Cezanne A Study of His Development [Paperback]

Roger Fry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 16, 2004

1927. Fry, English art critic and painter and champion of modern French schools of art introduced Cezanne and the postimpressionists to England. From 1905 to 1910 he was curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1933 he was made Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge. Interested in all eras, he consistently stressed the importance of analyzing the formal qualities within a work of art. His biography was written by Virginia Woolf in 1940. This volume contains his influential work on Cezanne, who today is regarded as one of the great forerunners of modern painting, both for the way he evolved of putting down on canvas exactly what his eye saw in nature and for the qualities of pictorial form that he achieved through a unique treatment of space, mass, and color.

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About the Author

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).

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 136 pages
• Publisher: Kessinger Publishing, LLC (April 16, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1417908688
• ISBN-13: 978-1417908684
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,112,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fry's modernist classic, April 9, 2000

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Benjamin Harvey - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cezanne: A Study of His Development (Hardcover)

When Virginia Woolf wrote Roger Fry's biography in 1940, she singled out his monograph on Cézanne as his most successful book, saying that it stood out "like Mont St.Victoire" from his other work. In this case at least, it's hard to disagree with Woolf's judgment. Despite the fact that it was published in 1927, before the artist's work had even been systematically catalogued, 'Cézanne : A Study of His Development' still has a remarkable freshness to its prose, and Fry succeeds in giving the viewer a sense of the excitement he himself felt while looking at the artist's works. ('Critical distance' is an obvious problem for Fry: he had been publicly identified with the artist since including his canvases in the notorious Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910-11 and 1912-13.)

Part of the pleasure of reading Fry's book is the way he describes Cézanne's development as if--to borrow another of Woolf's phrases--it were a "double story." In order to explain the radical difference between Cézanne's early works and his mature ones (respectively, before and after his turn to Impressionism), Fry imagines a psychologically troubled artist, who can only find peace by looking outside of himself: that is, away from invented imagery and towards nature. This split, for Fry, corresponds with the difference between the 'Romantic' and the 'Classic' sides of Cézanne's personality; but the schism is never absolute, and even in the artist's maturity, there is always the possibility that the repressed 'Romantic' will return. This, indeed, is how Fry explains Cézanne's continued interest in painting pictures of Bathers and other quasi-erotic subjects.

Such a blend of art criticism and novelistic story-telling makes for a fascinating and provocative read. Certainly that is how D.H. Lawrence seems to have found the book, and his 'An Introduction to These Paintings' is an attempt to wrest Cézanne from the grips of Fry's compelling account.