A Roger Fry Reader

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.

Roger Fry (1866-1934) was an English artist and art critic, who, at the invitation of J. Pierpont Morgan, was director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 1905 to 1910. His other books include Giovanni Bellini (1899), an edition of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses (1935), Henri Matisse (1930), Characteristics of French Art (1932), and Reflections on British Painting (1934).