Virginia woolf biography of roger fry surveying

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virginia woolf biography of roger fry surveying

He had to find his way, to piece things together, as best he could. 111). 87). A beautiful speaking voice, and the power, whatever its origin, to transmit emotion while transmitting facts. While he is better known for his criticism than for his art to this day, through his passion for art, he introduced an albeit somewhat skeptical British public to continental post-Impressionism (a term Fry himself coined), supported a new generation of progressive artists, and brought British art into the twentieth century.

Fry (1866–1934) was an English artist and art scholar, a curator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1906–10) and the Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge (1933). Whereas piety or holiness make goodness stink in the nostrils, he once wrote, saintliness is the imaginative power to make goodness seem desirable. flawlessly.

He became the most read and the most admired, if also the most abused, of all living art critics.”
One must master detachment. “I’ve given up even regretting the callus that had to form to let me go through with things. 188. Having organized the exhibition, Fry personally received letters of abuse and children’s drawings sent by their parents in order to force a comparison with the works of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, and Gaugin.

(182–3)

Woolf could have chosen from any of a number of explanations of these “fresh developments.” Here is the 103-word description Fry published in The Nation (1914):

For this reason, that those who are sensible to form find that the kind of emotions derived from the contemplation of it, while they may not be as intense as the emotions of ordinary life, or even as the echoes of those emotions aroused in romantic[6] art, yet are of so peculiar and precious a quality that they are willing to undertake great pains and make great efforts for the enjoyment of them, so that a small number of people do continue to maintain from generation to generation and from age to age the extraordinary value of these quite vague, undifferentiated, universal emotions.[7]

But Woolf has no patience for a sentence with five wandering dependent clauses and no subject, nor one that serves to make a perfectly comprehensible idea unapproachable.

Roger Fry: Art and Life. 90).

Earning a Living: Lecturing & Art Criticism

Although Sir William Rothenstein dismissed Fry as “not much of a figure draughtsman,” he also remembered Fry as being “clearly very intelligent” (see Further Reading, Woolf, p. But another anxiety, so vague at first that no reason could be found for it, took its place.

Perhaps her frankest critique comes in her assessment of his last book, Transformations (1926):

Phrases repeat themselves; words, hideous words like “pastose”, “constatation” have to be coined and forced into service to express exactly that sensation for which there is no correct term. Theories must be discussed, preferably with someone, like Charles Mauron”
“It is only by helping other people to overcome their troubles that one can forget one’s own”
‘After all, there is only one art: all the arts are the same’
“Privately, unhappiness is much greater than happiness.”
“I think there is a great deal of spontaneous music in the Italians….”
Theory
“I am getting an idea of what is the great thing in design, namely to have the greatest possible amount of interplay between the volumes and the spaces both at their three dimensionalist.

52). I have so little family feeling, so little feeling that it’s by the family that one goes on into the future.”
“The free man thinks less of death than of anything else and all his wisdom is the contemplation of life? The next page introduces Fry to Bloomsbury and, allusively, to his next lover.

Such interventions are rare and so subtle as to be biographical wisps, an echo of an unwilling critique.

Upon his return to London, he was more assured that “his life’s work was to lie not in laboratories, but among pictures” such as he had seen in Italy, as Woolf writes, “and that it would need a lifetime to take its measure” (see Further Reading, Woolf, p.