Roger Fry: A Pioneer of Modern Art Criticism and Aesthetics

Roger Fry was one of the greatest art critics of the 20th century, who promoted the rise and development of the Western modern art movement and constructed a set of modern aesthetics formalism and art criticism theories, exerting a huge influence on modern art. Despite the formation of Fry’s aesthetics formalism cannot be separated from the background of the transformation of Western cultural traditions, the influx of Chinese art into the West at that time also had an impact on Fry’s aesthetics formalism. Fry extracted and reinterpreted from Chinese art, forming a distinctive formalist aesthetic theory. In Fry’s various works, the influence of Chinese classical aesthetics can be seen, such as blank space, rhythm, and emotional expression. The research will explore the correlation between Roger Fry’s aesthetic formalism theory and Chinese art. The study will analyze how Chinese art was introduced into the West and how Roger Fry was influenced by Chinese art. It will focus some particular elements like rhythm and blank space, explore how Fry reinterpreted them and applied to modern art criticism theory, using his work “Cézanne: A Study of His Development” as an example.

British Formalist Aesthetics and Its Literary Writing Practice

Apart from continuing associations with the Cambridge Apostles, Roger Fry was not much involved with the Bloomsbury Group as a critic or painter before 1910. Yet in the development of Bloomsbury’s critical theory and practice, Fry’s Edwardian writing was important. His authority as critic and theorist converted them to post-impressionism, and thus altered their painting and their writing. Fundamental to Bloomsbury’s aesthetics is a complex analogy of visual and literary art, and that analogy is assumed in Fry’s criticism. By 1906 Roger Fry had established himself in the columns of the Athenaeum as one of the leading art critics in England — and then threw over this career for another as a curator in America. (He was the only member of Bloomsbury to have resided in the United States.) Much of Fry’s early art reviewing lies outside the literary history of Bloomsbury, yet some of the essays and reviews that he wrote have a place in the extended idea of literature assumed in this literary history.

Paul Cezanne died in October 1906 at age of 67. In time he would be generally regarded as most influential painter who had worked in nineteenth century (e.g., Clive Bell, 1982; Clement Greenberg, 1993). Art historians and critics would also agree that his greatest achievement was work he did late in his life: in judgment of historian Meyer Schapiro, for example, the years from 1890 to his death in 1906 are a period of magnificent growth (Meyer Schapiro, 1952; Theodore Reff, 1977; Roger Fry, 1989). In spring of 1907, 25-year-old Pablo Picasso showed a few friends a large new painting that would be given title Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. This would become most important painting of twentieth century, as forerunner of Cubism, the most complete and radical artistic revolution since Renaissance, which Picasso and his friend Georges Braque went on to create in next few years (John Golding, 1988; Galenson, 2001). Picasso would paint for another 66 years, until his death in 1973 at age of 92. During this enormously productive career, he would become by far most celebrated artist of twentieth century. Yet he would never again execute a painting as important as Demoiselles, nor produce another body of work as significant as that he made in years between 1907 and outbreak of World War I. The dramatic contrast between careers of Cezanne and Picasso raises intriguing questions about artists' productivity. Art historians have not systematically addressed question of when in their careers modem artists have typically done their best work, and previous research consequently affords no basis for judging whether it is simply a matter of chance that Cezanne and Picasso made their greatest contributions so close in time, in spite of difference of more than 40 years in their ages. But research by psychologists on ages at which successful practitioners in other disciplines have done their best work is suggestive. Mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and poets typically make their most important contributions at younger ages than do astronomers, biologists, and novelists; psychologists have argued that this is because creative ideations can be produced and elaborated more rapidly in disciplines that deal with abstract conceptual entities than in those whose central ideas are more complex and concrete (Harvey C. Lehman, 1953; Dean Keith Simonton, 1988, 1994). Economists have also identified a number of factors that can change relationship between age and productivity within a given activity (Yoram Ben Porath, 1967; Anne P. Bartel and Nachum Sicherman, 1993, 1995). In view of these results for other disciplines, and potential for change considered by economists, we argue that it was not a matter of chance that Cezanne and Picasso made their greatest contributions at such different ages, but rather that this was a result of process that gave rise to creation and early development of modem painting. Under influence of increased demand for innovation that had prompted beginning of modern painting, new generations of artists made painting an increasingly conceptual activity, in which young practitioners could make important advances. We will use evidence drawn from twentieth-century auction market to examine relationship between artists' ages and value of their paintings for a group of artists, including Cezanne and Picasso, who dominated that early development. This will allow a test of hypothesis that this relationship changed systematically during first century of that art. * Galenson: Department of Economics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, and National Bureau of Economic Research; Weinberg: Department of Economics, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210. We thank Gary Becker, Britt Salvesen, Tom Sargent, and two anonymous referees for comments, and Thomas Walker for research assistance.

The role of the art press has been proved crucial in the early formation of art history. The study of art criticism at the turn of the century, however, is still mainly focused on male figures, such as Roger Fry (1866–1934) and Bernard Berenson (1865–1959). In fact, evidence indicates that women were important contributors to these debates through their contributions in the new periodicals: The Studio, The Connoisseur, and The Burlington Magazine. This essay offers key examples of women writers, such as Julia Frankau (1859–1916), Julia Cartwright (1851–1924), and Mary Berenson (1864–1944). It explores thematic case studies on decorative art, the Old Masters, and collections history. Although these writers lacked institutional affiliations, their scholarly approaches overturn gender stereotypes of superficiality. Women writers were also often attuned to the interconnectivity of the press, collecting, art production, and the art market.

Roger Fry and the Beginnings of Formalist Art Criticism

Louis MacNeice was more interested in visual art than has generally been recognised. The origins of this interest lie in MacNeice's schoolboy friendship with the art-historian-to-be Anthony Blunt. The ideas that Blunt passed on, particularly those of the Bloomsbury Group art critics Clive Bell and Roger Fry, had a considerable impact on MacNeice's intellectual development. But in transferring Bell's and Fry's concepts from the visual arts to poetry, MacNeice also challenged their doctrines, teasing out the philosophical and political hazards of a formalist aesthetics that attempts to disconnect art from the complications of everyday life.

The Interpretation of Art. Essays on the Art Criticism of John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Herbert Read

The Purposiveness of Form: A Reading of Kant's Aesthetic Formalism Rachel Zuckert In the "critique of aesthetic judgment," Kant claims that when we find an object beautiful, we are appreciating its "purposive form." Many of Kant's readers have found this claim one of his least interesting and most easily criticized claims about aesthetic experience. Detractors hold up his aesthetics as a paradigmatic case of narrow formalism; 1 and even many admirers of Kant's aesthetics take Kant's claims about form to be problematic, but argue that they are inessential to his aesthetics (which includes more interesting, defensible claims). 2 Though these critics come to differing evaluations of Kant's aesthetics as a whole, they agree on two points. First, interpretively: that when Kant claims that it is the "form" of an object we find beautiful, he means that in aesthetic appreciation, we find certain spatial and/or temporal properties (such as proportion, line, shape) aesthetically pleasing—and that such properties are exclusively responsible for an object's beauty. Second, evaluatively: that Kant is wrong, at least about this. In this paper, I shall propose that we need not endorse either claim. I shall argue that one may interpret Kant's formalism as a claim that in aesthetic experience 3 [End Page 599] we appreciate the object as an individual, as comprising all (or indeterminately many) of its sensible properties as inextricably interrelated or unified to make the object what it is; in other words, we appreciate what has been called an object's 'individual form.' This reading, I shall suggest, allows us not only to understand Kant's aesthetics as intimately connected to his project in the Critique of Judgment (hereafter, CJ) as a whole, but also to see Kant's aesthetics, in general, as providing a richer, more plausible description of our aesthetic engagement with an object, or as less narrowly subjectivist than is frequently believed. I shall proceed by presenting Kant's claims about form, and the standard criticisms thereof, and then turn to defend this alternative reading. Before I do so, however, I wish to make some preliminary remarks about aesthetic formalism in general. Contemporary discussion of formalism often takes aesthetic formalism to be instantiated by the views of the twentieth-century art critics, Clive Bell and Roger Fry, 4 and Kant's formalism is often implicitly equated with theirs (or the kind of position attributed to them). I wish to resist that equation in this essay; to that end, I start here by giving a wider sense of what formalism might be, drawing especially on historical positions that were available to Kant. 5 Broadly speaking, "formalism" is the view that, in aesthetic appreciation of an object (usually a work of art), we do and ought to pay attention not to the object's representational content, emotional expressiveness, historical, institutional, or social context (whether conditions for the production of the object or its effects), but only to its form. Formalism is characterized in some sense, then, by what it excludes, viz. considerations taken to be external to the object. But it does specify positively (if vaguely) that the form of an object is what makes it beautiful. 6 'Form,' however, can mean a number of different things, all of which (in some sense) are the design or arrangement of an object's parts, often of its sensible properties. I wish to draw attention to three somewhat distinct ways in which one may understand such form or arrangement of properties, which I shall call 'property-formalism,' 'kind-formalism,' and 'whole-formalism.' Property-formalism is the view that the form of an object can be described in terms of a set of specific spatial or temporal properties that characterize the relations that hold among different parts of the object, and that these properties are responsible for the beauty of the object. Hogarth's view that the serpentine line is the most beautiful line, responsible...

Using William Rothenstein (1872–1945) as a case study, this essay explores the opportunities available for young art writers who were also practicing artists at the turn of the previous century—and the various anxieties that ensued over this dual role. Rothenstein's early contributions to the London periodicals The Studio and The Saturday Review are examined in relation to his one major publication: a 1900 study of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), the first English monograph on the artist. This was published as part of “The Artist's Library,” a popularizing venture overseen by the writer Laurence Binyon (1869–1943) and incorporating fellow artist-critics such as Roger Fry (1866–1934) and Charles John Holmes (1868–1936). Rothenstein's subsequent retreat from art criticism coincides, it is argued, with the growing professionalism of the practice, led by such scholars as Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), who originally questioned Rothenstein's involvement in “The Artist's Library.” An appendix provides the most comprehensive list to date of Rothenstein's art historical writings.

Underlying much discussion of forgery is this question: Why do people prefer a genuine work of art to a copy when they cannot tell the difference between the two? To put the question in its strongest form, suppose not just the average viewer, but even the greatest experts will never be able to see any difference between them. In this case, could there possibly be a justification to prefer the original work? Some people claim that the reasons to prefer the original are not aesthetic but moral:because exact copies are easily mistaken for originals they can be used to deceive. But the moral explanation cannot account for why we prefer to see the original even when there is no deception involved, that is, when the copy is clearly labeled as such. (From here on a nondeceptive copy will be called a “fake,” to distinguish it from a “forgery,” which is intended to deceive.) If, to accommodate the crowds, the Mona Lisa and a high-quality, clearly labeled copy were hanging in different parts of the Louvre, most of us would still choose to line up in front of the real thing; what seems odd is that we would do so even though we wouldn’t be able to tell if the works were switched.In resorting to the moral (nonaesthetic) explanation for the preference for originals, it is assumed that there could not possibly be any aesthetic grounds for such a preference. Underlying this assumption is the “appearance theory,” the view that the aesthetic value of an artwork depends “solely on the visual appearance of the painting” (Meiland 1983: 116). This view, however, is not so obviously true as it may seem; those who reject it claim that a work’s aesthetic interest depends not just on appearance but also on how an art object was made, when, by whom and for what cultural purpose. Richard Wollheim has more recently argued against a general version of the appearance theory, which applies to literature and music as well as to paintings. What he calls the “Scrutiny Thesis” is the view that to evaluate a work of art we should not draw on external, contextual or cultural knowledge, but confine ourselves to direct examination of an artwork, whether looking at, listening to or reading it (Wollheim 1993a: 132-33). The appearance theory is associated with the formalism of the early twentieth-century art critics Clive Bell and Roger Fry. Enthusiastic about abstract painting,they claimed that an artwork’s aesthetic interest derives entirely from abstract features of its appearance, such as a painting’s line, color and spatial organization (Bell 1992: 123-24). This led Bell to claim that the aesthetic response is independent of all knowledge of the world a viewer brings to a work. If this is so, the fact that a work is a forgery or a fake could not possibly affect its aesthetic value. But this would mean that our response to one of the late, near-formless Monet paintings of water lilies would be the same whether we recognized it as a picture of water lilies or mistook it for an abstract work. Given how dramatically the spatial experience changes when we do come to recognize the flowers, this seems implausible. Because figurative content has such a powerful impact, few accept Bell’s extreme formalism. Bell’s account was nonetheless notable as an attempt to distinguish features that are universally part of the appearance of a work of art (abstract shapes, lines and colors) from features that vary depending on external or contextual knowledge (everything else including figurative content). If we decide that Bell’s account of a work’s universal content is too narrow, then we face the problem of where else to draw a line between what anyone would perceive regardless of cultural context and what is perceived only with certain background knowledge. To those in a desert culture who have never seen a water lily or a Monet painting, a late Monet work might well appear abstract without added background information. For those who are steeped in Monet and his culture, the flowers are discovered simply by looking. Contextualist arguments against the appearance theory come in two main varieties.One variety, the kind Wollheim espouses, claims broadly that all perception (aesthetic or not) is shaped by what the perceiver knows. Another variety points to specific features that do not affect the way a painting looks, but that do affect its aesthetic value, such as the originality of a work.

Feminist critics have often blamed modernism for helping to create an art that is paternalistic, homophobic, elitist, Eurocentrist, and antifeminist.l In their haste to react to high modernism, and particularly to the art-critical writings of Clement Greenberg, they have frequently ignored the earlier exponents of modernism in art criticism. The author believes that this has led feminist art critics to overlook the positive aspects of modernism and to accept instead a postmodernism that is ultimately unresponsive to the feminist agenda. When feminists demand inclusion in the art world, they should explore the possibility that this goal might be reached better by following modernist theory and practices than by subscribing to a postmodernist theory that is characterized by an emphasis on the impersonal and possesses a paternalistic and antifeminist avant garde. In particular, the modernist criticism of Roger Fry deserves consideration as it offers prescriptions for feminist art and art criticism that could prove beneficial.

In this richly illustrated book, Michael Fried--one of the most esteemed and influential art critics and art historians working today--has gathered eight major essays written between 1993 and 2013, on topics ranging from Jacques-Louis David, Theodore Gericault, and Caspar David Friedrich through Gustave Caillebotte and Roger Fry to recent films by Douglas Gordon and Thomas Demand. Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, too, are distinct presences along with, in the background, the great art critic Denis Diderot and, in the case of Friedrich, the philosopher Immanuel Kant. As always in Fried's writing, the emphasis falls equally on observation and argument: never have these artists (and one critic, Fry) been subjected to so searching a gaze, and never has the meaning of their respective enterprises been laid bare with comparable clarity and force. Another hallmark of Fried's work is its extraordinary originality, and that too is fully in evidence throughout this remarkable book, which will add to his reputation as one of the indispensable thinkers of our time.

This essay argues against the prevalent view of the aesthetics implicit in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. It is an aesthetics of closure, an attempt to make “of the moment something permanent” (Woolf 2000a [1927]: 176), which is usually associated (as are Woolf's own theoretical statements) with the novel. This “formalism,” no doubt related to Roger Fry's art criticism, takes fictional shape in the character of Mrs. Ramsay. In fact, it is by bringing life to a standstill, enclosing it in crystalline “moments of being” (Woolf 1976), that Mrs. Ramsay struggles against the grasp of time. However, this aesthetics is shown to be illusory and self-deceptive: the very opposition between humanity and nature stems from the human desire to comprehend and thus reduce to reason (and language) what the text constructs as irreducible. Mrs. Ramsay's aesthetics gives way to the aesthetics of virtuality enacted by Lily Briscoe's painting. Only by reformulating the problem of time in spatial terms can Lily overthrow the limitations of the formalist framework: her art—a hybrid image/text—hinges on the blanks of aesthetic communication (which I define by reference to the work of Wolfgang Iser and Louis Marin). Lily's painting qualifies as the only viable alternative to Mrs. Ramsay's self-contained crystals of shape. Finally, I show how Woolf herself tried to (p)reenact Lily's painting in the central section of the novel, “Time Passes.” Apparently built on the humanity/nature opposition, this baffling segment revolves in fact around a blank (the absence of any perceiving consciousness internal to the fictional world) and encourages the reader to fill it in by imaginatively moving into the fictional world with a virtual body (as defined by Maurice Merleau-Ponty).

This introduction situates Lewis’s art criticism within historical, biographical, and critical contexts. In most accounts of the history of art criticism in mid-century England, Lewis barely figures. Prevailing narratives favour the work of Roger Fry, Herbert Read, and Kenneth Clarke. Yet, in retrospect, from the vantage point of twenty-first century modernist studies, Lewis’s interrogatory style, his attention to pragmatic and economic conditions surrounding the reception of the work of art, and his occasional critical assaults upon the emerging ‘modernist’ canon, justify a far more central position for Lewis in our understanding of the history of art criticism. This short introduction places Lewis’s work in relation to twenty-first century modernist studies, with its focus on the contexts, networks, and patronage structures which underpinned and generated the work canonised as modernist – a canonising project in which Lewis participated but which he also analysed and scrutinised, positioning himself, in the process, as one of the chief internal critics of the fields of visual and literary modernism.