Cezanne A Study of His Development

by Roger Eliot Fry

Roger Fry's classic study of the art and life of Paul Cézanne, originally published in 1927, has been acclaimed as a paradigm critical work for its clarity, perception, and originality. Himself an artist, Fry rejected prevailing modes of criticism, believing that form, not subject matter, should be the primary expressive element. Cézanne's work came closest to Fry's ideal—it gave formal expression to all of nature.

This study established Fry as a critical "father," the first of his line to explicate the ideas of "vision and design" in an attempt to understand modern art. His critical analysis has in many respects never been surpassed. Fry endeavored both to show the essential development of the painter's style and to approach individual works directly; he wrote that he would detect "the profound difference between Cézanne's message and what we have made of it." The result is a book, couched in Fry's most lucid, penetrating language, which is of great technical value to the painter and student and which offers the layman an illuminating demonstration of the remarkable force of Cézanne's art.

Genres: Art, Art History, Nonfiction, Biography

136 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Roger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasized the formal properties of paintings over the "associated ideas" conjured in the viewer by their depicted content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin... In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry".

Reviews

[Albert Jaeger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got interested in this book after reading a recent biography about the impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, which covers Pissarro’s (sometimes tense) interactions with Paul Cézanne. Fry’s short book was an early rave (or so some critics dismissively thought) about Cézanne’s painting genius. I approached the book with trepidation because of its somewhat dated writing style (1927), but also because of its reputation as being only accessible to high priests fully immersed in the secrets of modern art history. In fact, I found Fry’s writing style surprisingly coherent and down to earth (after all, he was friends with people like Bertrand Russell). At the same time, Fry’s analysis of Cézanne’s evolution as a painter is indeed difficult to follow, but not so much because of any highfalutin discourse, but because of Fry’s use of technical painting language that is likely easily understood by practiced painters (Example (p. 63): “The hatched strokes are more loosely spaced, the impasto becomes thinner, and has evidently been applied in a more liquid state.”) The perhaps biggest challenge I encountered was making my way through the list of black-and-white figures/plates attached to the book, which are arranged in an idiosyncratic manner and can only be appreciated by looked them up in color (only Cézanne paintings that were in the Pellerin collection in the mid-1920s are listed). The book’s print (a Kessinger's Legacy Reprint) was a pleasure to read.

[Uriah Marc Todoroff · Rating 2 out of 5]

quite bad as for as art history goes; almost equally bad as a piece of writing.