Vision and Design

Roger Fry

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780486400877
• eBook ISBN: 9780486143934
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Twenty-five art-related essays by distinguished British art critic and painter reveal his wide-ranging interests. Writings explore relationships between ancient and modern art and between art and life, examining such diverse topics as the art of the Bushmen, African sculpture, ancient American art, Giotto and the art of Florence, the paintings of Dürer, El Greco and William Blake, the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, the works of Paul Cézanne, and contemporary domestic architecture. Also includes Fry's most important theoretical statement, his "Essay in Aesthetics." 13 black-and-white illustrations.

NOTES

ART AND LIFE

From notes given to the Fabian Society, 1917. This society held a summer school in August 1917 and it is possible that Fry gave his lecture there.

1

A style named after Jeanne Bécu, comtesse du Barry (1743–93). patroness of the arts.

2

Fry is probably thinking of his former employer John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), whose financial empire was matched only by his huge collection of art works.

3

Salimbeni’s chronicle: G.G. Coulton, From St Francis to Dante, a translation of all that is of interest in the chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene, 1221–88 (1906).

4

St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153).

5

Paray le Monial is in east central France in the department of Saône-et-Loire. The Benedictine priory was founded in the tenth century.

6

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573–1610).

7

Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825).

8

Whistler’s ‘Ten O’Clock Lecture’ was given in London on 20 Feb. 1885 and published in his The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890). Whistler tried to establish the autonomy of art and nature and to defend himself against the critical abuse of Ruskin. In 1878 Ruskin and Whistler had gone to law about Ruskin’s remarks in Fors Glavigera which denigrated Whistler’s painting The Falling Rocket.

9

William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (Edinburgh, 1899).

10

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), painter of highly sophisticated aristocratic portraits.

AN ESSAY IN AESTHETICS

First published in the New Quarterly, 2 (April 1909), pp.171–90.

1

In A Manual of Oil Painting (1886), John Collier wrote: ‘This representation of natural objects by means of pigments on a flat surface is a very definite matter and most people are competent to judge of the truth or falsehood of such a representation ...’ (p.3). John Collier (1850–1934) was a painter of portraits and subject pictures. He studied at the Slade and was encouraged by Fry’s bêtes noires Edward Poynter and Alma-Tadema. Collier’s definition of art is similar to that given by G.P. Lomazzo in his Trattato dell’arte della pittura (Milan, 1585) where he wrote that ‘pittura è Arte laquale con linee proportionate, e con colori simili à la natura de le cose, seguitando il lume perspettivo imita talmente la natura de le cose corporee ...’ (P.19).

2

‘It is probable then, that if a man should arrive in our city, so clever as to be able to assume any character and imitate any object, and should propose to make a public display of his talents and his productions, we shall pay him reverence as a sacred, admirable, and charming personage, but we shall tell him that in our state there is no one like him ... and we shall send him away to another city ...’ (The Republic ofplato, trans. J.L. Davies and D.J. Vaughan (Cambridge, 1866), iii, 92–3).

3

Tolstoy does not say precisely this but he condemns Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for being unable to unite ‘all men in one common feeling’. (Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, trans. Aylmer Maude, 3rd ed. (1898), P.173).

4

Bastien-Lepage (1850–84), leader of the plein airiste school in France and a strong influence on the New English Art Club in its early years in England.

5

In Tolstoy’s story this is a wolf.

6

Denman Waldo Ross, Theory of Pure Design, Harmony, Balance, Rhythm (Boston and Cambridge, Mass., 1907).

7

Michelangelo’s Jeremiah is in the Sistine Chapel.

8

i.e. the Tondo Doni.

9

‘Le modelé humain a, chez eux, toute la beaute des lignes courbées de la fleur. Et les profiles sont fermes, amples comme ceux des grandes montagnes: c’est de l’architecture’ (Gustave Coquiot, Le Vrai Rodin, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1913), p.226)

THE OTTOMAN AND THE WHATNOT

First published as ‘The Ottoman and the Whatnot’, Athenaeum, 27 June 1919, pp.529-30.

1

Antimacassar: a covering for the back of chairs to prevent staining from greasy hair. It was invented in the nineteenth century and Fry is using it as a symbol for Victorian attitudes.

2

Mr Podsnap’s rhetoric: from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864–5). Podsnap epitomises Victorian conservatism, narrowness and complacency.

3

‘the young person’: i.e. Podsnap’s daughter, Georgina. One of his tests of propriety was ‘Would it bring a blush of shame to the cheeks of a young person?’

4

Ojibbeways and Waramunga: tribes of North American Indians.

5

The Ottoman: a couch with a head but no back, the body of which is ‘stuffed over’ so that no wood is visible.

6

a traitor: because the Ottoman (i.e. Turk) is a foreigner.

7

the Whatnot: a series of pillars holding shelves for china ornaments, and in this case the works of Tennyson and Whittier.

8

Tennyson and John Greenleaf Whittier: poets who represented, for Fry, Victorian propriety and moral rectitude. Whittier (1807–92) was an American Quaker.

9

‘Distance ... the view’: Thomas Campbell, Pleasures of Hope (1799), pt. i, 1.7.

10

A Limoges casket: produced between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries in south western France.

11

A cassone is a marriage coffer. It is often highly decorated and has large feet in the shape of claws. The panels on it are frequently painted with mythological subjects or with fables.

12

Boccaccian freedom: a reference to the bawdy tales which make up the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75).

13

Caffieri: after Jacques Caffieri (1678–1755), a French worker in metal.

14

Riesener: after Jean Henri Riesener (1734–1806), a French cabinet-maker of t...

Table of contents

• DOVER BOOKS ON ART AND ART HISTORY
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• PREFACE
• Table of Contents
• Table of Figures
• INTRODUCTION
• ART AND LIFE
• AN ESSAY IN AESTHETICS
• THE OTTOMAN AND THE WHATNOT
• THE ARTIST’S VISION
• ART AND SOCIALISM
• ART AND SCIENCE
• THE ART OF THE BUSHMEN
• NEGRO SCULPTURE
• ANCIENT AMERICAN ART
• THE MUNICH EXHIBITION OF MOHAMMEDAN ART
• GIOTTO - THE CHURCH OF S. FRANCESCO AT ASSISI
• THE ART OF FLORENCE
• THE JACQUEMART-ANDRÉ COLLECTION
• DÜRER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
• EL GRECO
• THREE PICTURES IN TEMPERA BY WILLIAM BLAKE
• CLAUDE
• AUBREY BEARDSLEY’S DRAWINGS
• THE FRENCH POST-IMPRESSIONISTS
• DRAWINGS AT THE BURLINGTON FINE ARTS CLUB
• PAUL CÉZANNE
• RENOIR
• A POSSIBLE DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE
• JEAN MARCHAND
• RETROSPECT
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX