Roger Fry as a Protestant Art Critic James Michael Golden A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Philosophy and Art History University of Essex April 2017 Contents Acknowledgements 1 Abstract 2 List of plates 3 Introduction 4 Chapter 1: Ruskin in Context: Forming an idea of the Renaissance in the Nineteenth 16 Century Chapter 2: Protestantism and Nineteenth-century British Art History 24 Chapter 3: John Ruskin and The Stones of Venice 32 Chapter 4: Roger Fry’s Cultural Background 45 Chapter 5: Roger Fry and Bellini 51 Chapter 6: Roger Fry and Giotto 70 Chapter 7: Narrative or Form: Roger Fry as a Protestant Curator and Historian 86 Chapter 8: Ruskin, Fry and Objective Beauty 103 Chapter 9: Ruskin, Fry, and False Opinions Concerning Beauty 106 Chapter 10: Ruskin and Typical Beauty 122 Chapter 11: Roger Fry and Defining Formalism 138 Chapter 12: Roger Fry and Impressionism 147 Chapter 13: Fry, Ruskin and Aesthetic Emotion 156 Chapter 14: Roger Fry and the 1910 Post-Impressionist Exhibition 166 Chapter 15: Reaction to the 1910 Post-Impressionist Exhibition 180 Chapter 16: The Social Uses Of Art 191 Chapter 17: Roger Fry and The Defence Of Post-Impressionism 205 Chapter 18: The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition 210 Chapter 19: Fry and Kant 217 Chapter 20: Roger Fry: Theory and reality 229 Chapter 21: Ruskin and the Theoretic Faculty 235 Chapter 22: Roger Fry and the Theoretic faculty 243 Conclusion 257 Bibliography 267 1 Acknowledgements I am grateful for the assistance given to me as a post-graduate student by the staff of Essex University’s Art History department. In particular I wish to thank my supervisor, Dr. Sarah Symmons-Goubert, for her constant support and encouragement over the whole period of my research work. 2 Abstract This thesis argues that Roger Fry should, in part at least, be placed within a tradition of British, Protestant, art criticism. To this end I compare his work with that of the leading nineteenth-century British art critic John Ruskin. I discuss the problems both men had in engaging with a predominately Catholic art form, and place their work within a wider British tradition. I consider their personal histories and how they gave a similar interpretation of art history. I explore the work of both men on Venetian art and artists with particular references to Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and Fry’s writings on Bellini and Giotto. I examine how Fry sought to distance artworks from the culture that produced them and how this affected his view on art history. I compare Fry’s aesthetic ideas with the Theocentric theory of art advanced by Ruskin in the second volume of Modern Painters. Here I compare their respective formalist ideas. I discuss how Fry’s formalism led him to reject Impressionism and champion the Post-Impressionists. I examine the controversy surrounding the 1910 and 1912 Post-Impressionist exhibitions and how they raised the question of the moral value and use of art. I end with a discussion of Ruskin’s concept of the Theoretic faculty and contend that Fry held a similar concept. Overall I argue for the presence of continuity between Fry’s early and later ideas on art criticism and history that can partly be explained by his religious background. 3 List of Plates Plate 1: Giovanni Bellini, Crucifixion, (Correr Museum, Venice) 56 Plate 2: Giovanni Bellini, Transfiguration, (Correr Museum, Venice) 58 Plate 3: Giovanni Bellini, The Blood of the Redeemer, (The National Gallery, London) 61 Plate 4: Giovanni Bellini, The Coronation of the Virgin, (S. Domenico, Pesaro) 64 Plate 5: Giovanni Bellini, Predella painting from the Pesaro Altarpiece, (S. Domenico, Pesaro) 66 Plate 6: Giovanni Bellini, S. Giobbe Altarpiece, (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice) 68 Plate 7: Giotto, Confirmation of the Rule, (Upper Church, Assisi) 74 Plate 8: Giotto, Nole Me Tangere, (Arena Chapel, Padua) 78 Plate 9: Giotto, Scenes from the Life of Joachim, (Arena Chapel, Padua) 78 Plate 10: Giotto, The Meeting at the Golden Gate, (Arena Chapel, Padua) 79 Plate 11: Giotto, Pieta, (Arena Chapel, Padua) 82 Plate 12: Athenodoros of Rhodes, Polydoros of Rhodes, Agesander of Rhodes, 129 Laocoön and His Sons, (Vatican Museums) Plate 13: Michelangelo, The Plague of Fiery Serpents, (Sistine Chapel, Vatican City) 131 Plate 14: Renoir, Les Parapluies, (National Gallery London) 154 4 Introduction In Roger Fry’s posthumously published Last Lectures his friend and fellow art historian, Kenneth Clark noted that: When, in 1933, Roger Fry was elected to the post of Slade Professor at Cambridge University, he was sixty seven years of age and had been known as the best living English writer on art. Though he had never been as widely read as Ruskin, his influence on taste and on the theory of art had spread to quarters where his name was barely known. A large, confused section of the public, dimly desiring to appreciate works of art, had begun to prefer coloured reproductions of Cézanne and Van Gogh to the meagre, respectable etchings which had furnished houses of a previous generation and many of Fry’s theories had been assimilated by those who had never read a word of his writings. In so far as taste can be changed by one man it was changed by Roger Fry. 1 This passage both acknowledges the influence of Fry and also suggests a conflict between his own ideas on art and those of his Victorian predecessor, John Ruskin. It was Ruskin who, as the most influential English art critic of the nineteenth century, played a vital role in establishing and defining a popular taste in art that was bound up with questions of religious and social morality. By contrast, Fry’s modernist criticism was advanced as a means whereby an artwork could be evaluated for its formal qualities alone, free from consideration of any “associated ideas”. In his concluding chapter to his 1920 collection of essays Vision and Design, Fry had described Whistler’s “Ten o’clock” lecture as an attempt to “…sweep away the ethical questions, distorted by aesthetic prejudices, which Ruskin’s exuberant and ill-regulated mind had spun for the British public”.2 The same could, and has, been said with regard to Fry’s own formalist theory. This thesis however argues that such a clear distinction between the aesthetic theories of John Ruskin and Roger Fry should not be assumed. Instead it argues that Fry should, in part at least, be regarded as 1 Kenneth Clark, Introduction to ‘Last Lectures of Roger Fry’ (Cambridge University Press 1939) 2 Roger Fry, ‘Retrospect’ from ‘Vision and Design’ (Penguin Books Ltd, London 1937, p232) 5 following in a tradition of Protestant and British art history and criticism, and that his work echoes in many respects the example set by Ruskin. In drawing a comparison between the writings of Ruskin and those of Fry I have concentrated on those early works of Ruskin most directly influenced by his evangelical Protestant faith. More specifically, I draw on Modern Painters, Volume II (1846) and the three volumes of The Stones of Venice (1851-3). It is in Modern Painters, Volume II that Ruskin most directly expresses his theocentric theory of aesthetics, while in The Stones of Venice he gives a particularly Protestant interpretation of both that city’s art and its history. With Fry I draw on writings that encompass most of his life and career, from letters sent as an undergraduate at Cambridge University in the 1880s, to his reflections on his role as an art historian and theorist, published in the 1930s. There are two reasons for this approach. From the late 1850s Ruskin was to undergo a crisis of faith, thereafter losing the religious certainties that underpin the aforementioned books. While his output was to remain prodigious over the following three decades the nature of his criticism would change. He no longer felt the need to relate questions of aesthetics directly to questions of theology. In claiming a religious aspect to Fry’s own approach to history and criticism, it is therefore appropriate to compare his work with examples of early Ruskin. In contrast, by including a much broader chronological span of Fry’s writing I argue that in many respects there was a much closer sense of continuity between his early and later writings than was the case with Ruskin. I have divided this thesis into a number of chapters, with each chapter dealing with certain aspects of the work of Ruskin and Fry. I begin by providing a brief outline of the contemporary ideas about the nature of the Renaissance against which Ruskin’s work first appeared. I then move on to the specifically British context, most notably anti-Catholicism, that helped shape his work. As I am directly comparing the work of Ruskin with that of Fry, this background information also provides a broad understanding of the intellectual context within which the work of the latter 6 appeared. Next I examine the work of both men as historians. Here I compare Ruskin’s attempt in The Stones of Venice to claim Venice as a Protestant republic during its period of greatness, with a similar strategy used by Fry, in his monograph on Giovanni Bellini. Likewise I compare the manner in which Ruskin gave a Protestant reading of St. Mark’s Cathedral, Venice with Fry’s interpretation of Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena chapel, Padua. For Fry, the distancing of works of art from their historical context was a process that would continue throughout his career. I examine how this affected both his purchasing and display decisions while he was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, New York.