A Roger Fry Reader

by Roger Eliot Fry, Christopher Reed (Editor)

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the art critic Roger Fry introduced English-speaking audiences to modern French art and formalist aesthetic theory. A Roger Fry Reader, edited by Christopher Reed, brings together for the first time a comprehensive selection of Fry's essays. Most appear here for the first time since their original publication in scholarly journals and art magazines, while some have never been published before. Representing 40 years of engagement with the arts, the essays cover a broad spectrum of topics, from Fry's influential promotion of Post-Impressionism to art education, museums, architecture, decorative art, and the implications of literature and dance for the visual arts. Reed also provides valuable historical background and considers Fry's legacy for the present. A Roger Fry Reader affords an opportunity to examine both the foundations of modern art criticism from the point of view of one of its foremost practitioners and current debates about the nature ofart and aesthetic experience.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Philosophy

447 pages, Paperback

First published July 15, 1996

About the author

Roger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasized the formal properties of paintings over the "associated ideas" conjured in the viewer by their depicted content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin... In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry".

Reviews

[Tony Poerio · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first read Fry, I was seriously impressed by his writing ability and point of view. He's an excellent art theorist, who doesn't get as much attention as he deserves. I haven't read all of this, but I had a class with the book's editor once upon a time--he was brilliant--and I really enjoyed reading Fry, with selections from this book, presented and explained very well. Would recommend.