“The Greatest Revolution in Art”: Reinterpreting Roger Fry’s Byzantinism

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in formalism throughout the humanities. Within the field of art history in particular, the emergence of a new formalism has been accompanied by a renewed interest in its historical manifestations. The British art critic Roger Fry (1866-1934) is one of those early formalists whose work has moved to the center of attention again. After having long been dismissed for his high modernist fixation on form at the exclusion of meaning, recent studies have shown that Fry’s position is more complex and nuanced than has often been assumed. In this article, I will revisit Fry’s formalism with a particular emphasis on his lifelong interest in Byzantine art. Although it has widely been recognized that Byzantine art played a crucial role in Fry’s theories, and was regarded by him as an important precursor of the avant-garde of his day (most notably the Post-Impressionism of Cézanne), I argue that the nature of his Byzantinism has long been misunderstood. Rather than being merely of formal interest to him, I demonstrate that Fry’s interest in Byzantine art is deeply historical, and his Byzantinism is nothing but an attempt to salvage art’s spiritual aura in a disenchanted world.