint-

ing.4 Sutton, in his introduction, briefly discusses Fry's early

theory and notes, correctly, that it affects Fry's analysis of Post-
Impressionism until 1914.5
Sutton and Spalding were both concerned with a great many
facts about Fry's life, and so do not expand on their opinions regard-
ing his aesthetics. Virginia Woolf, in her biography of Fry, is far
more interested in Fry's character and in his influence as a formal-
ist critic to discuss the significance of any theory of his other than
formalism. Her discussion of major early and late essays by Fry
illuminate Fry's character, rather than his aesthetic predispositions.6
I believe the most recent book to deal with Fry's aesthetics
at any length is Jacqueline Falkenheim's Roger Fry and the Beginnings
of Formalist Art Criticism (dissertation, Yale, 1973, published 1980).
Her primary interest is Fry's formalist criticism in its relation to
artistic concerns in England during his lifetime.7 She highlights
Fry's formalist writings: "the beginnings of formalist criticism--
that language descriptive of the relationship among areas of color,
the extension of space, and other structural elements, which avoids
making reference to subject matter or to associations with the
external world beyond the picture plane.“8 Her interest is typical of
general interest in Fry; she only briefly reviews Fry's interest in
representational elements in painting from 1909 to 1933. Yet Fry's
late theory, she suggests, "may be considered the one most consistent
with his feelings about art throughout his life."9
Aside from the vast number of articles in which Fry's aesthetic
theories are given passing attention, two particular articles discuss

at some length the nature of Fry's aesthetics. Both find an interplay

of formal and emotional concerns at the center of Fry's discussions

.of the pictorial arts. "The Aesthetic Theories of Roger Fry Recon-
sidered," David Taylor's 1977 work on Fry, acknowledges the interest

of most people in Fry's formalist years, which Taylor puts at 1913 to
1925, remarking, however, that “evidence is clearfly available that Fry,
in his final decade, was motivated by ideas and attitudes quite differ-
ent from those of his close theoretical association with Clive Bell."10
Taylor's re-evaluation of Fry is based on "Some Questions in Esthetics,"
written by Fry in 1926 for his collection of essays entitled Transfor-
mations. This fairly late essay shows Fry's abandonment of formalism
for a more inclusive theory.

In a 1962 essay, Berel Lang addresses the question to what
extent Fry can be considered a formalist. Lang finds "an essential
ambivalence in Fry's attitude concerning the degree of 'purity' which
he finds in the art work and in the extent to which he actually carries

11 Rather than being ambivalent, there were

Lout his formalist program."
long periods in his life when Fry clearly has no interest in a formal-
ist program. Because Lang's essay does not attempt to treat Fry's
work with any chronological precision, it fails to clarify the real
direction of Fry's thinking on the issue of form and representation.12
The essay documents enough remarks by Fry to make clear, however, that
he was not simply a formalist.
I, too, argue that Roger Fry was not simply a formalist.

Proceeding chronologically, I identify three periods in Fry's aesthetic
theory, and argue for my interpretation of these periods by presenting

quotations from Fry's writings during these periods. Only in his

middle period can Fry be considered a formalist, and even then, the
evaluation should be made with reservations. I have attempted merely
to present the outlines of Fry's theories, and many considerations
have been necessarily left aside.

My analysis of Fry's thought revolves around several essays
which most authors have relied on in interpreting Fry's aesthetic:

"An Essay in Aesthetics" (1909), "Post-Impressionism" (1911), "The
Artist and Psycho-Analysis" (1924), "Some Questions in Esthetics"
(1926), and "The Double Nature of Painting" (1933). I have also used
certain unpublished essays from the Fry Papers at King's College,
Cambridge. I show that in each period of Fry's thought the theories
propounded in these essays are applied in other essays which are pri-
marily critical, not aesthetic. All these works reveal what I believe
to be a central organizing concept, running through Fry's thought.

For Fry, the work of art is a medium of expression of the
artist's emotion. The work is successful if the artist succeeds in
communicating, through a unified formal composition, the emotions he
or she feels. Fry's understanding of what emotions properly belong
to a work of art changes throughout his life. Finally,.Fry's con-
stant re-evaluation of his theories, his interest in helping the
public to see works of art, and his sensitivity to the artist's purpose
lead him to a theory which encompasses and refines his former theories
and which, in particular, rejects formalism as inadequate to explain

the whole of art and the aesthetic experience.

10.

11.

12.

NOTES--INTRODUCTION

Kenneth Clark, introduction to Roger Fry, Last Lectures, Boston,
1962, first published 1939, ix.

 

For information on a smaller exhibition of Post-Impressionist
work at Brighton in June of 1910, see Frances Spalding, Roger
Fry: Art and Life, London, Toronto, Sydney, New York, 1980, 130.

 

Ibid., 121.

Denys Sutton, introduction to Roger Fry, Letters of Roger Fry,
2 vol., London, 1972, 89.

Ibid., 40.

See her discussions of "Some Questions in Esthetics" and the
Last Lectures for proof of Hoolf's relative indifference to
Fry's nonformalist predispositions in Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry,
a Biography, London, 1940, 258-259, 280.

 

 

Jacqueline V. Falkenheim, Roger Fry and the Beginnings of Formal-
ist Art Criticism, Studies in the Fine Arts: Criticism, No. 8,
edited by Donald B. Kuspit, Ann Arbor, 1980, xv, xviii-xix.

Ibid., 29.
Ibid., 90.

David Taylor, "The Aesthetic Theories of Roger Fry Reconsidered,"
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36, pt. 1, I977, 63.

Berel Lang, "Significance of Form: The Dilemma of Roger Fry's
Aesthetic," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 20, pt. 1,
I962, 171.

Ibid., 169, 171. In discussions on both these pages, Lang
neglects to clearly separate the various periods of Fry's
thought.

CHAPTER I

THE EARLY THEORY, 1902-1909: ART AS
EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION

' In his unpublished essay "Expressive Representation in the
Graphic Arts," written in 1908, Fry states his attitude toward
aesthetic theorizing:

I am myself obliged from time to time to sum up my results in

a theory of aesthetics, which I always regard as provisional

and as of the nature of a scientific hypothesis, to be held

valid until some new phenomenon arises which demands that the

terms of the theory shall be revised so as to include

it. . .
This insistence on constant re-examination is admirable in Fry. He
maintained this attitude throughout his life and it allowed him to
explore widely divergent theories and experiences of art at a time
when the representational theory of art was being questioned.2 The
theories which Fry held at one time or another were never fully
reasoned; he borrowed ideas from a variety of sources and developed
them, at any given time, as a loose system of explanation for his own
understanding and feelings about art. As an artist Fry always had in
mind a use for his aesthetic theories: the theorizing of Sir Joshua
Reynolds was an early ideal of Fry, who in his introduction to an
edition of Reynolds' Discourses (1905) writes:3

The artist can make as little use of the pure aesthetics of

professed philosophers as the practical engineer can of the

higher mathematics; what he requires is an applied aesthetics,

7

CHAPTER I

THE EARLY THEORY, 1902-1909: ART AS
EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION

' In his unpublished essay "Expressive Representation in the
Graphic Arts," written in 1908, Fry states his attitude toward
aesthetic theorizing:

I am myself obliged from time to time to sum up my results in

a theory of aesthetics, which I always regard as provisional

and as of the nature of a scientific hypothesis, to be held

valid until some new phenomenon arises which demands that the

terms of the theory shall be revised so as to include

it. . . .
This insistence on constant re-examination is admirable in Fry. He
maintained this attitude throughout his life and it allowed him to
explore widely divergent theories and experiences of art at a time
when the representational theory of art was being questioned.2 The
theories which Fry held at one time or another were never fully
reasoned; he borrowed ideas from a variety of sources and developed
them, at any given time, as a loose system of explanation for his own
understanding and feelings about art. As an artist Fry always had in
mind a use for his aesthetic theories; the theorizing of Sir Joshua
Reynolds was an early ideal of Fry, who in his introduction to an
edition of Reynolds' Discourses (1905) writes:3

The artist can make as little use of the pure aesthetics of

professed philosophers as the practical engineer can of the

higher mathematics; what he requires is an applied aesthetics,

7

and it is rarely indeed that a writer has at once the practi-
cal knowledge and the power of generalization requisite to
produce any valuable work in this difficult and uncertain
science. Reynolds was one of the first, and he remains one
of the best, who have attempted it. He keeps, as a rule,
close to the point at which the artist must attack the prob-
lems of aesthetics, and he succeeds in proportion as he does
so. When he endeavours to find support in abstract philoso-
phical principles he is less happy, though he never fails to
be ingenious and suggestive. It results from this--from his
approaching the subject with the artist rather than the
philosopher--that his methods will be found of real value.

, This evaluation of Reynolds may wiTlserve as a description of Fry's
own work in the area of aesthetics.

The aesthetic theory Fry held throughout the first decade of
the century had developed during the time Fry was establishing a repu-
tation as a connoisseur of the old masters (he was curator of paintings
and European buyer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1906-1910).
He supplemented his living by writing regularly for such journals as

the Nation, the Atheneum, the Pilot, and the Burlington Magazine. Fry

 

wrote reviews of contemporary exhibitions, explaining the art of his
peers, as well as the art of the masters. Fry was familiar with
Impressionist work and had seen and reviewed works by Cezanne and other
Post-Impressionists, but had not as yet taken them to heart, when he
wrote, in 1909, "An Essay in Aesthetics."

This essay summarizes the direction of Fry's first aesthetic;
what I shall refer to as Fry's early theory of the nature of art is a
criticism of the theory of the pictorial arts as essentially repre-
sentational. He believed that the theory of representation in which
imitation was the central explanatory concept was inadequate for a

complete and fruitful understanding of the graphic arts. In particular,

and it is rarely indeed that a writer has at once the practi-
cal knowledge and the power of generalization requisite to
produce any valuable work in this difficult and uncertain
science. Reynolds was one of the first, and he remains one
of the best, who have attempted it. He keeps, as a rule,
close to the point at which the artist must attack the prob-
lems of aesthetics, and he succeeds in proportion as he does
so. When he endeavours to find support in abstract philoso-
phical principles he is less happy, though he never fails to
be ingenious and suggestive. It results from this--from his
approaching the subject with the artist rather than the
philosopher--that his methods will be found of real value.

. This evaluation of Reynolds may willserve as a description of Fry's
own work in the area of aesthetics.

The aesthetic theory Fry held throughout the first decade of
the century had developed during the time Fry was establishing a repu-
tation as a connoisseur of the old masters (he was curator of paintings
and European buyer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1906-1910).
He supplemented his living by writing regularly for such journals as

the Nation, the Atheneum, the Pilot, and the Burlington Magazine. Fry

 

wrote reviews of contemporary exhibitions, explaining the art of his
peers, as well as the art of the masters. Fry was familiar with
Impressionist work and had seen and reviewed works by Cezanne and other
Post-Impressionists, but had not as yet taken them to heart, when he
wrote, in 1909, "An Essay in Aesthetics."

This essay summarizes the direction of Fry's first aesthetic;
what I shall refer to as Fry's early theory of the nature of art is a
criticism of the theory of the pictorial arts as essentially repre-
sentational. He believed that the theory of representation in which
imitation was the central explanatory concept was inadequate for a

complete and fruitful understanding of the graphic arts. In particular,

such an explanation, Fry felt, must corrupt or leave aside the crea-
tive act.4 Fry continued to hold this particular view throughout his
life.

Fry's alternative to the theory of imitation was based on the
idea that art is an expression of_the artist's emotion. Beauty in
art is different from beauty in nature because of the artist's role.
"In our reaction to a work of art there is . . . a consciousness of
a peculiar sympathy with the man who made this thing in order to arouse '
precisely the sensation we experience."5 Following Fry's method of
attacking the problems of aesthetics--“close to the point at which the
artist must"--this statement emphasizes first, that a work of art is
an expression of emotion (loosely equated here with sensation); second,
that the artist's expression results in an object with its own force
of reality; and third, that the viewer experiences the emotion
expressed by the artist.

Fry acknowledges a debt to Tolstoy's 1896 What is Art?, from

 

which Fry takes the notion of "the essential importance in art of the

"6 In explaining his attraction to this idea.

expression of emotions.

Fry wrote in 1920 that Tolstoy had laid aside previous theories of art

which centered around the concept of beauty in favor of more uSeful

speculation, wherein one might ask (among other things), "of what

kind of emotions is art the expression?"7 Tolstoy himself allows art

to express a great many emotions: humor, courage, voluptuousness,

a feeling of quietness or of admiration. Tolstoy:8
To evoke in oneself a feeling one has experienced, and having

evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines,
colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit

10
that feeling that others may experience the same feeling--
this is the activity of art.
Throughout the rest of his book, Tolstoy attempts to show that the
feelings that good art transmits are those "highest and best" feelings,
which morally elevate. Fry rejects this stricture on art, as he had
rejected it in Ruskin.

While Tolstoy was clearly a direct influence on Fry regarding
emotional expression in the arts, other writers of whom Fry was aware
and who represented views commonly held at this time made it posSible
for Fry to adopt this position. As Frances Spalding has noted, Fry
again turns to Reynolds for precedent. Fry, in his introduction to
the Discourses, says of Reynolds that his "contention was that art was
not a mechanical trick of imitation, but a mode of expression of human

experience."9

Two Americans, George Santayana and Denman Ross, with
whose writings Fry was familiar, included the idea of art as an essen-
tially expressive activity in their works. The idea is central to

Santayana's The Sense of Beauty, which Fry mentions in his introduction

 

to Reynold's discourses. And in The Theory of Pure Design, published

 

in 1907, Denman Ross states: "The arts are different forms or modes

of expression: modes of feeling, modes of thought, modes of action."10
This basic view of the essence of art is not argued in Ross's book.
But that it is firmly stated, seemingly without need of defense, is
evidence of its widespread acceptance at the turn of the century;
this helps us to understand in what intellectual context Fry was
working.

In order to apply this general concept of art as expression

to particular works of art, Fry introduces six “elements of design,"

11

which are the forms in a work of pictorial art: rhythm of line, mass,
space, light and shade. color, and the inclined plane. Whle Fry might
have included other elements for consideration in looking at a work

of art, his program of dividing up these particular elements for
further discussion and perception, is complete.

As we might by now expect, Fry does not introduce these elements
of design as sufficient in themselves. Rather, they affect us in
certain ways, they arouse certain emotions in us becauSe they stand
in relation to certain natural phenomena which arouse similar emotions
in us during the course of actual life. Rhythm of line, for example,
appeals to sensations of muscular activity, or space to profound
judgments surrounding our very physical movement. The “emotional
elements of design," says Fry "have this great advantage over poetry,
that they can appeal more directly and immediately to the emotional

11

accompaniments of our bare physical existence." He remarks that

only with the "presentation of natural appearances" can these elements
affect us strongly.12
But what begins to look like an admission that art is repre-
sentation after all is forestalled by Fry. He emphasizes that form in
a work of art is ordered according to the demands of the imaginative
life of the artist, not according to nature's demands. The artist
chooses which aspects of natural form to borrow in constructing a work
which conveys an emotional idea of the artist's own invention. No
longer is truth to nature the criterion far artistic success, but the

adequate expression of the artist's emotional idea. It is crucial

to note that Fry doesn't set limits on what is an emotional idea.

12

And this freedom is what allows him, five years later, to sympathize
with Bell's notion that discrete aesthetic emotions are the sole
apprOpriate emotions to be felt in front of a work of art.

By basing his early replacement for the theory of imitation on
the distinction between the imaginative life and actual life, Fry
provides a partial explanation for why we call only certain objects
works of art, and further, why certain emotional reactions are aesthetic
while others are not. Noting that unlike our responses to visual
phenomena in actual life, when confronted with an art object, which
we do not have to react to physically "we gee the event much more
clearly; see a number of quite interesting but irrelevant things, which
in real life could not struggle into our consciousness, bent, as it
would be, entirely upon the problem of our appropriate reaction."13
Thus our instinctive response to run away from a charging bull is
completely unnecessary and beside the point if the bull is a painted
one.

Fry calls art "the chief organ of the imaginative life."14
The imaginative life, for Fry, is distinguished not only by a greater
clarity of perception, but also by a "greater purity and freedom of

its emotionf: together with the idea that art is the medium of expres-
sive emotion, this concept of the imaginative life is the vehicle
through which Fry identifies the subject matter of aesthetics in this
early phase of his development.15 Kenneth Clark has suggested that the
dichotomy between the imaginative and the active life was to remain

the foundation of Fry's aesthetic theory throughout his 1ife.16

13

Fry's doctrine of the "emotional elements of design" allows
him to make general evaluations of an artist's work within a con-
sistent framework. A work could now be judged according to how
successfully its elements evoked the specific feelings the artist
had in mind. In a 1902 Athenaeum review of Auguste Breal's Rembrandt:

a Critical Essay, Fry applies~his doctrine:17

 

M. Breal hardly allows for the part played in the resulting
beauty by those elements of design which he calls factitious.
He insists on Rembrandt's study of nature, on his feeling

for life,<n1the intensity of his vision, but he scarcely
points out how much in the total result of Rembrandt's render-
ing of Biblical scenes is due to the deliberate invention and
the artful composition of his scenes--composition which,
where it is successful, where it really furthers the

dramatic idea, is based on the same principles of balance

and intentional design as were employed by the Italians

whom Rembrandt studied and copied, even though he never
imitated them.

Fry, throughout the years in which he held this early theory of the
nature of art, Organized his comments about pictures around the prin-
ciple of emotional or expressive design. Not only could he make
general evaluations of artists, but also detailed comments on particu-
lar parts of their pictures. In what is otherwise a rather vague and
ill-written essay, "Art and Religion," (1902) Fry draws our attention
to a particularly fine passage in one of Fra Angelico's Annuncia-
tions; his reaction to the passage is particularly sensitive and
even poetic, making it clear that at this time in his life Fry had
no qualms about the value of "non-aesthetic" emotions.18
At once the artist sees in his two figures the opportunity
for a subtle balance of line, for that polarity which enters
more or less into all beautiful design, while anything like
a too rigid symmetry is avoided by the contrast of mood, and

therefore gesture, and so of line, between the angel whose
rapid flight is brought to its gentle close, and the sudden

14

movement of surprise, the start of awakening from reverie
to a reality of incredible significance, which character-
izes the Virgin's movement.

I have noted that Fry's formulation of Tolstoy's idea empha-
sizes that the work of art, as an expression of emotion, has its own
force of reality. This is to be understood in the sense that it is
the art object itself which moves the spectator to a particular emo-
tion, by its particular arrangement of forms. Whether or not the
forms themselves are representational, it is their arrangement which
determines a particular situation and a particular response. This
kind of reality, peculiar to works of art (as Fry will maintain
throughout his life) is very close to that which Bernard Berenson
ascribes to the work of Giotto and others. In his 1896 Florentine
Painters, Berenson describes Giotto's work as "life-enhancing," that
is as appealing to our whole being, our senses, nerves, feeling for
weightiness and space. Thus we identify with the thing or scene
represented, according to Berenson, more completely than we would in
real life, yet the appeal is not made to evoke action on our parts
but rather to produce in us a feeling of ecstacy, which is the desired
result of a work of art.19

Lifeeenhancement is a quality of a work of art, and corre-
.spondingly, the viewer who appreciates this quality does so by having
what Berenson calls "ideated sensations." 20

Ideated sensations . . . are those that exist only in the
imagination, and are produced by the capacity of the object
to make us realize its entity and live its life. In the
visual arts this capacity is manifested primarily and funda—

mentally through varieties of imagined sensations of contact
and their multiple implications; and through the equally .

1s

imagined sensations of barometric, thermometric, visceral, and
above all muscular alterations, supposed to be taking place in
the objects represented.

When an artist makes use of his material this way, he has
created "form" in the Berensonian sense.21 Although, as Spalding has
pointed out, Fry in 1908 wrote to Berenson that he was looking at art
"more psychologically, less physiologically“ than was Berenson, yet
the basic understanding of the relation of expressive artistic form
to the natural world is shared by Fry and Berenson and it seems that
Fry borrowed from Berenson the idea that specific forms evoke specific
reactions because of this relation.

Fry was a close friend of Berenson at this time, and knew

22

his writings intimately. Some of the most interesting of Berenson's

ideas, for Fry's purposes.were his concepts of material and spiritual
significance. It is by grasping the significant in an object and
expressing that significance in form that an artist produces a work
that is life-enhancing. In discussing Giotto's Arena chapel frescoes,
Berenson remarks:23
"Whatare the significant traits,“ he seems to have asked him-
self, "in the appearance and action of a person under the
specific domination of one of these vices? Let me paint the
person with these traits, and I shall have a figure that
perforce must call up the vice in question." So he paints
"Inconstancy" as a woman with a blank face, her arms held
out aimlessly, her torso falling backwards, her feet on the
side of the wheel. It makes one giddy to look at her.
In choosing to portray just those character traits, as they manifest
themselves visibly, those which most clearly define a certain sort
of individual, Giotto has, in Berenson's terms, isolated the spirit-

ually significant.

16

This notion is closely related to Berenson's notion of the
"materially significant." What is conveyed in this case is not the
spiritual aspect of things, but their material aspect. According to
Berenson, an “exemplification of his (Giotto's) sense for the signifi-
cant is furnished by his treatment of action and movement. The group-
ing, the gestures never fail to be just as will most rapidly convey
the meaning. So with the significant line, the significant light
and shade, the significant look up or down, and the significant
gesture . . . Giotto conveys a complete sense of motion."24 Later in
the text Berenson elaborates his notion of significance, in explain-
ing what the artist achieves in his attempt to render movement; 25

making us realize it as we never can actually, he gives us a
heightened sense of capacity,and whatever is in the actual-
ity enjoyable, he allows us to enjoy at our leisure. In words
already familiar to us, he extracts the significance of move-

ments, just as, in rendering tactile values, the artist
extracts the corporeal significance of objects."

 

Thus Berenson suggests that Giotto knows what is significant insofar
as he knows what will most appropriately convey the idea he wishes to
express. Giotto's forms are chosen because they are significant--in
the everyday sense of the word.

Berenson's definition of significance, while maintaining the
link with meaning external to (though evoked by) the forms themselves,
nevertheless directs one to the notion of a kind of reality in art
which is in an important sense more vivid than actual reality. It
also directs one to the artist's ghgigg of form to serve an end and
gives precedent for the use of a notion of significance which centers

itself on form.

17

While Fry rarely uses the word "significant“ before 1910, his
early theory of art makes constant reference to the Berensonian sense
of the word in insisting that the artist chooses his elements of design
for a particular purpose, to create a particular effect. I suggest
that Fry continues to use this idea throughout his aesthetic writings;
during the period between 1915 and 1920 Fry develops his "middle?
theory of the nature of art, in which Berenson's idea is transformed
into the idea of “significant form." Fry develops "significant form"
with Clive Bell, as will be discussed in Chapters II and III.

While Fry introduces particular emotional elements of design
to be found in the graphic arts, he considers it essential that his
aesthetic cover all the arts. He will maintain this concern through
his career, but it is especially clear in his early theory. Fry gave a
series of (unpublished) lectures in New York and London during his
tenure at the Metropolitan. Based on the ideas in "An Essay in
Aesthetics," the purpose of these lectures is to divide all of art
into four categories: Epic, Comedic, Lyric, and Dramatic. Fry's
explanation of these categories, discussed briefly by Spalding from
her perusal of the Fry Papers at Cambridge, indicates how firmly
established was his belief that art is an expression of emotion.

Fry developed these categories to eXplain the various kinds of emo-
tions produced by various paintings.. "The epic artist,“ he writes,
Ywatches the procession and recalls it for the wonder, amazement and
delight of his kindred."26 The comedic artist conveys the emotions of

mundane experience with satire, irony, and wit; the lyric conveys

18

confessions of the soul, and finally,iidramatic artist conveys emo-
tions related to the most personal experience of the individual
(see Illustration 2).27

Acknowledging that his scheme is derived directly from an
analogy with poetry, Fry defends himself, noting that "the emotions
which are expressed by poetry, by music and by painting are-of the
same nature and that therefore these modes hold good for all the

arts."281

For Fry, the example of poetry is particularly helpful
"because there the direction of the emotional condition is much more
definite than in the other arts and, therefore, in that art much
greater progress has been made in classification."29
In his 1964 essay on Fry, Quentin Bell remarked that the New

English Art Club, with which Fry was affiliated between 1891 and 1908,
was "very much devoted to the idea of impersonality" in art.30 A
stance taken from Whistler, this refusal to accept deeper emotional
significance in painting was unacceptable to Fry. Fry's own interpre-
tation of Velasquez' work, at this time, was equally unacceptable to
the club:31

I advance this with great diffidence--I know that it is rank

heresy to attribute any conscious literary idea to any work of

Velasquez. It is a blow upon the reputation of the one old

master who is supposed to be free from the taint of thought and

innocent of the crime of poetical imagination.

Spalding considers it a weakness in Fry's argument, in "An

Essay in Aesthetics," that "while stressing that one should appreciate
a work first for its formal qualities, he as yet refuses to adopt a
purely formalist stance: he cannot deny either the need to be aware

of the artist's purpose, nor the psychological appeal of subject

19

 

Illustration 2. Roger Fry: The Pool, Exh. 1899. Oil on canvas,
42 x 68.5 cm. Private Collection.

20

matter."32 The implication that Fry intends his essay to be an argu-
ment for formalism is, I maintain, wrong-headed.

Fry's introduction of "emotional elements of design" as an
organizing concept was part of a continuous task throughout his life
to provide a vocabulary for discussion of the visual arts. Fry had
been introduced to such an attempt by Ross, whose discussion of
formal aspects of the graphic arts is particularly exact. Fry's
later contributions to this effort will be discussed in Chapters III
and IV.

The work of Ross is also important in the context of Roger

33

Fry's understanding of form. In The Theory of Pure Design Ross

discusses painting and drawing, distinguishing in their expression

two modes: "the mode of Pure Design and the mode of Representation."

Ross:34

By Pure Design I mean simply Order, that is to say, Harmony,
Balance, and Rhythm, in lines and spots of paint, in tones,
measures, and shapes. . . . In Representation we are no
longer dealing, as in Pure Design, with meaningless terms.

. . . The attention must be directed to what is important,
away from what is unimportant. Objects, people, and things
represented must be brought out and emphasized or suppressed
and subordinated, according to the Idea or Truth which the
artist wishes to express.

Although Ross's book focuses on Pure Design, he claims that Pure
Design and Representation can be effectively combined.35 The book
includes diagrams, simple line drawings, which illustrate his remarks
on Harmony, Balance, and Symmetry. Ross seems to admit in more than
one example that our appreciation of Design is Ffacilitated by an

~association of ideas."36 It is unclear in these cases whether the

21

Design is automatically Representational rather than Pure, since the
author mentions such associations as asides.

Another, more well-known writer on art at the turn of the
century, with whose writings Fry was also familiar, was James Abbott
McNeill Whistler. That Fry was wholly aware of Whistler's interest
in form for its own sake is evident (together with Fry's reaction to
this idea) in a 1903 Athenaeum obituary written by Fry on "Mr.
Whistleri" I quote Fry at length to show his understanding of

Whistler and his attitude toward the question of form and content at

this date.37

Along with sentimentality, which he rightly saw was the bane
of our age and country, he denounced all sentiment, all
expression of mood in art, until he arrived at the astounding
theory, enunciated in his "Ten o'Clock,' that pictorial art
consists in the making of agreeable patterns, without taking
account of the meaning for the imagination of the objects
represented by them--that, indeed, the recognition of the
objects was not part of the game. The forms presented were
to have no meaning beyond their pure sensual quality, and
each patch of colour was to be like a single musical note,

by grouping which a symphony, as he himself called it

could be made. The fallacy of the theory lay in its over-
looking the vast difference in their effects on the imagina-
tion and feelings beween groups of meaningless colour-patches
and rhythmical groups of inarticulate sounds. As a protest
it was, or might have been valuable, since it emphasized

that side of art which, when once realistic representation

is attainable, tends to be lost sight of; but as a working
theory for an artist of extraordinary gifts it was unfortu-
nate, since it cut away at a blow all those methods of

appeal which depend on our complex relations to human beings
and nature; it destroyed the humanity of art. What Mr.
Whistler could not believe is yet a truth which the history
of art impresses, namely, that sight is rendered keener and
more discriminating by passionate feeling--that the coldly
abstract sensual vision which he inculcated is, in the long
run, damaging to the vision itself, while the poetical vision
increases the mere power of sight.

22

Fry's early aesthetic theory replaces a long standing theory
that the criterion for success in the pictorial arts is accuracy of
representation. Fry objected to this theory because it ignored the
artist’s activity as a creator of expressive emotional designs, and
because it relegated pictorial art to the statue of a reflection of
reality.

For Fry, a work of art has a reality of its own, independent
of the whims of nature and human instinct. It is independent in the
sense that the artist orders the forms in a work of art according to
his or her own imaginative demands. These forms, which Fry calls
"emotional elements of design," arouse emotions in the viewer which,
although related to the emotions of actual life, are distinct from
those emotions, since the "aesthetic emotions" are appreciated in and
for themselves. In contrast, the emotions of actual life are appre-
ciated "by the standard of resultant action."38 Tolstoy, Berenson,
and Reynolds are important influences on Fry in his first attempt to
establish an aesthetic theory, and many of the ideas that Fry garners

from these authors remain important in his later work.

10.

11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.

NOTES--CHAPTER I

Roger Fry, Fry Papers, King's College Cambridge, manuscript
“Expressive Representation in the Graphic Arts."

See Roger Fry, "Retrospect," in Vision and Design, lst American
ed., London and New York, 1924, 284.

 

- Sir Joshua Reynolds, Kr., Discourses Delivered to the Students

 

of the Royal Academy, with introduction and notes by Roger Fry,
London, 1905, x, xi.

Roger Fry, "An Essay in Aesthetics,“ in Vision and Design, 17,
21-22.

Ibid., 30.

'Leo'Tolstoy, What is Art?, translated by Almyer Maude, Indianapolis,

 

New York, 1960, 27T* lst ed. 1896.

Fry,"Retrospect," 293.

Tolstoy, What is Art?, 51.

Frances Spalding, Sgger Fry: Art and Life, London, Toronto,

Sydney, New York, 1 87. From the Introduction to Discourses,
x.

 

Denman Ross, The Theort of Pure Design:: Harmony, Balance,
Rhythm, wjth illustrations and diagrams.”New York, 1933, 4.
First published 1907.

 

Fry, "An Essay in Aesthetics," 35.
Igflgy

Fry, "Essay in Aesthetics," 15,
Ibid., 24.

Ibid.

Kenneth Clark, Last Lectures, xiv.

23

17.
1e.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.

24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.

31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.

24

Roger Fry, "Fine Arts," Anthenaeum, 16 Aug. 1902, 229.

 

Roger Fry, "Art and Religion," Living Age, 14 June 1902, 654.

 

Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History, 1948, 67-68.

 

Ibid., 74.
Ibid., 71.
Spalding, Art and Life, 67-69, 109; Sutton, Letters, 293, 303.

 

Bernard Berenson, Florentine Painters, in The Italian Painters of
the Renaissance, New York, 1907, 45-46. First ed. 1896.

 

 

 

Ibid.
1bjd., Berenson's emphasis, 59.

Roger Fry, Art and Life, 110, from Fry Papers.-

 

121g,

Roger Fry, "New York Lectures," Fry Papers, conclusion.

.igyg.

Quentin Bell, Vision and Design--The Life, Work and Influence of

Roger Fry,London, 1966, 7. Philip Troutman also contributes an
essay to this catalog. See also Spalding, Art and Life, 46, 11.

 

Bell, The Life, Work and Influence, 7.
Spalding, Art and Life, 121.

 

191g,, 85.

_Ross, Pure Design, 5 and 7.

Igig., 8;

‘Igig., 60-61, 110.

Fry, "Mr. Whistler,“ Athenaeum, July 25, 1903, 133.
Fry, “Essay in Aesthetics," 27.

CHAPTER II

THE EARLY THEORY APPLIED, 1910-1914: POST-IMPRESSIONISM

We have seen that during the first decade of the century, the
content of Fry's aesthetic theory was influenced by philosophers and
connoisseurs of art. Fry's theory was to be practical. It allowed
Fry to eXplain the emotions he felt in looking at works of art and to
categorize the kinds of pictures which produced these emotions. He
emphasized the imaginative, communicative effort of the artist in
creating "expressive form." Between 1910 and 1915 Fry was to continue
interpreting art in terms of expressive form. And between 1915 and
1920 he turned his attention more directly to the forms themselves
and to those emotions which are aroused solely through the relations
of form, and not through psychological or literary associations.

Throughout this deCade, 1910-20, the major influence on Fry's
aesthetic theory does not come from literature, but from a new
acknowledged movement hithe visual arts, which Fry called "Post-
Impressionism.“ Fry also turned, at various times, to remarks by the
artists themselves.

As Fry would argue in several articles written between 1910
and 1934, art critics and aestheticians have, traditionally, been
intellectuals who discuss visual art as an offshoot of their literary

.interest, attempting to define the visual arts on the model of

25

26

literature. Fry attempts, increasingly during the years 1910-1920,
to bring to art theory the consciousness of the artist, whose model
is visual. That artists should have an important say in how art
should be defined lent itself to analysis which emphasized the visual
and the technical, an approach which set a standard for modernist
criticism. This visual approach allows Fry to emphasize the individual-
ity of the artist's intentions or purposes, particularly the Post-
Impressionist's, and confirms the practical direction of his theory,
directed as it is toward careful looking.

One of the artists to whom Fry listened was Maurice Denis.
Fry benefited from Denis' understanding of the art of Cézanne, in
particular as expressed in a two-part article which Fry himself trans-
lated for publication in the Burlington Magazine, January and Febru-
ary, 1910. For Denis, as for Fry, the art object is a result of the
artist's response to his environment; meaning is expressed through

1 But what will

form, according to Denis' symbolist interpretation.
become particularly important for Fry later in the decade is the idea
that an artist must pay the closest attention to his or her medium's
"intrinsic properties." Denis states that, "just as the writer deter-
mined to owe the whole expression of his poem to what is, except for
idea and subject, the pure domain of literature--sonority of words,
rhythm of phrase, elasticity of syntax--the painter (Cézanne) has been
a painter before everything."2 Denis' interpretation of Cézanne's
work, which is not purely formalist but which does emphasize form,

'did not at first dominate Fry's conception of Cezanne or the Post-

Impressionists in general.

27

Fry's practical aesthetic, in this decade between 1910 and
1920, cannot be separated from his attempt to gain acceptance for
Post-Impressionism in England. Fry was at all times during his life
more interested in bringing a clear understanding of art to the
general public than in discovering sophisticated truths which could
only interest those whose profession it is to think about art.

The first full-scale Post-Impressionist exhibition to be held
in England, called Manet and the Post-Impressionists, was organized
by Fry and ran from November 8, 1910, to January 15, 1911, at the
Grafton Gallery in London. In her biography of Fry, Spalding says
that Fry at first liked the term "Expressionists" for these painters,
because of the strong expressive design which characterized their

3 For one reason or another, this label was finally rejected.

work.
The show centered on works of Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, and
included such works as Manet's Un Bar aux Folies-Bergéres, Matisse's

Femme aux Yeuxvertgg-Cézanne's La Vieille au Chapelet, and Van Gogh's

 

Dr. Gachet.4

Of the exhibition, Clive Bell was to recall: "I do not suppose
there were fifty people in England who had looked at pictures by
Matisse or Picasso, but all true lovers of art knew instinctively that
they hated them."5' One indignant citizen expressed in the Ngtign his
"infinite sadness that Art should be dragged so low. I venture to
think," he adds, “that neither painters nor the public will listen to
the cobwebs of words which may be put together in praise of the

product of diseased minds, for, let us hope, the great mass of the

28

people are as yet sane.“6

Virginia Woolf, in her biography of Fry,
mentions a great number of prominent Britains who expressed a similar
outraged reaction, including Sir William Richmond, 0. S. MacCall,
Henry Holiday, Wilfrid Blunt, and Henry Tonks.7 Fry, himself, wrote
in a number of places that the same people to whom he had been lectur-
ing on Greek and Renaissance art--the "cultured" upper middle class in
England--who had seemed to have an appreciation for art--now rejected
the great works of Post-Impressionism. Fry understood this rejection
as based on snobbery--there had been a great many things to kngw_about,
for instance, Italian art which could be resorted to if one had failed
to see the works. This was not the case with a still life by Cézanne.
"One could feel fairly sure," wrote Fry, "that one's maid could not
rival one in the former case, but might by a mere haphazard gift of
Providence surpass one in the second."8 The upper classes could not
tolerate an art as accessible to their servants as it was to them-
selves. While Fry did not have a sympathetic audience in the upper
classes, his remarks on the nature of the new art were enthusiastically
accepted by young English artists; Fry had a regular following in this
quarter.9 Artists had a use for Fry's critical theory, his applied
aesthetic; it gave them the freedom to eXplore their mediums' fintrin-
sic properties." And it was in the assessment of Post-Impressionist
art that Fry's gift for getting people to look carefully was most
strongly challenged. .

In applying his aesthetic theory to Post-Impressionist art, Fry
acted as a true critic. H. Gene Blocker in his 1975 article, "The

‘Oilcan Theory of Criticism," argues, following Sibley, Isenberg,

29

Hungerford, and Hampshire, that a critic's task is not to prove the
truth of something. Rather, she or he attempts "to get us to §§g_the
work of art in a certain way, to get us into position to see for our-
selves what is being claimed for it."10 Blocker suggests that Fry did
just this in his remarks to the British public on Post-Impressionism.
Fry's strategy, according to Blocker, was two-fold. First, Fry '
separated art from life, defining art by its essentially formal
qualities and defining life by its moral and representational interests.
This, Blocker says, amounted to giving the public "a simple and value-
laden choice between art and non-art."11 Then, Fry explained the new
art as a return to the strong design tradition of past art (particu-
larly that of the Italian Quattrocento), thus giving the new art its
place in tradition and, with that, a claim to respectibility and
comprehensibility.12
Blocker's interpretation better fits Fry's more formalist
writings. These do not appear until after 1914. In 1910, at the
beginning of the ten-year period in which Fry had the most to say about
Post-Impressionism, Fry's remarks revolve around the same point he
wished to make clear in his early theory--that creative, expressive
design was the primary activity of the artist. Cézanne is the great
master of the new movement. Fry writes in the December 3, 1910,
Natign that it was Cezanne "who discovered by some mysterious process
the way out of the cul-de-sac into which the pursuit of naturalism
,§_outrance had led art."13 His assessment of artists, such as

Matisse and Van Gogh, by the emotional qualities of their work shows

3O

Fry's interest at this time in a nonformal analysis. And Fry's
analysis of Cezanne is largely nonformal.14
When Cezanne turns to the human form he becomes, being of a
supremely classical temperament, not indeed a deeply psycho-
logical painter, but one who seizes individual character in its
broad, static outlines. His portrait of his wife has, to my
mind, the great monumental quality of early art, of Piero della
Francesca or Mantegna. It has the self-contained inner life,
that resistance and assurance that belong to a real image, not
to a mere reflection of some more insistent reality.

'Fry's continued interest in finding a way to replace the
theory of imitation becomes especially clear in an answer to the
critics of the exhibition, when he replies to Henry Holiday's criti-
cism of one of Cézanne's Bathers. Holiday had objected that beyond
the bare recognizability as human figures, Cézanne's bathers "were as
nearly formless as possible--feeble and flabby. . . . I have sometimes
seen bathers," he says, "but not being a Post-Impressionist, I failed
to see thick black lines round their limbs."15 Fry replies by point-
ing out "unnatural linear conventions“ Hia drawing of the
Virgin and Child by Raphael, noting that Holiday "forgets that Art
uses the representation of nature as a means to expression, but that
representation is not its end and cannot be made a canon of criti-
cism."16 Fry ends the defense with a similarly strong statement as
to the "main achievement" of the Post-Impressionists: Ythey have
recognized that the forms which are most impressive to the imagina-
tion are not necessarily those which recall objects of actual life
most clearly to the mind."17 Fry makes a bolder statement in an
interview in a few years later, iterating this theme: "Art," he says,

"is significant deformity."18

31

Fry's writing in this period is beautifully and insightfully
done and his passion for this new art is profound. A lecture given by
Fry at the end of the first Post-Impressionist exhibition, published

in the Fortnightly Review, is particularly eloquent. Fry makes two

 

main points: first, that a certain amount of distortion of natural
appearances is necessary in order that the picture conform to the
imaginative demands of the artist. But secondly, "a certain amount of
naturalism, of likeness to the actual appearance of things is neces-
sary, in order to evoke in the spectator's mind the appropriate
associated ideas."19 The degree of distortion depends entirely on
what the artist wishes to express. Fry applies this idea further in
categorizing types of subjects in the graphic arts.20

And I think we may say this, that those sentiments and emo-

tions which centre around the trivialities of ordinary life

--that kind of art which corresponds to the comedy of manners

in literature--will require a larger dose of actuality, will

have to be very precise and detailed 'hi its naturalism:

but those feelings which belong to the deepest and most

universal parts of our nature are likely to be actually dis-

turbed or put off by anything like literal exactitude to

actual appearance.
As an example of the hazards of literal exactness, Fry cites William
Blake as an example of an artist whose deeper feelings are unsuccess-
fully expressed when he makes his greatest efforts at skillful
representation. It becomes clear that the Fdeepest and most uni-
versal" emotions Fry is referring to are spiritual rather than merely
formal. Fry believes, at this time in his life, that Atheir fitness
to appeal to the imaginative and contemplative life” can be a proper

canon of criticism.

32.

It is also in this article that Fry makes one of his first
"formalist" statements of the sort which, taken out of context and
made to be representative of Fry's thought as a whole, has misled
later critics and historians. "There is no immediately obvious reason
why the artist should represent actual things at all, why he should
not have a music of line and colour. Such a music he undoubtedly
has, and it forms the most essential part of his appeal."21 Note that
Fry hasn't called formal qualities the gnly essential part of the
appeal of art. Moreover, in this same paragraph, Fry goes on to say
that the artist has "a second string to his bow," his ability to call
up images of the visible world. For example, Fry has no gualms about
discussing Leonardo's use of line alongside that of Matisse, remarking
on the importance of line in Leonardo's work as an indicator of
character and mood. Thus it is clear that Fry is not committing him-
) self to a pg5e_formalism. Rather, formal and emotional demands must
be balanced so that a work of art contains elements which are there to
satisfy the imaginative expression of the artist.

Admitting the difficulty, if not impossibility, of finding
laws to govern this balance, Fry, nevertheless, attempts to point out
the direction in which to look by reiterating his notion of the
independent reality of a work of art. Art and its counterpart, the
imaginative life, have a "reality" which must be distinguished from
the "actuality“ of the external world. The latter must not be allowed
to interfere with the former, according to Fry.22 Thus not all

emotional expression is acceptable; this is what gives Fry's theory

33

direction, narrowing it down so that not everything can be called
a work of art. The test of this theory, that formal and emotional
elements are balanced to produce a work of art with its own reality,
rests on the viewer's ability to detect the balance. And, of course,
it is Fry's intention at all times to sharpen the viewer's sensibility.
To do so, Fry uses his own sensibility. As Virginia Woolf writes:
Undoubtedly he wakes the eyes; and then begins what is in its
way as exciting as the analysis by a master novelist of the
human passions--the analysis of our sensations. It is as if a
great magnifying-glass were laid over the picture. He eluci-
dates, he defines. And as the colours emerge and the struc-
ture, learning begins easily and unconsciously releases its
stores. He recalls other pictures--one in Rome, another in
Pekin; he is reminded of a Matisse or a Picasso seen the
other day in Paris. So the tradition, the submerged but
underlying connection is revealed.

Fry considers Post-Impressionism itself a broad enough move-
ment to allow total abstraction on the one hand and on the other the
expression of "what is most poignant and moving in contemporary
life.“24 He states this in his essay "The French Group," written for
the catalog of the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, held from
October 5 to December 31, 1912. Here again Fry makes a statement
which, taken out of context, might suggest a strict formalism:

". . . In so far as the artist relies on the associated ideas of the
objects which he represents, his work is not completely free and

pure. since romantic associations imply at least an imagined practical
activity.“25 The remark seems to imply that art really should be free
and pure and not allow the influence of "associated ideas." However,
what Fry objects to again is that a work of art rely 9n associated

ideas, rather than rely on a balance of form and associated ideas.

34

"Classical" art, as Fry defines it (following Maurice Denis), main-
tains such a balance, where “Romantic" art does not.26 The latter,
Fry suggests, loses its appeal more quickly, since it adds no new,
imaginative, or contemplative factor to our experience. Classical
art, on the other hand, "communicates a new and otherwise unattain-
able experience."27
An example of such a "classical" artist, for Fry, is Henri
Matisse. In a late 1912 article, Fry points out that on the one
hand, Matisse's art is "aloof, singularly withdrawn from the immediate
issues and passions of life," while on the other hand producing a mood
of serenity and repose.28- Fry recognizes that Matisse hasn't the same
need of representational or specific emotional meaning as do so many
works of Giotto, Caravaggio, David, or any number of history painters.
Matisse is more interested in distorting visual appearances, but in
recognizing this, Fry does not, even by late 1912, deprive Matisse's
work of a definite emotional element, a mood dependent on his use of
line and color.

In describing Matisse's 1909 Dang; (see Illustration 3), Fry
associates the term "significance" with form:29
In order that each form may have its full significance in the

whole, may hold its own in the equilibrium of all forms, it
must be as ample and as simple as possible. It is because he
(Matisse) has followed out this scheme so fearlessly that his
designs have their singular compelling power.
Fry's analysis of Matisse is not a formalist one. How then are we to
understand his use of the notion of "significant" form at this time?

This is best answered by comparing what Fry says with what Clive Bell

says about significant form.

35

 

Illustration 3. Henry Matisse: The Dance (First Version), early
1909. ‘Oil on canvas, 260 x 390 cm. New York, '
Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Nelson A. Rocke-
feller in honour of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

36

The friendship and mutual intellectual influence of Fry and
Bell is well known. Arnold Isenberg has remarked that "if we were
asked who the leading formalists were, some would say Bell and Fry

30 ,It has been widely assumed

while others would say Fry and Bell."
that Roger Fry was a strict formalist, sharing with Clive Bell the
theory that the essence of art is "significant form." We have seen
that in his early theory and at the beginning of his middle theory,
fsuch an estimation of Fry is inaccurate. Bell intended the theory of
significant form, as he wrote in 1913, to "explain the whole of my
aesthetic experience and suggest a solution of every problem."31
Bell attempts such an explanation in Art, first published in 1914. In
his introduction Bell remarks that after innumerable conversations
with Fry, the two differ profoundly about aesthetics; Fry, says Bell,
was habitually challenging Bell's generalizations with particular
examples of works of art which seemed not to fit Bell's thesis.32

Later, writing20f Fry in his 1956 Old Friends: Personal Recollections,

 

Bell says, “He never quite swallowed my impetuous doctrine--Significant
Form first and last, alone and all the time; he knew too much, and such
raw morsels stuck in his scientific throat. He came near swallowing

it once; but always he was trying to extend his theory to cover new

difficulties. . . ."33

The theory, which explained the whole of
Bell's aesthetic experience, could not explain the whole of Fry's.
Although several authors have suggested that Fry was not the
strict formalist he is popularly taken to be, none that I know of his
carefully documented this claim. I hope to show that Fry at no point

thought that significant form alone could account for what is essential

37

in art. Berel Lang, in the 1964 article "Significance or Form: The
Dilemma of Roger Fry's Aesthetic" says, ". . . even accepting formalism
as the dominant tendency of Fry's position, we must be continually
brought up short by the knowledge that he never commits himself to

34 But, against Lang, who suggests that the

its unequivocally."
closest Fry comes to strict formalism is in his 1926 publication

Transformations, I argue that it is between the years 1915 and 1920

 

that Fry's formalism is strongest.

In 1914 Fry still had qualms about formalism--in particular
about the power of significant form to explain the whole of art.
Before clarifying Fry's qualms, one might discuss what it was that
Fry and Bell meant by this term. I would note that Bell is not
defining the word "significant," rather one is to understand "signifi-
cant" in the ordinary sense: the "important, interesting or appro-
priate quality of a thing." I suggest that Fry, as well as Bell,
expects us to understand the term "significant“ in the normal, mun-
dane way. The term "significant form" was, after all, not meant to
mystify, but to clarify.

The word "significant“ suggests an effegt_of form, of some
forms, which sets them apart from others. I suggest an interpreta-
tion of Fry's use of "significant" which keeps to the general sense
of the word and which one might note has a clear connection with
Berenson's use of the word. Fry offers a definition of significant
form in his 1914 revédw ofClive Bell's Ant, in discussing what is
common and peculiar to all art: ". . . significant form, that is to

say, forms related to one another in a particular manner, which is

38

always the outcome of their relation to x (where x is anything that is

not of itself form)."35

This statement in itself suggests how far
Fry was in 1914 from being a strict formalist. Again: ". . . in all
art there is a fusion of something with form in order that form may
become significant."36 Fry confesses that he cannot say what this
"something" is which fuses with form--Bell, himself, suggests that
certain forms are significant because they express emotions (he means
A formal emotions) felt by the artist.37 As an example of this, Bell 1
suggests that a copy of a great work of art, however exact, has not
the beauty or the significant form of the original because what was
in the mind of the creator was not shared by the copyist. Fry does
not, in this review, address such a possibility, though it is hinted
at in other writings of the period. Here, he leaves the Nether
ingredient," "x" in a work of art totally unspecified, except to
required that x "is not of itself form."

Lang argues that Fry, himself, considers the artist's expres-
sion of an idea essential to significance of form, following Fry's
remarks in “A? Essay in Aesthetics": HI conceived early the form of
the work of art to be its most essential quality, but I believed this
form to be the direct outcome of an apprehension of some emotion of
actual life by the artist."38 FSignificant form on that account,f
writes Lang,

was significant because it conveyed to the perceiver the emo-
tions of the artist who, if the art work was successful, both

had felt deeply and had found a suitable vehicle in which to
embody his feelings.39

39

Lang is not correct in attributing to Fry a concept of significant

form in his 1909 "Essay in Aesthetics." Before the discussions between
Fry and Bell in 1910, there simple was not a notion of significant
form. Fry had earlier taken for granted the necessity, for the artist,
of working with form, on the one hand, and a governing nonformal idea
on the other. He had not formulated a term to denote this. Yet it

may be correct to say that in 1914 Fry understood significant form in
the way Lang suggests. Moreover, as early as 1911, Fry ties "signifi-

cant form" to his theory of imaginative expression.4o Fry is writing
41

of the importance of Cézanne:

Working along the lines of Impressionist investigation with
unexampled fervour and intensity, he seems, as it were, to
have touched a hidden spring whereby the whole structure of
Impressionist design broke down, and a new world of signifi-
cant and expressive form became apparent. It is that dis-
covery of Cézanne's that has recovered for modern art a whole
lost language of form and colour. Again and again attempts
have been made by artists to regain this freedom of imagina-
tive appeal, but the attempts have been hitherto tainted by
archaism. Now at last artists can use with perfect sincerity
means of expression which have been denied them ever since the
Renaissance. And this is not isolated phenomenon confined to
the little world of professional painters; it is one of many
expressions of a great change in our attitude to life. We
have passed in our generation through what looks like the
crest of a long progression in human thought, one in which

the scientific or mechanical view of the universe was
exploited for all its possibilities. How vast, and on the
whole how desirable those possibilities are is undeniable, but
this effort has tended to blind our eyes to other realities;
the realities of our spiritual nature and the justice of our
demand for its gratification. Art has suffered in this
process, since art, like religion, appeals to the non-mechanical
parts of our nature, to what in us is rhythmic and vital. It
seems to me, therefore, impossible to exaggerate the importance
of this movement in art, which is destined to make the
sculptor's and painter's endeavour once more conterminous with
the whole range of human inspiration and desire.

40

This is Fry's aspiration for Post-Impressionism in 1911--far from the
Modernist understanding of the movement, which centers around the use

of form for its own sake.

10.

11.
12.
13.

14.
15.

16.

NOTES--CHAPTER II

Fry acknowledges a debt to Denis and other artists in "The
Double Nature (If Painting," Apollo, 89, 1969, 365; for Denis'
views, see Maurice Denis, "Cézanne," Burlington Magazine, 16,
1910, 275. The article first appeared in L'Occident, September,
1907.

 

 

Ibid., 214.
Spalding, Art and Life, 133.

 

Ibid.; Clive Bell, "How England Met Modern Art," Art News, October,
1956, 24-27, 61, describes this exhibition and later ones.

Ibid., 24.

Robert Morley, Letter to the Editor, Nation, December 3, 1910,
406.

Woolf, Roger Fry, 155-157, 168, 186.
Fry, "Retrospect," 291.

Howard Hannay, Rgger Fry and Other Essays, London, 1937, 15-16;
Woblf, Roger Fry, 167.

H. Gene Blocker, "The Oilcan Theory of Criticism," Journal of
Aesthetic Education, 9, pt. 4, 1975, 22.

Ibid., 25.
Ibid.. 26.

 

Roger Fry, "The Post-Impressionists--II," Nation, December 3,
1910, 402.

Ibid.

Hanry Holiday,_ letter to the Editor, Nation, December 24, 1910,
539. '

Roger Fry, "A Postscript on Post-Impressionism,“ Nation,
December 24, 1910, 536.

41

42

17. Ibid., 537.
18. In Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, 195.

19. Roger Fry, "Post Impressionism,“ Fortnightly Review, 95, 1911,
860.

20. Ibid., 861.
21. Ibid., 862.

 

22. Ibid., 864.

 

23. Woolf, Roger Fry, 227.

24. Roger Fry, "The French Group,“ Catalogue of the Second Post-
Impressionist Exhibition, London, 1912, 16.

25. Ibid.
26. Denis, "Cézanne," 208, 213.
27. Fry, "The French Group," 17.

28. Roger Fry, "The Grafton Gallery: An Apologia," Nation,
November 9, 1912, 250-251.

29. Ibid., 250.

30. Arnold Isenberg, "Formalism," Aesthetics and the Theory of
Criticism, edit. by William Callaghan, et al., Chicago,
London, 1973, 23.

31. Clive Bell, Ant, New York, 1981, 6. First published in 1914.

32. Ibid., 8-9.

33. Clive Bell, Old Friends: Pegggnal Recollections, New York,
1957, 73. First published 1956.

34. Lang, "Significance or Form,“ 173.

35. Roger Fry, "A New Theory of Art," Mating, March 7, 1914, 938.
36. I_b_i_d_. ‘

37. Bell, fgjg, 19, 22, 28.

38.
39.
40.
41.

43

Fry, "Retrospect," 294.
Lang, "Significance or Form," 173.
Fry, “Post Impressionism," 867.

Ibid.

CHAPTER III

THE MIDDLE THEORY, 1915-1924: FORMALISM

Fry had, as early as 1886, written of the "value of pure
aesthetics as apart from the emotional" and of art.1 'Even at that
time formalist theories were taking shape on the continent, particu-
larly in Germany. Johann Friedrich Herbart, Robert Zimmerman, Conrad
‘Fiedler, and Adolf von Hildebrand had all developed theories which
distinguished between form and content. According to Peyton Richter,
these theories encouraged -

“pure visibility," according to which feelings and associa-
tions must be completely banished from the mind of the
aesthetic contemplator if he is to really “see" the work of
art, pictured as though at a d1stance.

This kind of vision was of growing interest to Fry between
1915 and 1920; he produced a great number of his own "Post-Impression-
ist" paintings during these years, and his writing was mainly in the
form of reviews in which he applied his aesthetic theories, but did not
discuss them explicitly.3 Fry said of his writing that these "analy-

ses of form-lines, sequences, rhythms, etc. are merely aids for the

uninitiated to attain to the contemplation of form--they do not

texplai ."4

for the benefit of public consciousness--an attempt at public educa-

He would later claim that his emphasis on formalism was

tion. We may best understand this period of formal analysis, first

44

45

as a sustained, in-depth concentration on formal concerns in order

to raise public consciousness of form, and second, as a concentration
on form in his own paintings. Rather than reject his theory of
expressive form, Fry narrows down the range of emotions which he
considers properly aesthetic, to include only emotions aroused by
pure form. After 1920, Fry more frequently discusses nonformal
elements in particular paintings. Moreover, the 1924 essay "The
Artist and Psycho-Analysis," perhaps Fry's strongest explicit defense
of formalism, is a deliberate simplification of his position. After
this point, his belief in the efficacy of the formalist aesthetic
diminishes rapidly.

Fry's later remark that he had once tried to "explain every-
thing" in terms of form refers to his attempt to isolate a particular,
purely aesthetic or "formal" emotion.5 Fry does not deny the exist-
ence of nonformal elements in art, but suggests that emotional elements
and our response to them can be separated from purely formal elements
and our response to those. Furthermore, these formal elements--line,
color, shape,and volume--are necessary elements of a work of pictorial
art, whereas the emotional elements are not. Therefore, form alone
is the essential quality of works of art and emotions other than the
formal emotion are not properly aesthetic.6 I have come across no
essay in which Fry explicitly argues for a formalist aesthetic,
during these years or any others. Yet his analysis of art is over-
whelmingly formal during this period, from 1915 to 1920, and these

should be considered his strongest formalist years.

46

Post-Impressionism again proved important for Fry's theory.
Its defiance of representation lead to a greater consciousness of the
picture surface. Fry noted in 1917 that "in general the effect of
the movement has been to render the artist intensely conscious of
the aesthetic unity of the work of art."7 This evaluation of the goals
of Post-Impressionism leads Fry, during these years, to discuss it
largely in terms of its use of form. This was inevitable, since the
artists did not create their works in order to direct our attention to
things represented.

Fry speaks, in "Art and Life" of contemporary art turning
its vision inward, “to work upon the fundamental necessities of man's
aesthetic functions.“8 These aesthetic functions are part of the
imaginative life, and as they cease to require accurate representa-
tion, they rely more fully on the reality of the work of art alone.
This is a new element in Fry's evaluation of Post-Impressionism, not
central to his 1910-1914 evaluation of that movement. Fry states
more than once that most people are unable to appreciate art of this
sort--that they are increasingly stimulated by and interested in being
carried away from the work of art--to God, glory, or actual memories

9 Fry attempts to bring them back to reality--to what's

of their past.
in front of them, to the work of art they seem to be looking at. He
has to talk about form because whatever it is that is conveyed by a
work of art is conveyed through lines, colors, volumes and shapes--
through form.

This most obvious of observations about a work of art was

behind Fry's long-lived urge to isolate form as the "most essential"

47

element in art. It is the most essential because it is the very
material of art; there can be art without associations with life,
but without form, art is obviously impossible.
The emotions aroused by form are difficult to understand and

to talk about. Fry suggests they are:10

much vaguer than ordinary emotions although as we know from

music they are extremely powerful. . . . They seem to me

to go below our conscious life and to stir the unplumbed

depths of our subconscious nature. . . .They may affect

. . instincts more fundamental [to] aspects of our

being than those which rise to consciousness in our

everyday life. At all events they do not flow along

recognizable channels toward familiar ends but seem to

flood and permeate our whole being. They seem to gain

by their massive quality what they lose in precision and

those who experience them feel also that they are of very

profound.significance.
This description of "formal emotions" is essentially denotative, so
that one who has not felt such emotions is, perhaps, not brought any
closer to them by this passage. It is a decidedly vague description,
especially for Fry. Because Fry is fully aware of the absence of an
adequate vocabulary with which to discuss the emotions aroused by
form, and because he believes that discussion of this sort should
properly be left to psychologists, Fry's formal analyses are directed
toward the forms themselves, rather than to the emotions forms arouse.

Fry felt the profound significance of forms most strongly in

the Pest-Impressionist works of Cezanne. In his 1917 review of

Vollard's Paul Cézanne, republished in Vision and Design_(1920),

 

Fry discusses the evolution of the artist's work in terms of line
and plasticity. Fry uses the terms "plastic" and "plasticity"

regularly during these years to describe certain formal elements in

48

painting. For Fry, the construction of an illusory three-dimensional
space is an important ingredient in an effective two-dimensional com-
position. (Illusory) three-dimensional shapes are plastic shapes for
Fry, and a plastic idea is “such a construction of three-dimensional
shapes as satisfies the contemplation of their relations to one

another and to the whole combination."11 (See Illustration 4.) Fry

writes:12

-That Cézanne became a supreme master of formal design every
one would nowadays admit, but there is some excuse for ;
those contemporaries who complained of his want of drawing.
He was not a master of line in the sense in which Ingres
was, "The contour escapes me," as. he said. That is to
say he arrived at the contour by a study of the interior
planes; he was always plastic before he was linear. . . .
In later works, such as the portrait of "Mme. Cézanne in a
green-house," the plasticity has become all-important, there
is no longer any suggestion of a romantic decor; all is
reduced to the purest terms of structural design.

Fry treats a number of modern artists with this strong formal-

ist emphasis, among them Renoir, about whose treatment of the human

figure Fry writes in 1919:13

The figure presents itself to his eye as an arrangement of
more or less hemispherical bosses and cylinders, and he
appears generally to arrange the light so that the most
prominent part of each boss receives the highest light.
From this the planes recede by insensible gradations
toward the contour, which generally remains the vaguest,
least ascertained part of the modelling. Whatever lies
immediately behind the contour tends to become drawn into
its sphere of influence, to form an undefined recession
enveloping and receiving the receding planes. As the eye
passes away from the contour, new but less marked bosses
form themselves and fill the background with repetitions
of the general theme. The;picture tends thus to take the
form of a bas-relief in which the recessions are not into
the profound distances of pictorial space, but only back,
as it were to the block out of which the bossed reliefs
emerge, though, of course, by means of atmospheric colour
the eye may interpret these recessions as distance.

I w“ .-_- .‘ifll.'.‘f' 'n' LM» 5":- ‘Tzi‘Igfi-LI q

49

 

 

Musée du Louvre, Paris.

0n canvas, 65 x 81 cm.

Still-life with a basket by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906).
1

Illustration 4.

50

It was not in only modern art that Fry wished the public to
see form; in this period Fry analyzes the art of the museums formally.

While he had given Fra Angelico a poetic interpretation in 1902, in

1919 Fry writes:14

The fact is Fra Angelico was, for all the fervour of his
religious emotion, a fiercely intellectual artist, one whose
immense sensibility was always under the control of an
-almost mathematically precise mind. He seems almost to have
had a horror of mixing or modifying in any way the several
colours of his palette. Ultramarine, scarlet, warm ochre,
black, white, terra verte, raw umber, a few greys made
probably by the simplest mixtures as of black and white
or umber and white,--he uses these almost as a musician uses
the notes of the scale, dreading the complications and
impurities of intermediate tones, and relying entirely upon
his rare sense of disposition and quantities to build up not
so much a harmony as a melody of colour.

Fry does not go on to explain Angelico's use of color in terms of his
religious motives. Nor does he discuss at any length the emotional
content of any other of the Florentine works he is reviewing, then
on view at the Burlington Arts Club. He does, however, note at one

point Pesellino's intense interest in depicting psychological

states.15

During this time Fry was fervently interested in formal con-
cerns in his own painting. He wrote to Vanessa Bell from Paris in

1919:

I spend most of my time over the Poussins in the Louvre and
am trying to hammer out some notions very vague at present
about the different kinds of fullness and emptiness of
picture space. Poussin fascinates me more than ever. His
composition seems to me more full of new and unanalysable
discoveries than anyone. I want to find what principle there
is that governs the relations of a convex volume to the space
that occupies and fills it.16

51

This is a typical remark for Fry during the late teens and early
twenties (see Illustration 5).

One of Fry's strongest formalist remarks during this period
was also made in a latter to Vanessa Bell in which Fry defines the
subject of any painting as "a thing with a definite point . . .
[calling on] purely formal sensibility."17

We can conclude that during the period from about 1915 to
1920 Fry attempted to analyze all art primarily through its formal
qualities. Expressive form, for a time, was limited to "significant
form." He paid some attention to nonformal emotion, but very little,
since Fry considered it extra-aesthetic. While Fry wrote a number
of insightful formal analyses during this period, this posture pre-
vents him from appreciating important emotional aspects of the art
he seeks to understand.

In the years between 1920 and 1926 Fry, for the most part,
continues to emphasize the formal analysis of works of art. As in
the previous five years, Fry maintains such notions as the distinc-
tion between the imaginative life and the actual life which renders
the work of art an independent reality, the separation of emotional
from formal aspects in a work of art, and that art is the means of
expression of the artist's emotion. During these years, however,

Fry is more willing to discuss emotional aspects of an artist's
work, along with the formal aspects. At the end of this period, Fry
writes an extensive essay "Some Questions in Esthetics," in which he

firmgly rejects formalism. The resulting aesthetic, as might be

52

 

Illustration 5. Roger Fry: South Downs, 1914. Oil on panel,
3 x 59 cm. Private Collection.

53

expected, is a refinement of various aspects of his early (and his
middle) theory.

In a 1921 lecture, "Architectural Heresies of a Painter," Fry
reiterates his view that imitation is in no way the end of art. He
is replying specifically to the suggestion that one might produce
"wonderful art" by copying the work of a master. "Now this view of
art," Fry says, is "fatal to creative effort. It implies an idea
that beauty is something material, absoldte, fixed, and determined
. . . whereas in fact beauty is a relative quality which inheres in
the forms of the object of art only in so far as it is an evident sign
of an inward spiritual state on the part of the artist."18

In a related statement, Fry had ended his 1920 essay "Retro-
spect" as follows.19

As to the aesthetic emotion--it is clearly infinitely removed
from those ethical values to which Tolstoy would have confined
it. It seems to be as remote from actual life and its practi-
cal utilities as the most useless mathematical theory. One
can only say that those who experience it feel it to have a
peculiar quality of "reality" which makes it a matter of
infinite importance in their lives. Any attempt I might
make to explain this would probably land me in the depths of
mysticism. On the edge of that gulf I stop.
In both these passages, Fry expresses himself in the same terms as he
had used since 1909 in talking about art.

The particular use of the words "spiritual? and "reality“ in
these two passages introduces an aspect of Fry's thought which I have
not emphasized. The imaginative life of human beings, including the
creative effort of the artist and the receptiVe vision of the viewer,

has a special status, above the ordinary field of physical existence.

54

Art and the imagination have a different quality than does ordinary
existence--the action of the mind can transform the physical into a
spiritual reality.

In a letter to Fry in early 1921, Goldsworthy Dickinson replies
to this last paragraph of "Retrospect.“ In regard to Fry's remarks on
the aesthetic emotion, Dickinson writes:20

I suppose you have cleared away a lot of confusion and got

down to a root perception, the meaning of which still remains

to you mysterious to judge from your concluding sentence.

Your use of the word Reality already postulates a kind of

mystic theory. I feel critical about that. What you have

got, in fact, is an emotion. Why should there be any reality

corresponding to it, other than the real work of art, which

arouses it?
None of Fry's other writings, as far as I know, support the claim that
Fry "postulates a mystic reality." I suggest that his remark in
"Retrospect" is an allusion to the reality of the spirit, about which
it is so difficult to speak. Fry would later claim that a fair amount
of that about which it is so difficult to speak in art is a result

of the workings of the human unconscious.21

I believe that for Fry
the spiritual reality of a work of art was mystifying and awesome,
but not transcendental.

During the early twenties, Fry continues to speak of the
artist's task in the same language as we have seen him use throughout
his career in aesthetics. Thus it is Rembrandt's "imaginative com-
prehension and construction of forms" which Fry finds of interest in

22 Even in articles devoted to

a 1921 article on the master's work.
formal analyses, form is presented in the context of his notion that

the artist's emotion determines the form of a work of art. Fry

55

revises this notion only peripherally in admitting only formal emo-
tions into his aesthetic. In this same article on Rembrandt, Fry
suggests that out of this construction of forms "emerges even for
those who miss this discovery of formal sequences a spirit which
brings conviction not so much of its ever having been actual as of

its PEIDQ necessary or eternally real."23

The necessity of which
Fry speaks is the necessity, inevitability, or propriety of a particular
artistic composition. Its "eternal reality“ is a function of the
success of the artist in creating a composition which does not rely'
on associations outside the work itself. That is, given the general
context of human life, Rembrandt's pictures carry significance in
their own unique "world" revealing a spirit which retains its com-
pleteness across time.
Desmond MacCarthy, in his introduction to a 1952 Arts Coun-
cil exhibition of Fry's paintings and drawings, acknowledges that Fry
seems to have held different views on the degree to which the content
of a work of art might enter into the aesthetic experience.24 During
the years 1920 to 1926 Fry wavers on this matter. In a June, 1921,
article, Fry extolls Rembrandt's formal design. A month earlier, he
had written an article on portraits by Rembrandt in the collection of
Prince Yussupoff in Petrograd; here Fry reveals a sensitivity to
Rembrandt's handling of emotional elements, reminiscent of his early
theory:25
Rembrandt had so miraculous an instinct for the characteristic
that he could, one imagines, have discovered an expressive

design from any conceivable material. . . . Something of the
thickness and phlegm of the Dutch character is there, but they

56

have the poise and balance of well-bred people. In response
to this, Rembrandt has here developed a more sweeping sil-
houette, a more flowing rhythm in the lines and a general
sense of amplitude and ease that give to these two pictures
so singular a charm.

Fry's 1924 essay "The Artist and Psycho-Analysis“ has been
cited in defense of claims that Roger Fry was a pure formalist. The

passage chosen by Arnold Isenberg, and used by him as an introductory

quotation, is a baldly formalist remark when read in isolation.26

Now I venture to_say that no one who has a real understanding
of the art of painting attaches any importance to what we call
the subject of a picture--what is represented. To one who
feels the language of pictorial form all depends on hoy_it is
presented, nothing on what. Rembrandt expressed his pro-
foundest fee ings just as well when he painted a carcass hang-
ing up in a butcher's shop as when he painted the Crucifixion
or his mistress. Cézanne whom most of us believe to be the
greatest artist of modern times expressed some of his grand-
est conceptions in pictures of fruit and crockery on a common
kitchen table.

I would argue that the context of the article out of which this quo-
tation is taken requires one to hesitate in accepting this as an
accurate measure of Fry's views. The essay was originally read to the
British Psychological Society and Fry's argument is that art is not
merely an attempt at wish-fulfillment.

Such a characterization of art had been offered by Freud,

Jung, and Pfister. Fry quotes Freud:27

The artist has also an introverted disposition and has not far
to go to become neurotic. He is one who is urged on by
instictive needs which are too clamorous; he longs to attain
to honour, power, riches, fame, and the love of women; but he
lacks the means of achieving these gratifications. So, like
any other with an unsatisfied longing, he turns away from
reality and transfers all his intereSt,and all this Libido
too, on to the creation of his wishes in life.

57

Fry rightly rejects this characterization of art and the artist.
Of course, Fry had long held that art was an activity separate from,
and transcending the instinctive life. The imagination of the artist,
in Fry's view, is contemplative and does not concern itself with the
immediate cares of actual life. Thus, art is not a veiled call to
action.28
Although he expressed this view in his 1909 essay on aesthet-
ics, it would not have served the purpose of Fry's argument against the
psycho-analysts to introduce an aesthetic which allowed the artist to
express nonformal emotions in a work of art. A more clear-cut dis-
tinction between art and instinct was needed, if Fry was to succeed
in casting doubt on the psycho-analysts' characterization of art.
And so Fry says, "for the moment I must be dogmatic and declare that
the esthetic emotion is an emotion about form."29
In distinguishing between true art and art as wish-fulfillment,
Fry uses terms which he had never before and would never again use to
describe art that is not purely formal.30
I believe that'DtJdistinct aims and activities have got classed
together under the wand "art," and that the word "artist" is
used of two distinct groups of men. One of these groups into
which I would divide artists is mainly preoccupied with
creating a fantasy-world in which the fulfillment of wishes is
realized. 'The other is concerned with the contemplation of
form.
Even in his most formal analyses, Fry does not see fit to characterize
dramatic artists such as Giotto or Rembrandt as "creating a fantasy-
world in which the fulfillment of wishes is realized." In attempting
to remove art from the domain of psycho-analysis, Fry presents an

agrgument in terms understandable to the scientists, and he allows

58

some kinds of pictures to be fair game for their inspection. Such
a picture is described by Pfister:31

A yoUth is about to leap away from a female corpse on to a

bridge in a sea of fog, in the midst of which Death is

standing. Behind him the sun rises in blood-red splendour.

On the right margin two pairs of hands are trying to recall

or hold back the hurrying youth.

The distortion of the category of nonformal art which Fry
allows for the sake of argument must be taken into account in under-
‘ standing just how straightforward is Fry's assertion of the pre-
eminence of form in true art. Because Fry does not leave room
between these two extremes, one concludes that his distinction is
designedly not a precise expression of his views.
Fry had adopted a formalist position for much of the period

between 1915 and 1924, and had analyzed art from all ages and places
in formalist terms. He had stated in 1921 that form alone was the
essential quality in all of art, and that emotions other than those
aroused by form were not property aesthetic. Yet there is no straight-
forward, prolonged argument for a formalist aesthetic in any of Fry's
writings of these years, and in the early twenties Fry turns more
frequently to emotional elements in art. To whatever extent we may

judge Fry to be a formalist in 1924, soon afterwards he would begin

to very clearly turn away from its strict demands.

0'!
o

to 00' \1'01

11.
12.
13.
14.

15.
16.
17.
18.
19.

NOTES--CHAPTER III

Sutton, Letters, 110.

Peyton E. Richter, editor, Perspectives in Aesthetics: Plato
to Camus, New York, 1967, 381.

 

 

Spalding, Art and Life, 221. Woolf, Ro er Fr , 202-212; Donald
A. Laing, Roger Fry: An Annotated BiEliograpfiy of the Published
Writings, New York, 1979, 170-181.

 

See Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, 230.

See Roger Fry, "Literary in Painting," Fry Papers; Fry in "Double
Nature," does not say he was, simple, a formalist.

See Roger Fry, letter to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Fry Papers.

Roger Fry, "Art and Life," Vision and Design, 12.

 

Ibid., 14.

Ibid., 2; Fry, "Retrospect," 297.

 

Fry, "Literary in Painting," Fry Papers.
Roger Fry, "Architectural Heresies of a Painter,“ Fry Papers.

Roger Fry, "Paul Cézanne," Vision and Design, 264-265.

 

Roger Fry, "Renoir," Vision and Design, 269-270.

Roger Fry, "Florentine Painting," Burlington Magazine, 35,
1919. 4.

Ibid., 11.

See Woolf, Roger Fry, 220.
See Sutton, Letters, 438.
Fry, "Heresies."

Fry, "Retrospect," 302.

59

20.

21.
22.

23.
24.

25.

26.
27.

28.
29.
30.
31.

60
Letters of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, King's College,
Cambridge, January 3, 1921.
Fry, Last Lectures, 13.

Roger Fry, "Self Portrait by Rembrandt," Burlington Magazine,
38, 1921, 262-263.

 

Ibid., 263.

Sir Desmond MacCarthy, Introduction to Paintings and Drawings,
an exhibition catalog, London, 1952.

 

Roger Fry, "Two Rembrandt Portraits," Burlington Magazine, 38,
1921, 210. ' '

Isenberg, "Formalism," 22.

Roger Fry, "The Artist and Psycho-Analysis," The New Criticism.
Edwin Berry Burgum, ed., New York, 1930, 202-203.

See Chapter l, Note 16: Fry, "Essay in Aesthetics," 17-21.
Fry, "Psycho-Analysis," 198.

Ide,, 194.

ijd,, 207-208.

CHAPTER IV

THE LATE THEORY. 1926-1934: PAINTING'S DOUBLE NATURE

In an unpublished essay on Giotto in the Fry Papers, dated
between 1919 and 1926, Fry implies that the relations among Giotto's
forms are the most important part of his work, while admitting that it
is impossible to overlook "what is desirable" in Giotto's dramatic
content.1 Fry remarks that his own "problem" is that of relating
Giotto's dramatic content to its form--acute here since Giotto's
dramatic imagination is in forms "of such amplitude and such origi-
nality." Fry recognizes that form and content "play into one another's
hands . . . to raise each other to a higher power." This last remark
is perhaps the first articulation of what will become one of two
central ideas in Fry's late theory, and which appeared in published
form in Fry's lead essay in the book Transformations, in 1926. Fry
is hesitant to allow full cooperation between form and dramatic
content in "Some Questions in Aesthetics." Yet he clearly allows it.
At any rate, the essay on Giotto may be placed within at most a year or
so from this 1926 date.

The second central idea of Fry's late theory is also dis-
cussed in the Giotto essay. This is the idea that

in all cases our reaction to works of art is a reaction to a

relation and not to senstations or objects or persons or
events. This, if I am right, affords a distinguishing

61

62

mark of what I call esthetic experience, esthetic reactions, or
esthetic states of mind."2 This distinction grows out of a long-
standing notion in Fry's theorizing that an art object is distinguished
from other objects because of its organization according to the
imaginative demands of the artist. The organization of forms, in
other words, the ordered relation of forms one to another is the
subject of aesthetics, and thus, the source of the aesthetic emotion.
In his discussion of "Some Questions in Aesthetics," David
Taylor points out that the claim that an aesthetic experience involves
"the recognitidn cfi"a relation among visual elements" is not neces-
sarily a formalist hypothesis, since we might as well relate trees,
buses, and socks as volumes, lines, and colors.3
Taylor then discusses what is the main thesis of Fry's essay,
that aspects of realism may legitimately enter into a work of art if
they are part of the necessary group of relations which make up the
work of art.4 We can understand this thesis as an elaboration of
Fry's belief that a work of art has its own "reality," separate from
--that is, not an imitation of--the actual world. Although Taylor
does not acknowledge this continuity of Fry's thought, he is, never-
the less, correct in characterizing this idea as transitional, from
Fry's emphasis on form and formal emotions (as aesthetic reality), to
an emphasis on the varieties of aesthetic reality which can be created
by various artists. Taylor calls this a theory of "aesthetic person-
ality."5
Taylor focuses the rest of his essay on the ramifications of

this aspect of Fry's newly iterated aesthetic, outlining what he

63

understands to be the main features of the theory of artistic person-
ality. I agree with Taylor that this becomes a focus of Fry's later
aesthetic theory and mark especially his claim that

for Fry, from 1926 onward, aesthetic content would appear to '
be the whole emotional import of the artisth unique sensi-
bility, transmitting, by means of its deep familiarity with
the expressive resources of its medium, the familiar into the
revelatory: a content accessible only within the context of
the work of art.6

 

While Fry admits, in this essay, the importance of representa-
tion in painting, he still resists the idea that a painting might
be successful when it leads one to contemplation of something out-
side the painting itself. Thus, in his analysis of Rembrandt's
Titus at his desk (Illustation 6), Fry suggests that the contempla-
tive mood of the work is so well established by the forms on the
canvas that it is those forms that one contemplates and is not imme-
diately led to questions such as what Titus, Rembrandt's son, was-
-really like, and what was his relationship to his father--did it make
him moody or unhappy. Rather, one observes the softened light as it
falls across the right grain of the desk, as it shapes the boy's face
out of the darkness behind him. One notices the solidity of the desk
in opposition to Titus' small body. The thoughtful expression on his
(painted) face is compelling in itself, quite apart from what it
might represent in the real world. This is how, in his late theory,
Fry brings one back to what is in front of one's face: by pointing
out the unique context into which associations with the actual world

are called. As an artist, Rembrandt isolates certain characteristics

64

 

Illustration 6. Renbrandt van Rijh: Titus at his Desk, 1655.
' Oil on canvas, 77 x 63 cm. Rotterdam, Museum
Boymans-van Beuningen. ‘

65

of his son and through his use of paint, creates a spiritualized image,
with its own "revelatory" content, its own reality.

Taylor points out Fry's use of the word "spiritual" in
describing such a work of art. His explanation of this, though some-
what high-flown, points out clearly Fry's concept of the unique
quality of the creation of works of art:7

Fry's use of the word spiritual in regard to this process would
seem peculiarly appropriate since what is involved is essen-
tially the operation of transmutative mind in the manifesta-
tions of sight, the bestowing upon these the connotation of
a distinct "spirituality," or sense of heightened visual and
psychic activity."
This concept of art, of its spirituality, is not new in Fry, dating
back as it does at least to the first decade of the century.

I would emphasize, what Taylor does not, that in this 1926
essay, Fry is somewhat hesitant about the ways in which form and.
emotional content interact in a work of art with an independent
reality. Fry's stated thesis in the essay is to show the falsity of
I. A. Richards' claim that aesthetic experience is not separate from
other experiences. He does this by introducing three works of art
--Brueghel's Carryingyof the Cross, Daumier's Gare St. Lazare, and
Poussin's Ulysses discoveringyAchilles amongithe daughters of
Lycomedon. In these works, as Fry analyses them, psychological and
formal content do little, if anything, to complement one another. He
suggests that this is the rule in European art.8 "Co-operation,
then, between the two experiences derived from the psychological

aspects of a picture does not appear to be inevitable. I have not

sought to prove that it is impossible or that it never occurs."9 This

66

clearly separates Fry from Bell's formalism, but also shows how little
Fry is willing to claim here.

Fry will come to believe that such cooperation occurs in
artists other than Rembrandt. He sets up the apparatus for those
later evaluations by distinguishing between two sorts of talents an
artist may possess and which, in 1926, he is already willing to state

are possessed by Rembrandt.10

Rembrandt is certainly rare, if not unique, among artists in
having possessed two separate gifts in the highest degree.
His psychological imagination was so sublime that, had he
expressed himself in words, he would, one cannot help
believing, have been one of the greatest dramatists or
novelists that has ever been, whilst his plastic construc-
tions are equally supreme.

Fry believes that in most of Rembrandt's works, one or another
of his gifts predominate. And in what he says is one of the best

examples of perfect cooperation between the two, Christ Before Pilate

 

in London's National Gallery, Fry's analysis of these elements falls
into their two corresponding parts. He admits to not being able to
reconcile them, suggesting that one's vision must switch from one
aspect to the other in beholding the work. It is worthwhile to quote
Fry's analysis at length.11

As Rembrandt has seen it, Christ Himself falls into the back-
ground. This in itself is a striking indication of how '
fresh and original Rembrandt's dramatic imagination was.

As he reconstrcuted from the Gospel text the whole scene
before his inner vision he saw that such a moment as he has
chosen must have arisen. It is the moment of greatest
dramatic tension, where the protagonists are no longer Pilate
and Christ, but Pilate and the Rabbis. And he has given this
moment with astonishing perception of ' exactly the kind of
characters involved and the inevitable effect of their clash.
. . . Certainly as drama this seems to me a supreme example
of what the art of illustration can accomplish. And as a

67

plastic construction it is also full of interest and
strange unexpected inventions. The main group piles up
into a richly varied but closely knit plastic whole which
leads on by the long upward curve of Pilate's robe and
turban to the less clearly modelled volume of the soldiers
around Christ. Around these Rembrandt has created first
of all the concavity of shade beneath the overhanging
baldachin of the judge's seat, and this opens out into
the vaster concavity of the public place through which

a diagonal movement, hinted at by the inpouring crowds,
leads us away under the arched entrance.

Personally I feel that the great, uprising pillar
surmounted by the bust of Caesar, admirable as it is in
its dramatic suggestiveness, is a little detrimental to
the spatial harmony. Still, one cannot deny the plastic
beauty of the whole conception, although it is somewhat
too crowded and overlaid with detail to be considered
one of Rembrandt's great discoveries. This may, perhaps,
be placed to the psychological account, since the general

agitation and bustle of every detail increases the idea of
the whole mad turbulence of the scene.

In summing up the importance of "Some Questions hi Aesthetics"
one would note Fry's clear departure from the formalist aesthetic,
which ignores the artist's intentions and the kind of meaning his
work will Carry. Although he does not explicitly address this diffi-
culty, Fry meets it squarely in suggesting that it is each artist's
unqiue vision and understanding of his subject and material which
determines his or her work's aesthetic content. Further, Fry dis-
tinguishes two aspects of the artist's capacity--a formal and an
emotional one. The major difference in this 1926 formulation from
what has been a consistent dichotomy in Fry's aesthetic is its admis-
sion that formal and emotional elements may enter equally in the
aesthetic experience.

Fry wrote to Charles Mauron July 10, 1926, I have "begun to

think one must admit the possibility of psychological volumes in the

68

visual arts."12 From this point in 1926 until his death in 1934 Fry's
aesthetic theory is less and less formalist. As he writes to Helen
Anrep in 1928:13

I am at last getting under way with my lecture. I propounded

a few of its heresies at Vanessa's last night. She, poor

dear, is deeply shocked but I believe I'm on a tack that

will make things a little clearer and relieve the strain which

I have felt of late on the other orthodoxy. One runs a theory

as long as one can and then too many difficulties in its

application--too many strained explanations accumulate and

you have to break the mould and start afresh. I'm going to

divide pictures into Opera pictures and Symphony pictures

and then we can begin to analyse them according to these

ideas instead of trying to pretend that all pictures produce

similar effects by similar means.
The lecture to which Fry refers, "Representation in Art," written in
late 1928 and early 1929 and as yet unpublished, lays out some basic
themes of Fry's late theory. Many of these themes: the understand-
ing of the visual arts as a means of expression, and not as mere
imitation; the importance of the independent reality of a wOrk of art;
and the helpfulness of analyzing our reactions to art as a means of
comprehending its significance, have been constant in the various
different phases of Fry's aesthetic theory. While Fry continues to
maintain that purely formal ("symphonic") works can be separated and
appreciated in a different way than works of art which combine the
formal and emotional ("operatic" works), he now explicitly refused to
maintain that operatic works are less aesthetically successful. And
he improves on his early theory by discussing more fully the relation
between form and emotion and by broadening the range of forms and
emotions for which the theory can provide help in seeing and under-

standing.

69

Both Spalding and Pamela Diamand (Fry's daughter) suggest
that part of the reason Fry changes his mind about the efficacy of

formalism is that Fry's companion during these years, Helen Anrep, was

not sympathetic to the formal analysis of the whole of art history.14

Of a late letter from Fry to Anrep, Spalding remarks that Fry

noted in Correggio's Adoration of the Magi how much of its
content he had prevously missed due to his emphasis on form.
"I see I'm in danger of getting shockingly 'literary' under
your influence," he reported back to Helen. "But I see that
the pictures that 'count' most enerall have some quite

new and personal conception of the situation." In this '
case, it was the reluctance and tenderness expressed in the
figure of the Virgin that had caught his attention.15

 

As has been noted, Fry's close friend Dickinson had criticized
his formalism as early as 1921. Dickinson remarks that Fry's attempt
to "isolate a special element," the purely aesthetic element, weakens
Fry's theory as regards its application to literature. "I believe,“
writes Dickinson, "that element, isolated, would be very thin indeed,

16 This was also Virginia

perhaps like a note without overtones."
Woolf's objection to the universality of Fry's theory. Woolf writes
to Fry on September 22, 1924,

I'm puzzling, in my weak witted way, over some of your prob-

lems: about "form" in literature. . . . I say it is emotion

put into the right relations; and has nothing to do with

form as used in painting. But this you must tidy up for me

when we meet. . . ."17

I suggest that the most important factor in Fry's decision to

reject pure formalism was that it had begun to deprive him of seeing
what was in front of him, and he felt this in 1926 just as he had felt
it in 1903 in objecting to Whistler's theory: "the coldly abstract

sensual vision which he inculcated is, in the long run, damaging to

70

the vision itself, while the poetical vision increases the mere power
of sight."18

In "Representation in Art," Fry compares music and architec-
ture to painting, sculpture, and literature, noting the relatively
large part played by representation in the latter group. "In con-
sequence," Fry says, “truth to nature is often put forward as the
highest incentive to creation and the certain test of achievement."19
This turns out, consistent with all phases of Fry's aesthetic theory,
to be an inappropriate demand on these arts. His argument here is
that such a demand is not universal, since no one thinks of making it
in regard to music and architecture. And because it is not universal,
it is inadequate as a basis for aesthetic theory.

He argues further that our reactions to music, to literature,
and to pictures are fundamentally alike, implying that in this reaction
we may find the appropriate basis for aesthetics. Fry finds, as he
had stated in "Some Questions in Aesthetics," that in all cases we
react to relations. Fry uses the drama as an example: "the aesthetic
idea of adrama is not in the emotions themselves but in the pattern
which the artist has made out of them." Thus since in the case of all
the arts an analysis of our reactions leads us to a series of relations,
these relations are the real content of the work of art.

In upholding his idea that the work of art must have its own
reality, Fry introduces a difficulty for the art of painting. He
suggests that anything merely representational--which does not play a

necessary part in the unity of the whole--tends to destroy the work

71

of art, by introducing elements unconnected with the work itself.
This is clearly related to the ideas espoused in "Some Questions in
Aesthetics," and to other aspects of his late theory.
In a lecture on the "Literary in Painting," given in 1931
(also unpublished), Fry presents a fairly complete aesthetic theory.20
He denies that emotions aroused by form must necessarily be isolated
from other ("literary") emotions; there are some pictures, he now
claims, in which the two elements interact in something like a chemical
combination. He concedes to having gone too far in stressing form,
saying that it was for the benefit of the public sensibility, adding
that he "was thinking of making amends by writing a book on Rembrandt
as a dramatist."21
I suggest that the most important statement made by Fry in
the 1931 essay, which marks his later theory as a kind of evolutionary
advance over his previous two theories, is the following.22
Aesthetic satisfaction which comes from psychological elements
included in a work will depend on the form given to that
psychological material--just as it is in a work of literary
art . . . with this will be compounded our aesthetic satis-
faction in the form given to the visual construction. We
have an apprehension of both forms at once but it is from
farm in both cases that our aesthetic satisfaction is
derived.
The aesthetic which Fry then presents is precisely that which is
found in his 1933 lecture "The Double Nature of Painting."
If his formal theory made the public aware of a responsibility
to look closely at visual art, to draw not only literary, but more
importantly formal delight from it, he now asks more. He asks one to

consider how the forms, which move us at a level so subtle that it is

72

difficult to talk about, enhance the story, the psychological content.
This requires one to enter more fully into the artist's intentions,
to see the work as'a whole. In 1894 Fry had suggested that "to look
at pictures the right way, to understand them critically" involved an
"appreciation of the painter's intention and of the emotional equiva-

lent of the picture."24

His late aesthetic theory suggests a way
to do this. It requires ridding one's mind of generalizations about
lyric or Comedic art, about the supremacy of pure form or of ingenuity
of representation in favor of a close visual analysis of particular
works of art.

The visual analysis will.reveal emotional elements which it
will be important to react to. These emotional elements may be of
two sorts: in "symphonic" pictures they will be purely formal, in
"operatic" pictures the emotions will be literary, or psychological,
and may make reference to things outside the painting. This outside
reference will not interfere with the independent "reality" of the
painting if the form which makes this reference is an essential part
of the scheme of the painting as a whole. This is the case because
such a reference will have the meaning it does only in reference to
its particular presentation in the work of art. Thus the reference
to the plight of Paolo and Francesca in Delacroix's painting means
something somewaht different than does the same reference in Dante's
Inferno. The difference lies in the form of presentation.

Fry was in Vienna (perhaps during his May 1928 visit there)
looking at Giorgione's Three Philosophers, when he writes, "for the

first time I became sharply aware of how much it is necessary to invoke

73

the double function of art in order to explain all that I expe-
rienced."25 Fry explained this double function as requiring the
cooperation of two distinct arts. First, the art of producing a
system of forms which presents us with certain delights, surprises,
and puzzles which cna be worked out wholly by looking at the picture
with reference to nothing outside it. Second, the art of producing
significant dramatic or poetic content, which necessarily relies on
the artist's psychological imagination and on references to a world
outside the picture frame. He gives examples of paintings which rely
on only one of these arts: that is, examples of "pure painting," which
are wholly formal, and of "literary painting" which employ form
solely to represent a literary or psychological situation. He then
discusses paintings which employ both; these he calls "true paint-
ing."

Fry mentions one literary painting, Poynter's Faithful unto
.9222!3 the same artist's Israel in Egypt is a second example of a
literary painting. Earlier in his career Fry would have called it
epic, and during his middle period would have mourned its lack of
formal concerns. Painted for the educated middle class, it is decora-
tive in a way similar to that of a modern day movie poster. The forms
are solid and arranged only to draw our attention to the mass of
Jewish slaves laboring for the Egyptians. Various symbols of
Egyptian power are placed throughout the picture space to reinforce
the theme. While a few interesting shadows are cast on the pylon

temple at the right, the play of light is not generally exploited for

74

its own visual effects. The perspective is skillfully done but with
no surprises and not consistent rhythm of volumes in space enlivens
the illusory picture space. We are given a clear depiction of an
historical event and it is the historical event which remains the
point of the work.

We might look briefly at an example of what Fry would have
called "pure painting"--and he is careful to say that pure painting
is not to be considered better or worse than operatic painting:-
Picasso's Le verre d'absinthe.26 Representation drops out as an
essential element of this painting, replaced by a rhythm cfl’ shaded
planes across the canvas. PIcasso makes no attempt to render physical
reality, says Fry; instead, he draws our attention to the flat sur-
face by various devices. The complex relationship of lines and tones
felt by Picasso are recorded and shared by the viewer.

An oddly delightful example of failure to unite the double
function is discussed by Fry in his Brussels lecture: Correggio's
Martyrdom of St. Placid and St. Flavia. Fry marks the double aspect
of the work: first, its representation of the extremely violent and
brutal martyrdom of these two saints and second, the formal composi-
tion, which as he notes is not only melodious, but voluptuous. "It
.is as if one were to play Othello to the music of Cosi fan tutte.
What an admirable ballet scene; you would think the executioners have
just come on stage performing a gay and elegant pas de deux."27
Correggio cannot adapt his typical elegant rhythm to such a brutal

theme, and the double aspect of the work pulls in two directions.

75

 

Illustration 7. Mart rdom of Saint Flavia and Saint Placid by
Antonio Correggio (1489/94-1534). Oil on

canvas, 160 x 185 cm. Pinacoteca, Parma.

76

Giorgione's Three Philosophers exemplifies true operatic

 

painting. Fry is first struck by the formal qualities of the work,
in particular the volumes of the three figures which he finds
intriguingly placed in Giorgione's strange pictorial space. He
finds their placements both unexpected and inevitable. Yet Fry
confesses that it is not only a pleasing formal emotion which he
experiences in front of Giorgione's masterpiece . . . he says, "I
feel that I am in the presence of a great poet as well as_a great
plastic artist."28 The "unexpected and inevitable" disposition of
volumes, Fry claims, heightens our capacity to feel the strange quiet-
ude of the three figures, their otherworldliness, their understanding
of a hidden truth. Thus the formal and psychological complement one
another here. Fry notes that Rembrandt is another painter of great
dramatic poetic skill and suggests that there are cétainly others.
Fry admits that this theory of the double nature of painting,
which does not aim at a metaphysical basis or at ultimate principles
but hopes to "stimulate the growth and direct the attention of the
sensibility," does not give one the intellectual satisfaction of a
theory which lends to all painting the unity of explanation offered
by the earlier formalist theory.29 The late theory is "less tidy,"
he writes, "but there it is.. . .9; Fry does not like "straining
facts at all."30 He gives up unity of explanation for a theory which
better accounts for all the facts. Emotional content, crucial to art
throughout history, is given a place in Fry's late aesthetic and

finally, the individual aims of the painter are given due attention.

77

 

Illustration 8. The Three Philoso hers by Giorgione (c. 1476-1510).
Oil on canvas, 123.8 x 144.5 cm. Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna. Fry acknowledges Giorgionneyas

"a great master of plastic harmonies and a great
romantic poet."

\10101

10.
11.
12.
13.
14.

15.
16.
17.

NOTES--CHAPTER IV

Roger Fry, "Giotto," Fry Papers. Other quotes in this paragraph
are from the same essay.

See Roger Fry, “Art and Science," Athenaeum, June, 1919, 434-435.
Taylor, "Aesthetic Theories," 64.

Ibid., 66. Taylor quotes Fry as saying "the moment anything
. . ceases to serve towards the edification of the whole
plastic volume . . . (or) depends on reference to something
outside the picture, it becomes descriptive of some other
reality."

 

Fry, "Some Questions," 26.

I id., 27.

Ibid., 28-30.

 

Sutton, Letters, 594.
Spalding, Art and Life, 268.

Ibid., 268-269; Pamela Diamand,. Fry's daughter, suggested this
in a conversation with me in August, 1984.

Spalding, Art and Life, 269.
Dickinson Papers, January 3, 1921.
Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia.Woolf, Vol. 3, 1923-1928,

Edited by Nigel Nicolsen and JOanneTTrautmann, New York, 1978,
133.

78

18.
19.

20.
21.
22.
23.
24.

25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.

79

Fry, "Whistler," 133.

Roger Fry, "Representation in Art," Fry Papers. Other quotations
in this and the next paragraph are also from this manuscript.

Roger Fry, "The Literary in Painting," Fry Papers.

U-
do
Q.

HH
0.

bi

Ibi

5‘

Sutton, Letters, 162. Fry repeats the idea in "Idioms in
Painting,“ Fry Papers. The precise date of this essay is
unknowna_it is listed as 1924-1935.‘

Fry, "Double Nature,“ 371.

Fry, "Literary in Painting."

Fry, "Double Nature," 369.

Fry, "Literary in Painting."

Roger Fry, “Representation in Painting," Fry Papers. Now
dated 1928-1929.

CONCLUSION

The oversimplification of Fry's views came early. In a 1923
review of Fry's paintings a writer for the Westminister Gazette says
that a "serious indiscretion has to be recorded of the portrait of
The Honorable Bertrand Russell,in which Mr. Fry has been, I believe,
betrayed into something dangerously like psychological interest.“
Indeed, it seems the most common error made by writers on art has
been to overlook the evolutionary quality of Fry's thought, and to
ignore altogether his interest in emotional expression in favor of
ill-documented claims that Fry was simply a formalist.

In his 1933 Critical History of Modern Aesthetics, the Earl
of Listowel states, without qualification, that for Fry "dramatic
representation in painting is the unwarranted intrusion of an alien
art, the art of literature; for painting itself is an art of plastic

"1 and that Fry endorses Bell's notion of

volumes and pure design,
significant form. We have seen that this second claim is blatantly
false. Listowel's other claim is made in reference to Fry's opinion
as expressed in "Some Questions in Esthetics" (1926), and in "An
Essay in Aesthetics," (1909). Listowel implies that the two works
are entirely compatible and that together they offer a formalist view
of art. A review of the two essays reveals that although somewhat

compatible, the two essays are by no means formalist. Instead, they

80

81

support Fry's belief that art is an activity of the imaginative life
and that the art object is a means of transmitting the artist's
emotion--whatever it may be--to the viewer. At the early date at 1933,
then, Fry's views are already being distorted through simplification.
Morris Weitz makes a similar error in his 1956 article "The
Role of Theory in Aesthetics," where he calls Fry a formalist,
referring to the "Bell-Fry theory" of significant form.2 Moreover,
as distinguished an aesthetician as Arnold Isenberg falls into the.
same oversimplification. In his essay "Formalism," published post-
humously in 1973 from a lecture outline, Isenberg quotes Fry at length,
without citing a source. His use of this passage, in which the
strongest formalist remark is that "Rembrandt expressed his pro-
foundest feelings just as well when he painted a carcass hanging up
in a butcher's shop as when he painted the Crucifixion or his mis-
tress," lends an explanation for why such misrepresentations of Fry
abound.3 Isenberg is interested in the theory of formalism--that
Fry may (or may not) have held this theory is for him, incidental.
In the course of discussing what he considers weak arguments for a
formalist position and possible reasons for holding it, Isenberg never
mentions Fry's reservations about Bell's statement of significant
form, and never admits that Fry ever held any other theory. The
quote Isenberg depends on is from the 1924 essay, “The Artist and
Psycho-Analysis," in which Fry comes closest to arguing explicitly
for a formalist aesthetic; by ignoring the context of these remarks

Isenberg further propagates the myth of Fry's formalism.

82

The instances of this sort of simplification, made with inade-
quate documentation and for purposes which distort Fry's own, can
be recorded without end. I will only name a few aestheticians who
have followed this course, aside from those already mentioned:

4 I do not

Harold Osborne, Stephan Pepper, and F. E. Sparshott.
discuss misrepresentations of Fry in the writings of modern art.crit-
ics, but note that lately' critics have themselves found formalism
wanting, and might do well to understand the whole of Fry's thought.
His constant interest in emotional expression in art, and his late

concern with the transmutative power of the artist may be of par-

ticular interest to the “postmodernist" critic.

NOTES--CONCLUSION

Earl of Listowel, Critical History of Modern Aesthetics, London,
1933, 143. '

Morris Weitz, "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics," Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15, No. 1, 1956, 35.

Isenberg, "Formalism," 22.

Harold Osborne, Aesthetics and Criticism, New York, 1955, 85-

86 and 131. The author allows for some nonformalist sentiments
in Fry's wiritng, but leaves this in doubt when he writes, 224-
225: "Roger Fry became firmly convinced of the absolute value
of abstract form-properties independent of sentiment, feeling

or representation. . . ."; Stephen C. Pepper, The Basis of Criti-
cism in the Arts, Cambridge, Mass., 1956, 91-92; F. E. SparShBtt,
The Structure of Aesthetics, Toronto, 1965, 328, 348-49.

 

83

BIBLIOGRAPHY

84

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