Page 60 - Studio International - May 1966

Roger Fry in retrospect
London commentary by Charles Harrison
Most of those without a special interest who visited the fluence was over a younger generation. The impact of
Arts Council exhibition Vision and Design 1 must have been his two exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries is legendary.
more grateful for the opportunity to see gathered together Apart from the opportunity which these created to see at
works illustrative of Roger Fry's scope as a critic than first-hand the latest developments in French painting,
for the paler pleasures conveyed by the works of Fry Fry's lectures and criticism constantly brought to public
himself and of his Bloomsbury associates. In that the attention new realms of art and new evaluations of old
former were carefully reassembled and scrupulously ones.
catalogued the exhibition performed for Fry a consider- His own enthusiasms, certainly in 1920, were for works
able service. As far as his own painting is concerned Fry which provided him with a particular kind of aesthetic
was of course his own worst enemy. To say that the experience dependent on what Clive Bell had called 'sig-
selection in the Arts Council galleries was representative nificant form'. The rationalization and the aesthetics of
invokes considerable credit for the organizers, little for this experience provided Fry with much of the material
the painter. The extremely comprehensive section of the for 'Vision and Design'. What is important is that young
exhibition devoted to Fry's critical activities reveals him painters and sculptors who may or may not have read
for the vastly influential figure that he was. Sir Kenneth Fry's works or attended his lectures, were put constantly
Clark has said that Fry taught his generation to look; it in touch with a range of works which illustrated his ideas.
is perhaps more important that he taught them what to Although the ideas themselves may not necessarily have
look at. permeated, an atmosphere—an aesthetic environment—
`Roger Fry ... did not get the living painters to cham- developed in which those qualities became esteemed that
pion that [he] deserved.'2 It is ironic that a critic whose were common to the works by which Fry's tastes had been
primary concern, as Fishman has observed,3 was with formed.
`the transformation of three-dimensional data in two- The Italian Primitives, Negro sculpture, Sung and T'ang
dimensional terms,' should have been most immediately pottery, Giotto and Cezanne alike provided an antidote
influential on a group of painters whose chief gifts were to the literary values of the nineteenth century. They
decorative (although the high-points of this art, well illustrated for the benefit of the younger painters of the
represented at the Arts Council, were by no means 1920's those qualities of visual art which are entirely in-
negligible). But in the long term Fry's most valuable in- herent to it; qualities of vision and design, of formal inte-

Roger Fry
River with poplars 1911
Oil on canvas
22½ x 28 in.
Collection Mrs Pamela
Diamond

220