Interpreter of the Post-Impressionists

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23191, 30 November 1940, Page 11

Interpreter of the PostImpressionists

Roger Fry. A Biography. By Virginia Woolf. The Hogarth Press. 307 pp. (12/6 net.)

[Reviewed by CAROLINE WEBB.]

To many people art critics seem parasitic creatures who make a livelihood by criticising what they cannot do themselves. Virginia Woolf’s life of Roger Fry shows that this critic at any rate was a very different type of person. In the first place Fry was a painter himself, who wrestled all his life with the actual problems of painting. He was probably too much of an intellectual to become a great .painter. “Theories are dangerous for an artist,” he once admitted; “it is much better to know nothing about them.” But the fact that he was not in the first rank of painters enabled him to criticise the work of these men with greater understanding and tolerance than if he had been their competitor. Then, too, Fry spent a great deal of time and much of the scant means he had in helping artists and trying to improve the debased taste of his day. As a means both of attacking the prevailing ugliness of life in 1913 and of giving artists a steady 30s a week he started the Omega workshops. His aim was to enable artists to make the painting of pictures a leisure occupation by working at applied arts and crafts for a limited number of hours each day, and to produce good designs and colours for all sorts of articles in daily use. In fact, the Omega was the forerunner of the Bauhaus, the famous German art school which insisted that its students should combine both pure and applied arts in their training. The workshops closed , down after about five years partly because of the Great War, partly because artists are the most difficult of human beings to get working harmoniously together, and partly because commercial firms would not co-operate. The Bauhaus was liquidated by the Nazi Government. Yet this ideal of a closer association of art and manufacturing, of painter and craftsman, remains the greatest hope for the future of art in the modern world.

sentimental and representational painting so popular in England at that time. As a painter he felt that what he had been painfully groping after had been suddenly revealed to him. As a critic he felt compelled to introduce the public to his great discovery so that they, too, might rejoice at this rebirth of artistic expression. It took 10 years or more for this to happen; and even now, after 30 years, there are still people whom these paintings rouse to furious anger. All this and more about Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf relates vividly and sympathetically. People who hoped to find in the book a full ac* count and discussion of his aesthetic theories will be disappointed. Indeed it contains even less of this than the collection of his articles and essays which was published under the title “Vision and Design”; and those who hoped that the book would reveal new development in Mrs Woolfs style will also be disappointed. It is a straight biography which recreates with remarkable skill the charming, intelligent, lovable man, Roger Fry.

It was not, however, the Omega experiment that made Roger Fry s name a household word, but his introduction of the post-impresslon-ist painters to the English public. It is hard to believe what fury, abuse, and vehement criticism these paintings aroused in 1910. “The exhibition is either an extremely bad joke or a swindle. . . . They are the works of idleness and Impotent stupidity, a pornographic show,” wrote one authority, while even the more charitable among Fry’s friends considered him “slightly insane.” But to Fry himself the works of Cezanne, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the others were a revelation. They provided the release he had longed for from the

The librarian of the Canterbury Public Library reports that the first of the Christmas book mails has arrived, and in this a number of the more popular fiction . writers are represented. These books include Hugh Walpole’s “The Bright Pavilions,” the early history of the Herries family in Elizabethan England; Philip Gibbs’s “Sons of the Others,” a story based on the present war; A. T. Hobart’s “Their Own Country,” the sequel to “Oil for the Lamps of China”; Francis Brett Young’s “Mr Lucton’s Freedom, a story set,in the Welsh Border lands; Vickt Baum’s “Central Stores : and a mystery by Michael Tnnes, The Secret Vanguard,” ______