Page 61 - Studio International - May 1966

grity and of independence. The formal puritanism which
Above Below
Paola Verveziano Crucifixion
First half of fourteenth century
Panel 13+ x 15+ in. the case painted by Roger Fry
Owned by Roger Fry 33 x 46 in.
Private collection, Essex Private collection, Somerset
Painted virginals 1917-18,
made by Arnold Dolmetsch,
reached its peak in British art in the mid 'thirties, with the
white reliefs of Nicholson and the carvings of Hepworth
and Moore, owed much to the stringency and selective-
ness of Fry's tastes. Nicholson in Paris, searching out the
Italian primitives, Cezanne, Douanier Rousseau, Negro
art, Matisse and Picasso, and Moore pursuing unfashion-
able enthusiasms in the British Museum, owed more, in
the early 'twenties, to the educative puritanism of Fry
than probably either of them realized.
What the artists learned at first hand from the works
concerned was ultimately, however, of a different quality
from what the public have learned through Fry's writ-
ings. Ironically, the formalist view of art, while anticipa-
ting pure abstraction, has been in the end a potent enemy
of the cause of abstract art. Unable to see form and
content as one,4 Fry prepared the ground not so much
for abstraction in art as for a critical perception of art
based entirely on its abstract qualities. This was ulti-
mately of no assistance—in terms of gaining supports—to
a generation of abstract painters whose most purely
formal works vibrate with the memory of acute visual
experiences before actual scenes or objects. The finest
abstract painting is a crystallization of a whole range of
responses or attitudes to the visual world, at once an
elegy and a commentary, with a vast field of reference.
The formalist tempts us to abandon the difficult chase
after chimeras and to settle for something less.
Since the war the position has become still more in-
volved. Action painting poses questions unanswerable in
Fry's terms. Art as a form of autobiographical activity,
while it still depends on the quality of integrity which
Fry so admired in Cezanne or Chardin, is no longer
susceptible to all the critical standards which Fry hoisted.
Abstract expressionism demands a psychoanalytical ap-
proach of the kind which he anticipated but ultimately
avoided.
What Fry shrank from was that involvement with the
personality and passion of the artist demanded by the
expressionist painter, whether it be Grunwald or Gott-
lieb. His very fastidiousness, while it disciplined his re-
sponses to what he admired, prevented him from
enjoying to the full that other, less Mediterranean, art in
which the whole man is patently engaged. It is perhaps
for this reason that Fry has become so unfashionable. The
importance of action in painting is for us a lesson well
learned. In an age when our attention is inevitably drawn
to the processes of perception and creation, the study of
works of art as autonomous ends in themselves appears
to offer little. q
1 Vision and Design: The Life, Work and Influence of Roger Fry. Arts
Council and University of Nottingham.
2 Alan Bowness: Catalogue of exhibition British Art and the Modern
Movement. Arts Council, Cardiff.
3 Solomon Fishman. The Interpretation of Art. University of
California Press. 1963.
It was for this separation that he was attacked by I. A. Richards in
The Principles of Criticism in 1924.
5 There is evidence to suggest that some younger painters felt
resentful at the lack of any attention from Fry.
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