BiblioVault - Books about Fry, Roger

Art and the Market

Roger Fry on Commerce in Art, Selected Writings, Edited with an Interpretation

Craufurd D. Goodwin

University of Michigan Press, 1998

Roger Fry, a core member of the Bloomsbury Group, was involved with all aspects of the art market as artist, critic, curator, historian, journalist, advisor to collectors, and gallery operator. He is especially remembered as the person who introduced postimpressionist art to Britain.
Reprinted in this volume are seventeen of Fry's works on commerce in art. Although he had no formal training in economics, Fry addressed the art market as a modern economist might do. It is therefore fitting that his writings receive here an original interpretation from the perspective of a modern economist, Craufurd D. Goodwin. Goodwin explores why Fry's work is both a landmark in the history of cross-disciplinary thought and a source of fresh insights into a wide range of current policy questions.
The new writings included contain Fry's most important contributions to theory, history, and debates over policy as he explored the determinants of the supply of art, the demand for art, and the art market institutions that facilitate exchange. His ideas and speculations are as stimulating and provocative today as when they were written.
"A fascinating selection of essays by one of the twentieth century's most thoughtful and stimulating critics. Goodwin's introduction sets the stage beautifully, providing useful links to Veblen and Keynes." --D. E. Moggridge, University of Toronto
"Art and the Market uncovers new connections between aesthetics and art in the Bloomsbury Group. . . . Goodwin adds significantly to the understanding of cultural economics in the work of Fry himself as well as J. M. Keynes and even Leonard and Virginia Woolf." --S. P. Rosenbaum, University of Toronto
"All those interested in the arts and economics, and their connections, will be delighted by this collection, as will be students of Bloomsbury." --Peter Stansky, Stanford University
Craufurd D. Goodwin is James B. Duke Professor of Economics, Duke University.

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The Capitalist and the Critic

J. P. Morgan, Roger Fry, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

By Charles Molesworth

University of Texas Press, 2016

A skillful and fascinating retelling of the often testy relationship between J. P. Morgan and Roger Fry, two men who did more to establish the preeminence of the Metropolitan Museum of Art than any collector and curator before or since.

Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, the Metropolitan Museum of Art began an ambitious program of collection building and physical expansion that transformed it into one of the world’s foremost museums, an eminence that it has maintained ever since. Two men of singular qualities and accomplishments played key roles in the Met’s transformation—J. P. Morgan, America’s leading financier and a prominent art collector, and Roger Fry, the headstrong English expert in art history who served as the Met’s curator of painting. Their complicated, often contentious relationship embodies and illuminates the myriad tensions between commerce and art, philanthropists and professional staff, that a great museum must negotiate to define and fulfill its mission.

In this masterful, multidisciplinary narrative, Charles Molesworth offers the first in-depth look at how Morgan and Fry helped to mold the cultural legacy of masterpieces of painting and the development of the “encyclopedic” museum. Structuring the book as a joint biography, Molesworth describes how Morgan used his vast wealth to bring European art to an American citizenry, while Fry brought high standards of art history from the world of connoisseurs to a general public. Their clashes over the purpose and functions of the Met, which ultimately led to Fry’s ouster, reveal the forces—personal and societal—that helped to shape the Metropolitan Museum and other major American cultural institutions during the twentieth century.

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Cezanne

A Study of His Development

Roger Fry

University of Chicago Press, 1989

Roger Fry's classic study of the art and life of Paul Cézanne, originally published in 1927, has been acclaimed as a paradigm critical work for its clarity, perception, and originality. Himself an artist, Fry rejected prevailing modes of criticism, believing that form, not subject matter, should be the primary expressive element. Cézanne's work came closest to Fry's ideal—it gave formal expression to all of nature.

This study established Fry as a critical "father," the first of his line to explicate the ideas of "vision and design" in an attempt to understand modern art. His critical analysis has in many respects never been surpassed. Fry endeavored both to show the essential development of the painter's style and to approach individual works directly; he wrote that he would detect "the profound difference between Cézanne's message and what we have made of it." The result is a book, couched in Fry's most lucid, penetrating language, which is of great technical value to the painter and student and which offers the layman an illuminating demonstration of the remarkable force of Cézanne's art.

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A Cezanne in the Hedge and Other Memories of Charleston and Bloomsbury

Edited by Hugh Lee

University of Chicago Press, 1992

The Bloomsbury circle has long preoccupied writers, critics, and the general public alike. For many years its focal point was Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, home to Vanessa and Clive Bell and Duncan Grant. A Cézanne in the Hedge brings together thirty firsthand reminiscences of the Charleston, vividly and amusingly evoking its creativity—and eccentricity. Childhood memories from Quentin Bell, Angelica Garnett, and Nigel Nicholson are interspersed with appraisals of the work of Bloomsbury members such as Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, and Virginia Woolf and of their contribution to twentieth-century British art and thought. The finale is a childhood spoof written by Virginia Woolf entitled "A Terrible Tragedy in a Duckpond."

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A Roger Fry Reader

Roger Fry

University of Chicago Press, 1996

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the art critic Roger Fry introduced English-speaking audiences to modern French art and formalist aesthetic theory. A Roger Fry Reader, edited by Christopher Reed, brings together for the first time a comprehensive selection of Fry's essays. Most appear here for the first time since their original publication in scholarly journals and art magazines, while some have never been published before. Representing 40 years of engagement with the arts, the essays cover a broad spectrum of topics, from Fry's influential promotion of Post-Impressionism to art education, museums, architecture, decorative art, and the implications of literature and dance for the visual arts. Reed also provides valuable historical background and considers Fry's legacy for the present. A Roger Fry Reader affords an opportunity to examine both the foundations of modern art criticism from the point of view of one of its foremost practitioners and current debates about the nature ofart and aesthetic experience.

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