Roger Fry

Roger Eliot Fry ( born December 14, 1866 in London, † September 9, 1934 ) was a British painter and art critic. He coined the term Art Post Impressionism and is considered an important precursor of Vorticism. Important was his influence on the Bloomsbury Group, which he had joined in 1910.

Life and work

The son of Judge Edward Fry grew up in London in a wealthy Quaker family.

After visiting the Clifton College, he studied at King 's College, Cambridge, where he was received by the Cambridge Apostles. After his first exam, which he passed in 1887 and 1888 in the natural sciences, he traveled in 1891 to Italy to study the old masters of Italian art and took 1892 painting at the Académie Julian in Paris. In his subjects, he specialized in Italy for further trips to the art of the Renaissance and held in Cambridge lectures about it. The acquaintance with the American art historian Bernard Berenson and Renaissance Kenner was at that time.

Fry learned the fellow student in the arts Helen Coombe (1864-1937) and married her in 1896. When shortly afterwards showed her symptoms of mental illness, she came in 1899 in a clinic that she left again after a recovery before 1910 final was admitted to a home. Fry remained connected to her throughout his life and wrote her loving letters.

1903 Fry was next Berenson and other co-founder of the magazine The Burlington Magazine, a London published scientific journal for art and decoration. From 1904 he was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1906 he discovered the works of Paul Cézanne during a stay in Paris and turned his interests in modern art. The following year he went back to England and represented the interests of the museum as "European advisor ". In 1910, he was after a dispute with the museum's director, JP Morgan, dismissed.

AB November 1910 was organized by Fry exhibition Manet and the Post- Impressionists in the Grafton Galleries, London, instead. The London audience felt shocked and provoked; the press also published abstruse misperceptions. Fry organized a second Post-Impressionist exhibition, in addition to contemporary British painting mainly works by Henri Matisse, the Fauves as well as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were issued despite these negative reactions 1912. She was under the patronage of Lady Ottoline Morrell, with the Fry had a volatile romantic relationship.

The fuss about the issue did not affect his admiration of French modernism. On the contrary, they moved him to " his actual art, old masters, to turn their backs and to devote himself entirely to his own painting and modern art ."

In 1913, Fry the Omega Workshops, a design workshop, which also Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant of the Bloomsbury Group, which he had joined in 1910, belonged. He established himself as an art historian and art critic with various publications in the arts and was still active as a painter. In 1933 he was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, but died the following year in London after an accident at his home.

Honors

On July 25, 1940 was published posthumously in Virginia Woolf's biography of Roger Fry, the friend she had known since the Bloomsbury time, in common with her husband, Leonard Woolf, managed publishing the Hogarth Press, London.

The art historian Kenneth Clark praised Fry as " incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin ... in so far as taste can be changed by one man, it what changed by Roger Fry " ( " incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin ... if taste by a man can be changed, it was Roger Fry changed ").

Attached to the house Fitzroy Sqare # 33 in London's Bloomsbury, in the Omega Workshops were based, had the British organization English Heritage 1910 Install a Blue Plaque in his memory.

Writings

• Vision and Design (1920 )
• Transformations ( 1926)
• Henri Matisse ( 1930)
• French Art ( 1932)
• Reflections on British Painting (1934 )

Secondary literature

• Barbara Aulinger: Roger Eliot Fry, in: major works of art history. Edited by Paul Naredi -Rainer, composed by Johann Konrad Eberlein and Götz Pochat, Kröner, Stuttgart 2010, ISBN 978-3-520-36401-2, p.138 -141
• Bernd Klüser, Catherine Hegewisch (eds.): The Art of the exhibition. A documentation thirty exemplary art exhibitions of this century, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt / Leipzig, 1991, ISBN 3-458-16203-8
• Frances Spalding: Roger Fry, art and life. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980, ISBN 0-520-04126-7
• Virginia Woolf: Roger Fry: A Biography. Hogarth Press in 1940; Harcourt College Publishers Publishers Ltd 1976, ISBN 0-15-678520- X