Cezanne A Study of His Development

by Roger Eliot Fry

"" A Study of His Development"" by Roger Fry is a comprehensive analysis of the artistic evolution of the renowned French painter, Paul Cezanne. The book explores Cezanne's life and work, tracing his development from his early Impressionist style to his later, more abstract paintings. Fry examines Cezanne's use of color, form, and composition, and how he influenced the development of modern art. The book is filled with detailed descriptions of Cezanne's paintings, accompanied by photographs and illustrations. It also includes a biographical section on Cezanne's life and career, as well as a bibliography of his works. This is an essential read for anyone interested in the history of art or the works of Paul Cezanne.1927. Fry, English art critic and painter and champion of modern French schools of art introduced Cezanne and the postimpressionists to England. From 1905 to 1910 he was curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1933 he was made Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge. Interested in all eras, he consistently stressed the importance of analyzing the formal qualities within a work of art. His biography was written by Virginia Woolf in 1940. This volume contains his influential work on Cezanne, who today is regarded as one of the great forerunners of modern painting, both for the way he evolved of putting down on canvas exactly what his eye saw in nature and for the qualities of pictorial form that he achieved through a unique treatment of space, mass, and color.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

Genres: Art, Art History, Nonfiction, Biography

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

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

[Albert Jaeger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got interested in this book after reading a recent biography about the impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, which covers Pissarro’s (sometimes tense) interactions with Paul Cézanne. Fry’s short book was an early rave (or so some critics dismissively thought) about Cézanne’s painting genius. I approached the book with trepidation because of its somewhat dated writing style (1927), but also because of its reputation as being only accessible to high priests fully immersed in the secrets of modern art history. In fact, I found Fry’s writing style surprisingly coherent and down to earth (after all, he was friends with people like Bertrand Russell). At the same time, Fry’s analysis of Cézanne’s evolution as a painter is indeed difficult to follow, but not so much because of any highfalutin discourse, but because of Fry’s use of technical painting language that is likely easily understood by practiced painters (Example (p. 63): “The hatched strokes are more loosely spaced, the impasto becomes thinner, and has evidently been applied in a more liquid state.”) The perhaps biggest challenge I encountered was making my way through the list of black-and-white figures/plates attached to the book, which are arranged in an idiosyncratic manner and can only be appreciated by looked them up in color (only Cézanne paintings that were in the Pellerin collection in the mid-1920s are listed). The book’s print (a Kessinger's Legacy Reprint) was a pleasure to read.

[Uriah Marc Todoroff · Rating 2 out of 5]

quite bad as for as art history goes; almost equally bad as a piece of writing.