Fry, Roger

▪ British art critic and painter

in full  Roger Eliot Fry 

born December 14, 1866, London, England

died September 9, 1934, London

      English art critic and artist, best known as the champion of the movement he termed Post-Impressionism.

      Fry was born into a Quaker family and was educated at the University of Cambridge for a career in science. His interest in art grew, however, and he studied painting in Italy and also began to lecture on art. His first book, Giovanni Bellini, was published in 1899. Thereafter he published art criticism, and in 1905 his edition of Joshua Reynolds's Discourses was published.

      Fry first came into contact with the work of the French painter Paul Cézanne (Cézanne, Paul) in 1906, and the experience changed the course of his life. He began to publish articles on the works of Cézanne, Paul Gauguin (Gauguin, Paul), Henri Matisse (Matisse, Henri), and Vincent van Gogh (Gogh, Vincent van), for in these painters he saw a merging of the structural understanding of the classical artists with the colour explorations of the Impressionists (Impressionism). Upon his return to London, Fry became associated with the Bloomsbury group. In November 1910 he organized for the Grafton Galleries the first of two painting exhibitions that were to revolutionize aesthetics in England. The uproar over “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” was considerable; it removed Fry from the ranks of traditional and academic critics and propelled him into the vanguard of art criticism. A second exhibition of a similar nature opened in October 1912.

      In 1913, following a precedent that had been set by William Morris (Morris, William) and the Arts and Crafts Movement, Fry organized a group of young artists into a collective called the Omega Workshops. The goal of the collective was to infuse the innovative aesthetic of Post-Impressionism into the design of everyday functional objects (such as drapery, furniture, and china). The bright colour and ornamental pattern used by these artists marked a fresh departure from the more restrained design of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Omega remained in operation until 1919.

      Fry continued to lecture, travel, and paint throughout his life. His legacy is a body of art criticism and theory that includes Vision and Design (1920), Transformations (1926), Cézanne (1927), Henri Matisse (1930), and several other collections of lectures. He also wrote the Britannica Classic on Paul Cézanne. In 1933 he was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge.

Additional Reading

Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, ed. by Diane F. Gillespie (1995, reprinted with corrections; first published 1940); Donald A. Laing, Roger Fry: An Annotated Bibliography of the Published Writings (1979); Frances Spalding, Roger Fry: Art and Life (1980).

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