Roger Eliot Fry

The British art historian, curator, critic, and painter Roger Fry was one of the foremost advocates of modern art of his time and was largely responsible for introducing modern French art to Anglophone audiences in Great Britain and the United States. As a member of the Bloomsbury Group, cofounder of the Omega Workshops, curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and professor of art at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, Fry remains among the most important critical voices on art in the early twentieth century. His extended meditations on the emotional qualities inherent in a work of art, explored in the context of Post-Impressionist painting, had a formative impact upon his contemporaries and shaped the discipline of art history.

Born to a wealthy Quaker family, Fry completed a degree in natural sciences at King’s College, Cambridge in 1888 before traveling to Italy and France to study art. Upon returning to England, he emerged as the foremost expert of early Italian art and Renaissance painting, and published his first book, a study of the artist Giovanni Bellini, in 1899. He lectured widely while teaching art history at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London. While an art critic for the literary review The Athenaeum (1901‒6), Fry cofounded The Burlington Magazine in 1903and served as its editor from 1909‒11.

In his capacity as a curator, Fry helped shape the reception of modern French art in Great Britain and the United States. In 1906, Fry was hired as curator of European painting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was integral to the expansion of the museum’s holdings of Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture. After encountering two paintings by Paul Cézanne at the International Society Exhibition in London in 1906, he began to shift his focus to what he would term “Post-Impressionist” French painting, tracing a formal development in the work of Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh through Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Upon returning to London in 1910, Fry organized two important exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries—Manet and the Post-Impressionists in 1910 and the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912. Fry also made important contributions to British modern art and design, cofounding the Omega Workshops, a design collective, with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in 1913, and championing the work of young artists, primarily Walter Sickert and David Bomberg.

In addition to continuing to promote modern French art in monographic studies devoted to Cézanne (1926), Georges Seurat (1926), and Matisse (1932), Fry wrote several important thematic studies devoted to psychoanalysis and non-Western art; the latter was an interest reflected in his personal collection of objects and folk art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Keenly attuned to the art market (he wrote Art and Commerce in1926), Fry served as an acquisitions advisor to prominent British collectors including Sir Michael Ernest Sadler and the Courtauld family. Fry died in 1934; in 1958, his family bequeathed his art collection to the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where it remains today.