roger fry - formalism
Roger Fry's Formalism by MICHAEL FRIED
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
University of Michigan November 2 and 3, 2001
I want to begin my consideration of Roger Fry's art criticism by looking again at a familiar crux-his 1901 article on Giotto, or rather that article together with the notorious footnote he later attached to it when the article was reprinted in Vision and Design (1920). Throughout his article Fry stresses Giotto's tradition-inaugurating mastery of an essentially dramatic mode of pictorial representation. For example, referring to the mosaic of the Navicella designed by Giotto for St. Peter's in Rome (ca. 1300), a work that is less than a shadow of its original self, Fry writes: "We can, however, still recognize the astonishing dramatic force of the conception and the unique power which Giotto possessed of giving a vivid presentation of a particular event, accompanied by the most circumstantial details, and at the same time suggesting to the imagination a symbolical interpretation of universal and abstract significance". (The symbolical interpretation Fry has in mind concerns the three-part contrast among the drifting ship and its distraught crew, the despairing Peter, "who has here the character of an emissary and intermediary, and the impassive and unapproachable figure of Christ himself") The best-preserved portions of Giotto's achievement, of course, are the frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua, nearly every one of which, Fry asserts, "is an entirely original discovery of new possibilities in the relation of forms to one another" and at the same time is a masterpiece of dramatic narration.
Among the particular subjects Fry comments on are the Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalen, to which he will return in a late essay, and the Joachim and Anna cycle, culminating in the scene of Joachim's meeting with Anna (the future mother of Mary) at the Golden Gate in which, we are told, "Giotto has touched a chord of feeling at least as profound as can be reached by the most consummate master of the art of words". Fry then writes:
It is true that in speaking of these one is led inevitably to talk of elements in the work which modern criticism is apt to regard as lying outside the domain of pictorial art. It is customary to dismiss all that concerns the dramatic presentation of the subject as literature or illustration, which is to be sharply distinguished from the qualities of design. But can this clear distinction be drawn in fact? The imaginings of a playwright, a dramatic poet, and a dramatic painter have much in common, but they are never at any point identical. Let us suppose a story to be treated by all three: to each, as he dwells on the legend, the imagination will present a succession of images, but those images, even at their first formation, will be quite different in each case, they will be conditioned and coloured by the art which the creator practises, by his past observation of nature with a view to presentment in that particular art. The painter, like Giotto, therefore, actually imagines in terms of figures capable of pictorial presentment, he does not merely translate a poetically dramatic vision into pictorial terms. And to be able to do this implies a constant observation of natural forms with a bias towards the discovery of pictorial beauty. To be able, then, to conceive just the appropriate pose of a hand to express the right idea of character and emotion in a picture, is surely as much a matter of a painter's vision as to appreciate the relative "values" of a tree and cloud so as to con- vey the mood proper to a particular landscape.
I take his reference to modern criticism to indicate two writers above all: the French painter and critic-theorist Maurice Denis, whose 1907 article on Cézanne Fry was later to translate and whose landmark essay "Définition du néo-traditionnisme," in which a rigorously formalist pictorial aesthetics was first explicitly stated, appeared in 1890; and Bernard Berenson, who in The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance of 1896 cautioned against "the error of judging a picture by its dramatic presentation of a situation." In any case, there is an obvious tension between the passage I have just cited and the footnote Fry added at the be- ginning of the "Giotto" article almost twenty years later. Fry writes: The following, from the Monthly Review, 1901, is, perhaps more than any other article here reprinted, at variance with the more recent expressions of my aesthetic ideas. It will be seen that great emphasis is laid on Giotto's expression of the dramatic idea in his pictures. I still think this is perfectly true so far as it goes, nor do I doubt that an artist like Giotto did envisage such an expression. I should be inclined to disagree wherever in this article there appears the assumption not only that the dramatic idea may have inspired the artist to the creation of his form, but that the value of the form for us is bound up with recognition of the dramatic idea. It now seems to me possible by a more searching analysis of our experience in front of a work of art to disentangle our reaction to pure form from our reaction to its implied associated ideas.
I think it is fair to say that Fry held this position, more or less, for the remainder of his life, though he never quite stopped wondering whether there might not be rare instances in which dramatic expression and the expression of properly "aesthetic" emotion through relations of pure form actually fused and became one (along with Giotto, it was mainly Rembrandt who kept that possibility alive for him). For the most part, however, Fry maintained that the two kinds of expression are essentially distinct, a view he continually put to the test of introspective analyses of his actual feelings before particular works. This is the core of his so- called formalist aesthetics, the conviction that all persons capable of experiencing aesthetic emotion in front of paintings (to speak only of the latter) are responding when they do so to relations of pure form- roughly, of ideated volumes in relation both to one another and to the surface and shape of the canvas-rather than to whatever dramatic expressiveness the work in question may be held to possess.
Fry's position on these matters seems dated, to say the least: it would surely be impossible to find anyone today who shares his belief that the task of an artist is essentially to communicate aesthetic emotion, or that what he means by pure form or relations of pure form actually exist. Let me quickly say that I have no wish to challenge this negative consensus, though perhaps I ought to add that despite the prima facie unpersuasive- ness of Fry's aesthetic theories I consider him a writer on art of immense subtlety and interest (I assume that this too is a widely shared opinion). Instead I propose to take the discussion of his thought in a new direction by underscoring the fact that, in his writings from the Giotto article on, the counter to form, form's "other," is not primarily subject matter, con- tent, illustration, literariness, or representation as such-though at times he speaks of all of these in this connection-but drama, that is, dramatic expression. In the case of Giotto, the problem Fry encountered was the apparently perfect synchrony of form and drama, which led him in 1901 to conflate the two to an extent he wished in 1920 to call into question.
But other artists presented different problems. Take El Greco, whose spectacular canvas The Agony in the Garden, now thought to be a studio copy of the original in the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art entered the National Gallery in 1919. In Fry's article on the Agony in Vision and Design he notes both its "melodramatic apparatus," by which he means the " 'horrid' rocks, the veiled moon, the ecstatic gestures," and in general the pushing of expression to its limit, and "the extraordinary emphasis and amplitude of the rhythm, which thus gathers up into a few sweeping diagonals the whole complex of the vision" and thus "affects one like an irresistible melody, and makes that organisation of all the parts into a single whole, which is generally so difficult for the uninitiated, an easy matter for once". (Fry was impressed by the public enthusiasm for the Agony.) He goes on to observe:
El Greco, indeed, puts the problem of form and content in a curious way. The artist, whose concern is ultimately and, I believe, exclusively with form, will no doubt be so carried away by the intensity and completeness of the design, that he will never even notice the melodramatic and sentimental content which shocks or delights the ordinary man. It is none the less an interesting question, though it is rather one of artists' psychology than of aesthetics, to inquire in what way these two things, the melodramatic expression of a high- pitched religiosity and a peculiarly intense feeling for plastic unity and rhythmic amplitude, were combined in El Greco's work; even to ask whether there can have been any causal connection between them in the workings of El Greco's spirit. (ibid.; emphasis added)
A page or so later, Fry contrasts El Greco with the leading Baroque sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, whose sculptures he finds equally excessive and rhetorical but whom he sees as "express[ing] great inventions in a horribly impure technical language" based on a desire to make the crowd, "including his Popes, gape with astonishment". El Greco, however, was out of touch with any public and moreover "was a singularly pure artist, he expressed his idea with perfect sincerity, with complete indifference to what effect the right expression might have on the public" (ibid.). Such courage and purity bring El Greco close, Fry suggests, to the stance of the modern artist, which also accounts for the fact that whereas nearly everyone is revolted by Bernini's sentimental sugariness, "very few artists of today have ever realized for a moment how unsympathetic to them is the literary content of an El Greco. They simply fail to notice what his pictures are about in the illustrative sense".
This seems somewhat unlikely, but what I wish to emphasize is, first, Fry's claim that in El Greco's picture dramatic and formal considerations are fundamentally at odds (melodrama being a dramatic notion); and second, the related view that although the Agony in the Garden is formally extreme, the impulse behind that extremeness had only to do with the complete realization of an artistic idea and not at all with exerting an effect on an audience (which is why the form cannot be considered melodramatic in turn). In contrast, Bernini's sculptures are also formally extreme, but their extremeness is compromised, made artistically null and void, by his desire for public acclaim.
The next stage in Fry's exploration of these ideas takes place in the essay that brings Vision and Design to a close, "Retrospect," despite its brevity perhaps the most important of his mainly aesthetic texts. There Fry briefly discusses his early career as a connoisseur of Italian Renaissance paintings, summarizes his growing interest in modern French paintings that led to the organization of several influential exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in 1910, 1911, and 1912 (also to his coining the term "Post-Impressionism"), acknowledges the influence on his think- ing of Leo Tolstoy's What Is Art? with its insistence that the end of art is not beauty but emotional communication between human beings, and-rejecting Tolstoy's moralism-proceeds to ask: of what kind of emotions is art the expression? His answer is that, inspired partly by Clive Bell's Art (1914) and by his own further reflection on modern French painting (Paul Cézanne being the central figure), he has come to conclude with Bell that "the artist [is concerned] with the expression of a special and unique kind of emotion, the aesthetic emotion"; and that this has led to what he describes as "an attempt to isolate the purely aesthetic feeling from the whole complex of feelings which may and generally do accompany the aesthetic feeling when we regard a work of art".
Fry turns to a particularly challenging example, Raphael's Transfiguration a work he says "a hundred years ago was perhaps the most admired picture in the world, and twenty years ago was one of the most neglected". Fry notes that the painting depicts two events in the Gospel story of Christ that occurred simultaneously at different places, Christ's transfiguration and the unsuccessful attempt by his disciples in His absence to heal the lunatic boy. The composition thus falls into two halves, one above the other, which also happen to contrast pictorially with one another in obvious respects. In a characteristic thought-experiment, Fry imagines a Christian spectator wholly familiar with the dramatic story the picture tells, and further imagines that such a spectator is also a student of human nature who will there- fore be struck by the incongruity between the usual notion that Christ's disciples were simple peasants and fishermen and the sight of "a number of noble, dignified, and academic gentlemen in improbable garments and purely theatrical poses". Fry then posits a different sort of spectator, one highly endowed with a special sensibility to form and either ignorant of or indifferent to the Gospel story. Such a spectator, Fry contends, will at once be struck by "the extraordinary power of coordination of many complex masses in a single inevitable whole, by the delicate equilibrium of many directions of line." That is, the spectator will "at once feel that the apparent division into two parts is only apparent, that they are co-ordinated by a quite peculiar power of grasping the possible correlations," but his emotions will have nothing to do with the factors previously mentioned (the Gospel story), "since in this case we have supposed our spectator to have no clue to them".
Fry concedes that a spectator entirely preoccupied with considerations of form is extremely rare and in particular that owing to our difficulty in recognizing the nature of our own feelings we are liable to have our aesthetic reaction interfered with by our re- action to the dramatic overtones and implications. I have chosen this picture of the Transfiguration precisely because its history is a striking example of this fact. In Goethe's time rhetorical gesture was no bar to the appreciation of aesthetic unity [Fry had earlier quoted Goethe's remarks on the mutually complementary character of the painting's upper and lower halves]. Later on in the nineteenth century, when the study of the Primitives had revealed to us the charm of dramatic sincerity and naturalness, these gesticulating figures appeared so false and unsympathetic that even people of aesthetic sensibility were unable to disregard them, and their dislike of the picture as illustration actually obliterated or prevented the purely aesthetic approval which they would probably otherwise have experienced. It seems to me that this attempt to isolate the elusive element of the pure aesthetic reaction from the compounds in which it occurs has been the most important advance of modern times in practical aesthetic.
And two paragraphs later Fry cites his Giotto article of 1901, in which the current of feeling associated with the dramatic idea and that stemming from his experience of pure form ran together in his mind so much that he regarded them as being completely fused. Now, however, he would say that the fusion was only apparent and was due to his imperfect analysis of his mental state.
Again, my concern is not with Fry's claims about the nature of strictly aesthetic experience so much as with his identification of considerations of drama as the antithesis to those of form, glossed as "the spatial relations of plastic volumes", and especially with his characterization of Raphael's Transfiguration as a work in which the "rhetorical insincerity" of the gestures and expressions of the figures in the lower half of the composition is so egregious as effectively to destroy one's appreciation of the painting unless it is somehow ignored or other- wise put out of mind (think back to Fry's contemporary artist in front of El Greco's Agony in the Garden being so caught up in contemplating the form of the work that he "takes no notice" of the melodrama of the mise-en-scène).
All this leads me to advance a thesis that will not surprise anyone familiar with my work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting: namely, that Fry was in crucial respects an anti-theatrical critic, one whose most habitual and determining thoughts and feelings about painting (and art in general) belong to the great tradition of anti-theatrical pictorial practice and critical reflection that goes back at least to the middle of the eighteenth century in France and that found its major theoretician and founding art critic at the outset in Denis Diderot, a figure whom Fry, for reasons we shall come to, failed to recognize as a precursor.
In my book Absorption and Theatricality, I argue that for Diderot the central task of the painter was somehow to negate or neutralize or otherwise deny the presence of the beholder before the painting. A painting, he insisted, had to establish the metaphysical illusion of its unawareness of or indifference to being beheld. It accomplished this effect in two mutually reinforcing ways: by depicting personages who appeared to be wholly absorbed or engrossed in their actions, feelings, and states of mind, and therefore wholly unaware of anything other than the objects of their absorption, and by relating those personages to one another and to all the other elements in the picture in so dramatically perspicuous and persuasive a manner as to give rise in the beholder to the conviction of an immediately graspable unity, the effect of unity implying the perfect closure of the composition within the borders of the painting. (The dramaturgical and theoretical instrument binding both strategies together were the tableau.)
The result was a new, all-or-nothing conception of the pictorial enterprise: in Diderot's writings on painting and the stage, two notions, drama and theatre, that until that moment had been somewhat inter- changeable emerged for the first time as opposites. The first or positive term, drama, signified the entire participation of the personages in the world of the representation; the second or negative term, theatre, indicated a more or less open address to an audience as if to solicit its applause. To the extent that a painting succeeded as drama, it was free of even the slightest taint of theatricality; conversely, the least suggestion that the personages in the painting were not wholly absorbed in what they were doing and feeling but on the contrary were aware of being be- held irremediably sapped the composition of dramatic credibility. In the passages from Fry we have just examined, this corresponds to the distinction between the powerfully dramatic art of Giotto and the rhetorical or theatrical treatment of gesture and expression in Raphael's Transfiguration. Where Fry differs from Diderot, of course, is in his insistence that the "aesthetic" viewer will not be repulsed by Raphael's treatment of gesture and expression, as the previous generation was (and as Diderot had been repulsed by what he saw as the mannered gestures and expressions of the figures in paintings by Antoine Watteau and François Boucher), but on the contrary will find a way to ignore or look past it in order to perceive the deeper formal unity that in his view makes the Transfigurationabsolutely remarkable.
But this difference in turn is more apparent than real; at any rate, I want to argue that Fry's notion of pictorial unity is itself essentially anti-theatrical, indeed that it ultimately stems from or at least has profound affinities with the theorization of unity in Diderot's art writing, in particular in certain of his Essais sur la peinture (1766), a text whose intrinsic brilliance and pertinence to subsequent developments have to this day not been fully recognized.8 First, however, I need to say just a bit more about Fry's relation to the anti-theatrical tradition in which I have placed him. I have suggested that the tradition began around the middle of the eighteenth century in France, the decisive moment being the transition from Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (I am thinking of his genre paintings of the 1730s and 1740s) to Jean-Baptiste Greuze, whose Père de famille enjoyed popular and critical attention in the Salon of 1755 but whose heyday was the 1760s and 1770s. On the face of it, Chardin is likely to seem absorptive and Greuze theatrical, in the pejorative sense of the latter term as it has just been defined.
My argument in Absorption and Theatricality, however, is that the very qualities in Greuze's treatment of action and expression that have understandably drawn the related charges of theatricality and sentimentality are the consequence of the particular steps he took to immure his personages within the world of the representation and thereby to neutralize or counteract a heightened consciousness of the presence of the beholder before the painting. It is as if starting in the mid-1750s and gaining momentum in the decades that followed what I call the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld came to the fore in a way that threatened to drain the representation of persons going about their ordinary business of all persuasive force, and as if in order to screen that primordial convention from view-to minimize its disruptive force-Greuze found himself compelled to heat up the action within the painting, to involve his personages in ever more emotionally tendentious narratives, to devise ever more elaborate scenarios for tying his personages together in a single, striking dramatic composition. In short Greuze, too, was with respect to intention an anti-theatrical painter, though within a relatively short period the particular means that he mobilized to establish the overriding fiction that his personages were wholly unaware of being beheld came to strike disenchanted viewers as theatrical with a vengeance, whence the charge of sentimentality that, with reason, has been levelled at him to this day.
Without retracing the further evolution of the anti-theatrical tradition, I will say that the example of Greuze is representative, by which I mean that the steps that were taken and the strategies that were de- vised by successive generations of French painters to try to neutralize beholding came sooner or later to fall short of the desired result (I think of this as the implicit motor behind the devising of new anti-theatrical strategies), until with the advent of Edouard Manet and his generation and their unexpected and unsettling stress on facingness the Diderotian tradition was brought not exactly to an end-absorptive paintings continued to be made and admired, theatricality continued to be an issue for some artists and critics-but rather to a state of open crisis from which it has never fully recovered. By the time Fry arrived on the scene in the first decade of the twentieth century the issue of theatricality was no longer central to advanced painting, but anti-theatrical values had been largely assimilated in some of the most interesting recent criticism and theory, and he seems to have accepted them as fundamental-to have made them his own-without ever pausing to inquire as to their exact provenance.
Among other things, this meant that Fry felt no inhibition in applying anti-theatrical criteria not just within the modern French tradition but across the entire expanse of painting, sculpture, and related arts of all ages and cultures: his commentaries in Vision and Design on El Greco, Raphael, and Bernini are cases in point, as is, to cite an almost comic in- stance of his willingness to range far afield, his general reservation, in the article "Some Aspects of Chinese Art" (reprinted in Transformations), about the makers of Chinese ritual bronzes of 500 B.C. to the effect that "you can never quite catch the artist unprepared for you, never see him so completely absorbed in his idea that he does not know you are looking over his shoulder". (Fry also was put off by what he earlier characterized as "the assertive and self-conscious calligraphy of the Japanese.")
In fact it is possible to understand Fry's insistence on the separateness of dramatic and aesthetic considerations as in part a response to the fact that so much of the supposedly great art of the past, in particular the art of the foremost Italian painters of the High Renaissance, when assessed from what may loosely be called a Diderotian point of view, now appeared rhetorical or theatrical, so that if the claim for its greatness were to be renewed and sustained a fresh basis for that claim would have to be found. For Fry, this involved an appeal to qualities of form or design, which being closed in on themselves, in that sense wholly internal to the work in question, rather than addressed to a beholder, provided an anti-theatrical "core" that far outweighed in significance all other aspects of the work. (The discrepancy between considerations of dramaturgy on the one hand and of form on the other was perhaps most consistently acute in the case of Nicolas Poussin, whose art fascinated Fry for just that reason.) By the same token, if all paintings of figures in action were like the Arena Chapel frescoes, in which drama and form appeared perfectly consonant with one another, the idea of a fundamental separation between the two might never have occurred to Fry, or if it did occur to him it would not have had remotely the same force.
In this connection it is worth noting that Fry came to see High Renaissance painting as theatrical in the pejorative sense of the term several years before his discovery of the primacy of form, a development the origins of which are usually associated with his first encounter with two canvases by Cézanne in January 1906. The crucial text is a 1903 review of the English translation of Heinrich Wölfflin's The Art of the Italian Re- naissance. Of the figures in Andrea del Sarto's sacred conversations Fry remarks:
One feels...that they are arranged entirely with a view to the effect to be produced on the spectator, and that even when they do not turn round and look anxiously at him, they are none the less preoccupied with his presence. And what is true of Del Sarto is true in varying degrees of most of the masters of the grand style. The dramatic ideal of mediaeval art, the presentment of definite personalities acting freely and unconsciously under the impulse of a strong emotional situation, gives place in the art of the High Renaissance to an essentially theatrical idea in which the scenic effect is calculated for the spectator. He no longer, as with Giotto and Masaccio, and with Leonardo, is the unseen spectator of a great and all-absorbing event; his coming is anticipated, and before the curtain rises all the actors have taken their allotted places. Even in Raphael's cartoons something of this will be felt, some sense that the poses are over-explicit, "rhetorical rather than truly dramatic" [no source given]. Michaelangelo, most people will feel, just escapes this, for though his figures sometimes display unnecessary movements in order to accomplish the simplest things, they always have an air of self-absorption in some ends of infinitely greater moment than the situation itself can explain. Certainly they never seem to become conscious of the spectator's presence; they miss being truly dramatic only because the internal drama of their own existence weighs too heavily upon them.
Further on, Fry contrasts Raphael's Transfiguration with a painting of the same subject by Giovanni Bellini at Naples, which he prefers. "The miraculous, it is true, is absent [from Bellini's painting]," he writes, "but the superhuman is made startlingly evident by the almost ominous gravity of movement of these three mysterious forms, transfigured, indeed, but by no coup de théâtre, whereas Raphael's miraculous performance is just a theatrical presentment." By the time Fry came to write "Retrospect," his view of Raphael's dramaturgy had not changed, but the discovery of Raphael's Transfiguration's profound formal unity fundamentally altered his judgment of its artistic merit.
As for Fry's conception of pictorial unity, perhaps the most revealing discussion of the topic occurs in a letter of November 23, 1920, to Marie Mauron, wife of the French writer and aesthetician Charles Mauron, in which Fry discusses his own landscape painting in terms of a pursuit of wholeness, "a unity where all the parts [are] bound to each other inevitably." He continues: "One can call such moments inspiration, and the whole thing is to preserve this moment of vision when one is aware of the necessity of everything. As one works one is always being side-tracked by the cold observation of unnecessary facts that bother one and that have nothing to do with the essential unity. Therefore, the whole effort should be bent towards this question of unity and necessity. This perception of unity and necessity is very like the perception and comprehension of a natural law when one recognizes that many different phenomena are governed by a single principle."
More than a century and a half earlier, Diderot had called for the elimination of any incident that did not contribute directly and indispensably to the dramatic treatment of the subject, insisted that all the elements in a painting be sub- ordinated to the central compositional idea, and put forward a causal, in that sense machinelike notion of the relations among those elements, all of which were to be understood as combining together in a single powerful effect. Above all a painting had to induce in the viewer a conviction of the absolute necessity of the various relationships it comprises, the experience of that conviction being a subjective criterion of artistic success, as well as implying that the relationships in question are as they are owing to the play of forces internal to the work rather than because of a desire to appeal to the beholder. (Needless to say, the conviction of unity and necessity I have just invoked is itself the product of an at- tempt to affect the beholder in a certain way.)
I don't claim that Fry could only have derived his ideas about unity from Diderot's writings; on the contrary, the issue of pictorial unity had been central first to the Italian and then to the French traditions for centuries, and Diderot's dramatic and causal (dramatic because causal) inflection of the issue had been assimilated by subsequent French art critics to an extent that makes any ascription of direct influence beside the point. Moreover, Fry would have disavowed an affinity with Diderot if only be- cause of the prominence of dramatic concerns in the latter's writings on painting. From Fry's perspective, this gave Diderot's criticism a literary cast that he deplored. "Diderot's celebrated critiques of the Salons of his day are almost entirely devoted to the psychological aspects of illustration," Fry writes in "Some Questions in Aesthetics." "No wonder that for him Greuze was the greatest of painters" (T, p. 55). For Diderot, too, chiaroscuro, contrast of light and dark, was a major resource of painting (and vehicle of pictorial unity) mainly because it lent itself to the production of dramatic effects. Not surprisingly, Fry distrusted chiaroscuro, which he saw both as serving melodramatic ends and as tending to obscure contours and hence relations of forms while dissolving the picture surface in an illusion of indeterminate depth (but there was always Rembrandt to give him pause).
Finally, Diderot stressed the instantaneousness with which the effect of unity was to be achieved, an emphasis often lacking in Fry, who mostly admired artists who "[allow] the motif to unfold itself gradually to the apprehension" (The idea of instantaneousness returns in force in the criticism of Clement Greenberg.) So there are differences of inflection between Diderot's and Fry's ideas about pictorial unity. Nevertheless, I want to suggest that Fry's conception of painting, including its emphasis on unity, belongs in its essence to the intellectual tradition keyed to considerations of drama and anti-theatricality set going textually by Diderot in the 1750s and 1760s. Again, Fry would have dismissed such a suggestion, not only for the reasons I have summarized but also because, in his view, "it is only by representation of persons or events that any dramatic element can enter into a picture," an assumption that effectively excludes the possibility of dramatic relations among forms. But this forecloses the issue much too abruptly, and in the remainder of this essay I shall seek to bring out even more than has already been done the Diderotian tenor of Fry's thought.
Take, to begin with, one of Fry's most characteristic and recurrent phrases - "almost unconscious" (and its variants). Again an again Fry says of some admired feature of a work of art under discussion that it came about as the result of an unconscious or (more frequently) almost unconscious choice or decision on the part of the artist. This is a major feature of Fry's discussions of Cézanne. To cite just one characteristic statement: "[Cézanne's work] has that supreme spontaneity as though he had almost made himself the passive, half-conscious instrument of some directing power." My point is that unconsciousness lines up with anti-theatricality, not having a design on an audience; more precisely, under the Diderotian paradigm unconsciousness in the mode of oubli de soi, self- forgetting, is the infallible sign of a personage's complete absorption. Fry's harping on the artist's unconsciousness (or half-unconsciousness or almost-unconsciousness) thus amounts to both a displacement and a radicalization of Diderot: to the extent that an artist is imagined as unaware of doing a particular thing, it cannot be claimed that he or she did it in order to make a particular impression on the viewer.
Moreover, the issue of unconsciousness in Fry goes far beyond Cézanne. So, for example (and there are many examples), Fry in "On Some Modern Drawings" insists on a particular psychological fact: "namely, that perfect rhythmic continuity and coherence is only attain- able by human beings when their activity is at least partially unconscious. To fix the attention on any gesture is to deprive it fatally of that specific quality of rhythmicunity" (Henri Matisse was for Fry the exemplar of rhythmic unity understood in those terms, though in 1918 he was delighted to find certain younger British artists conceiving of a drawing "as the almost unconscious overflow of a vivid aesthetic experience rather than as a performance before an imagined public.")
Walter Sickert, an artist (and writer on art) about whom Fry's feelings were often ambivalent, is praised for "the exquisite choice, none the less perfect that it seems to be half-unconscious, of the few tones of violet-grey, dull maroon, orange, and green, out of which he builds his colour schemes." Similarly, Vanessa Bell is praised for recognizing that "'handling' and quality of paint are only really beautiful when they come unconsciously in the process of trying to express an idea." And in a late essay Fry speculates that Rembrandt "attained to design by an in- direct method. It was, one guesses, an almost unconscious habit rather than a deliberate and conscious aim." All these are instances of a larger principle. "It is one of the curiosities of the psychology of the artist," we read in "The Jacquemart-André Collection" (1914), "that he is generally trying very hard to do something which has nothing to do with what he actually accomplishes; that the fundamental quality of his work seems to come out unconsciously as a by-product of his conscious activity" (V, p. 153). This is said as a preamble to a discussion of Paolo Uccello, in whose art the conscious pursuit of elaborate perspectival constructions turned out to facilitate an unconscious mastery of form, but Fry stands behind it in all its generality.
Or consider the following excerpts from Fry's analysis in "Some Questions in aesthetics" of Rembrandt's A Schoolboy at His Desk (1655). The topic Fry is pursuing is the nature of realism, which on the face of it would seem to present difficulties for his argument by virtue of its apparent concern with the depiction of reality at the expense of considerations of form. But Fry finds precisely in Rembrandt's entire engrossment in the scene before him the psychological or spiritual precondition for his creating harmonious plastic unities out of the data of experience. "The boy was at his lessons," Fry writes of the imagined original scene. "Puzzled and bored by them, he looked up from his task; his thoughts wandered, and he sat there day-dreaming, with his cheek propped on his thumb." Then: "Rembrandt painted this scene with complete realism, without a thought of anything but the vision before nature by the [conscious] desire to construct his whole scene perspectively, really set free in him his [unconscious] power of creating a purely aesthetic organisation of form".
If one looks carefully in the original at the passage where the thumb indents the cheek one can see why such works occur at very rare intervals. If for a moment Rembrandt had thought about his picture he was undone; nothing but complete absorption in his vision could sustain the unconscious certainty and freedom of the gesture. Each touch, then, had to be an inspiration or the rhythm would have broken down". Fry goes on to discuss the painting of the desk, in itself "a plain flat board of wood, but one that has been scratched, battered and rubbed by schoolboys' rough usage." He continues:
Realism, in a sense, could go no further than this, but it is handled with such a vivid sense of its density and resistance, it is situated so absolutely in the picture space and plays so emphatically its part in the whole plastic scheme, it reveals so intimately the mysterious play of light upon matter that it becomes the vehicle of a strangely exalted spiritual state, the medium through which we share Rembrandt's deep contemplative mood. It is miraculous that matter can take so exactly the impress of spirit as this pigment does. And that being so, the fact that it is extraordinarily like a school- boy's desk falls into utter significance beside what it is in and for itself.
In the same spirit Fry observed a few pages earlier of Gustave Courbet's Blonde endormie: "However 'realistic' this is we are not tempted ever to refer to what lies outside the picture. This plastic unity holds us entirely within its own limits because at every point it gives us an exhilarated and surprised satisfaction. Everything here is so trans- muted into plastic terms and finds therein so clear a justification that we are not impelled to go beyond them or to fill them out, as it were, by thinking of the model who posed more than half a century ago to M. Courbet in Paris, or of any other woman whatever"
1. Fry writes on the assumption that Rembrandt's painting depicts an original scene-an actual schoolboy sitting at a desk and lost in a daydream. But is that likely, given the apparent obliviousness of the boy in the painting to the immediate presence of the painter? My claim, however, is not simply that Fry's mini-narrative of the picture's genesis is unpersuasive. It's rather that that mini-narrative allows Fry to specify Rembrandt's state of mind and that this is important because he believes, following Tolstoy (also Maurice Denis), that a work of art is essentially an act of communication of emotion (or a mental state) from the artist to the viewer, from which it follows that by specifying the mode of the artist's activity the critic is able to determine the expressive content of the picture. In this instance the artist's state of mind is understood as wholly absorbed in what Fry calls his "vision," hence as oblivious to everything else including, Fry imagines, the canvas on which he is working.
2. The subject of Rembrandt's picture is manifestly absorptive, in a vein that will later be mined by Chardin and indeed by Greuze. In subsequent essays Fry singles out Rembrandt's David Harping before Saul (no longer attributed to the master), in which Fry especially admires "the astonishing invention of [Saul's] unconscious seizing the curtain to wipe his tears [emphasis added]";33 and Bathsheba, two equally absorptive canvases. And Courbet's Blonde endormie is asleep, sleep being an absorptive motif, as I first argued in Absorption and Theatricality. Fry's strong preference for paintings with absorptive themes and motifs is evident throughout his career, though naturally he is repulsed by works that use an ostensibly absorptive framework for what seem to him artistically illicit purposes (Luke Fildes's The Doctor in the Tate, to be glanced at toward the end of this essay, is an egregious instance of this). But Fry had no idea that his admiration for paintings of absorptive subjects could be understood in those terms; like every other critic in the Diderotian tradition, except in a sense Diderot himself, he found him- self moved and impressed by such paintings without ever recognizing that it was the treatment of absorption that largely determined his response. And had it been explained to him that this was so he would have resisted the explanation because from where he stood what I have been calling absorption merely concerned considerations of drama or illustration and not at all those of form.
3. Fry imagines the finished painting to be wholly autonomous with respect to the real world to the extent of not even suggesting comparison with it, despite being a ne plus ultra of realism-or rather, this is what being a ne plus ultra of realism turns out to mean. So, for example, the fact that the desk in Rembrandt's canvas bears an extraordinary resemblance to the original desk becomes utterly insignificant in the light of the spiritual intensity of the depiction (reflecting the intensity of Rembrandt's purely contemplative mood); similarly, the viewer of Courbet's canvas is said to be so deeply satisfied by the plastic unity of the whole that it never occurs to him or her to "go beyond" that unity by thinking of the woman whom Fry assumes modelled for Courbet when he made his painting. Again, Fry's claims are improbably extreme, but what should be underscored are the rhetorical lengths to which he is prepared to go to secure the fiction of the painting's hermetic closure vis-à-vis the outside world. I think of this as a radicalization of Diderot's conception of the autonomous, hence anti-theatrical tableau (it never occurred to Diderot to deny comparison with external reality; on the contrary in his remarks on Chardin he explicitly courted it), as if for Fry mere reference to reality-to a "beyond" or "outside"-undermined a painting's unity and hence disqualified it artistically.
Fry's preference for Georges Seurat over Vincent Van Gogh is explained on these grounds: although the impassioned Van Gogh was a master of design and colour, his "whole nature impelled him to regard even the most indifferent object, a pair of boots or a chair, as charged with dramatic significance," a stance toward the world that inevitably limited his achievement (after recovering from the first shock of en- countering his work "we look in vain for further revelations").Seurat, in contrast, in a painting like the Young Woman Powdering Her Face (1888-89), took off from "the gimcrack finery of the period," but "for all [the painting's] reality nothing of the original theme, of the thing seen, remains untransformed, all has been assimilated and remade by the idea. And perhaps this complete transmutation of the theme by the idea is the test of great art. It means that in proportion as a picture attains to this independent reality and inherent significance the element of illustration drops out and becomes irrelevant." Not surprisingly, al- though Fry devotes a longish paragraph to a discussion of the function of Seurat's painted frames, the general topic of framing, with its implicit problematisation of the distinction so important to Fry be- tween what lies within and outside a painting, goes unexamined in his texts.
4. As we have seen, Fry praises Rembrandt for being so absorbed in his vision of the schoolboy at his desk that he never thought about his picture but instead handed over its making to his unconscious. Similarly, Camille Corot's Seated Woman with Bare Breasts is said in "Some Questions in Esthetics" to evince "an almost reckless indifference to all else but the artist's fascinated response" while in Characteristics of French Art Fry remarks apropos of the same picture that "Corot was not thinking at all about making a work of art, it was not even a proper 'académie' or nude study, he was much too moved by his thrilled contemplation of the actual appearance to care whether the result was a work of art or not." In the same spirit he remarks of Vanessa Bell: "One feels before her works that every touch is the outcome of her complete absorption in her general theme. So complete is this devotion to the idea that she seems to forget her canvas and her métier. In fact, she is a very pure artist, uncontaminated with the pride of the craftsman. How much harm, by the by, the honest craftsman has done to art since William Morris invented the fiction of his supposed humility!" (A related topic concerns Fry's ambivalent regard for Sickert and his students.) More broadly, Fry in "On Some Modern Drawings" argues that there are two ways by which to arrive at rhythmic drawing: the first calligraphic, calling for the artist to suspend his attention to the gestures he is making, the second when the artist "becomes so concentrated upon the interpretation of a contour as to be unconscious of what goes on between his hand and the paper. The ideal of such a situation is that he should actually never look at the paper".
A different sort of statement bearing on this topic is found in the late text "Henri-Matisse" (1935). "The artist himself has a double nature and a double allegiance," Fry writes. "He longs on the one hand to realize his vision, on the other to be a maker; he longs to tell of his experience and also to create an object, an idol, a precious thing. And almost always the vision and the precious thing, the objet d'art, are at variance. His vision and his craft pull different ways and his orbit is determined by their relative powers and proximities". The struggle to reconcile the two longings is a basic theme of Fry's summary account of the his- tory of European painting. As Fry tells it, the struggle largely takes the form of a tension between representation on the one hand and design on the other; Matisse's distinction, in Fry's view, is that "in the entire his- tory of European art no one has ever played so many delightful, unexpected, exhilarating variations upon the theme of the dual nature of painting as he has".
But there is also in Fry's characterization of the contrary longings, especially when read in the light of the other remarks just cited, the suggestion of a hierarchy according to which realizing one's vision far outweighs considerations of craft, the making of a "precious thing, the objet d'art," though naturally both elements must be present if the result of the artist's labours is to be a painting. It is almost as though Fry invites us to imagine that an artist might somehow realize (and communicate) his or her absorbed vision and yet not produce an object, an artifact, for others to see and admire; if that were possible, and of course it is not, it would place the viewer in the same position as that of "pure" artists like Rembrandt, Corot, and Bell for whom the work in progress, in Fry's hyperbolic account of their states of mind as they painted, virtually did not exist. I think of this as perhaps the most extreme expression of Fry's lifelong anti-theatricalism: to produce an actual work, an objet d'art, is to make something that inescapably is there to be beheld; whereas to share certain artists' absorbed visions is to enter into communion with states of mind that not only care not at all for potential viewers but have lost sight of the work of art itself. (The title Vision and Design takes on a new inflection in this light.)
One book of Fry's in particular makes fascinating reading within the framework of this essay-Characteristics of French Art (1933). Fry begins by noting that the French possess "a peculiar alertness of observation and nimbleness of mind," along with an interest "in life as it is and in people as they happen to be". This seems unexceptional, but when Fry turns to specific examples of French art a page or so later his thought acquires an edge. The first work he discusses is a thirteenth- century sculpture of a boy musician from the façade of a house at Rheims. "[W]hat is striking here is the certainty with which the artist has grasped the central character of the figure," Fry writes. "In the movement of the head and the expression of the face he has made us vividly aware not only of the character of the boy but of his state of mind. In his intentness on the music which he is playing he is scarcely aware of the outer world-his face has that vague unseeing regard which comes from a withdrawal from the outside, from concentration on what is passing within the mind" (C, p. 8). A few pages later Fry de- scribes another representative sculpture, a Burgundian Madonna and Child of the fifteenth century:
[T]his is essentially a snapshot, the artist must have seen this very thing happen, must have been so struck by its odd, unexpected significance and by the opportunity it gave for an entirely new and beautiful plastic harmony that he was able to carry it through with- out losing anything of its momentary quality and its intimate intensity of expression. He has watched some young mother-one fancies her sitting, as they so often do, in the street, just outside her door. Something attracts her attention, and she looks round one way while the child struggles away from her in the opposite direction. She holds him firmly but so easily that she seems scarcely conscious of what he is doing as she becomes absorbed in a tender, slightly melancholy reverie.
Fry then contrasts the Burgundian sculpture with an Italian version of the theme by Jacopo della Quercia, in which he Šnds no hint of a momentary actual event (early fifteenth century). Not that della Quercia would have neglected to study nature deeply; but his primary concern, Fry suggests, was to achieve "a simple and grand rhythmic motive" while at the same time expressing the tenderness and grace appropriate to the subject. The result is "an intenser plastic unity" than the Burgundian sculpture possesses; more broadly, "the Italian imagination worked at a higher emotional pitch [and] with a greater momentum to- wards a preconceived end". But if the comparison with della Quercia gives the honours of form to the Italians, the victory is less significant than it seems for the simple reason that by the seventeenth century the transcendent achievements of the Italian Renaissance in the realm of design were a thing of the past. The problem, in part, was consciousness itself. "In the full Renaissance," Fry wrote twenty years earlier (referring, I think, to what we would call the High Renaissance), "this idea of design became the object of conscious and deliberate study, and the decadence of Italian art came about, not through indifference to the claims of artistic expression, but through a too purely intellectual and conscious study of them." In practice that meant that the value of unity was carried down to the present by painting in France. And what from my point of view is almost startling (and yet, at this stage in our argument, not altogether surprising) about the two French sculptures Fry begins his book by discussing is that both emerge in his account as quintessentially absorptive, in two by now familiar complementary modes: the first in and through intensity of effort, the second in and through a kind of distraction, which leaves the gesture of restraining the child to operate unconsciously, automatistically (the pair corresponds approximately to the two modes of losing sight of the page in "On Some Modern Drawings").
Put more strongly, the entire book is written under the twin signs of absorption and anti-theatricality, but without the writer being aware that this is so, and a fortiori without his recognizing that both absorption and anti-theatricality became pressing issues for painting in France starting in the middle of the eighteenth century and continuing at least until the advent of Manet and his generation (in fact they continued to play a role beyond Manet, but in significantly modified terms). This is not said in derogation of Fry: the very force and coherence as well as the continual productiveness of the French anti-theatrical tradition seem largely to have depended on its invisibility as such to the artists and critics who took part in it. But Fry does offer the exemplary spectacle of a major critical intelligence who spent almost his entire viewing and writing life in the grip of certain fundamental assumptions and attitudes that continually inform his judgments and determine his preferences but that he was never able to acknowledge in their own right. And because he could not do this, he remained in the dark about their historicity (his negative attitude toward Diderot, the ultimate source of his most deeply held values, is only the most striking instance of that obliviousness), which is also to say that he never suspected that there might be a problem in applying those assumptions and attitudes as universal criteria to all the art that came his way.
This last is a large topic, but a portion of its complexities may be glimpsed when it is recalled that I have already suggested that Greuze's intentions were dramatic, not theatrical, and that what has been seen as the blatant theatricality of his art stems directly from that fact. It follows that, with respect to works belonging to the French anti-theatrical tradition, Fry treats as an absolute quality (theatricality, anti-theatricality) inhering permanently and unchangingly in a given picture what historically speaking is best thought of as a structure of intention on the part of the artist, one that will be perceived differently by different cohorts of spectators with the passage of time. As for works by artists be- fore or simply outside that tradition (e.g., Andrea del Sarto, Raphael, El Greco, Bernini, Poussin, Caravaggio, and J. M. W. Turner, not to mention makers of Chinese ritual bronzes and Japanese calligraphers), it seems altogether unlikely that the concept of theatricality in the pejorative sense of the term can be made to apply to them in any consistent or illuminating way.
It would be instructive to examine a series of passages in Characteristics of French Art, each dealing with a different painter from the perspective of an unexamined anti-theatricalism, but by this stage in my argument that's probably not necessary. Instead I want to bring this lecture to a close by focusing in turn on three rather disparate items.
The first is a passage in Fry's Cézanne: A Study of His Development. The topic is still-life, and Fry has just remarked on Francisco Goya's ability to give "even to the still-life, a kind of dramatic significance."
Cézanne at one time might well have had similar aims [Fry earlier stressed the young Cézanne's taste for pictorial melodrama], but by the period which we are considering he had definitely abandoned them. He eagerly accepts the most ordinary situations, the arrangements of objects which result from everyday life. But though he had no dramatic purpose, though it would be absurd to speak of the drama of his fruit dishes, his baskets of vegetables, his apples spilt upon the kitchen table, none the less these scenes in his hands leave upon us the impression of grave events. If the words tragic, menacing, noble or lyrical seem out of place before Cézanne's still-lifes, one feels none the less that the emotions they arouse are curiously analogous to these states of mind. It is not from lack of emotion that these pictures are not dramatic, lyric, etc., but rather by reason of a process of elimination and concentration. They are, so to speak, dramas deprived of all dramatic incident. One may wonder whether painting has ever aroused graver, more powerful, more massive emotions than those to which we are compelled by some of Cézanne's masterpieces in this genre.
I find this extraordinary. Throughout his career as a critic (after the Giotto essay, I mean), Fry has been insisting that drama has nothing whatever to do with form. Cézanne was for Fry the supreme modern master of form, and yet it suddenly turns out that his finest paintings, the still-lifes, are not dramatic exactly, in a tangled sentence Fry seems explicitly to state that they are not-but "dramas deprived of all dramatic incident." This would seem to identify form at its most purged and concentrated with drama, period. Diderot would agree.
The second item is the first of six radio broadcasts of 1929, "The Meaning of Pictures; I-Telling a Story," which turns on a highly charged comparison between two sharply different works: Luke Fildes's The Doctor (1891) in the Tate, which depicts a doctor caring for a sick child as dawn breaks following an all-night vigil, and Giotto's Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalen in the Arena Chapel (ca. 1305). Naturally, Fry abhors Fildes's canvas. After praising its ingenuity, he writes: "[A]ll the same there is something profoundly wrong. For all the mass of details which are correctly described for us there is something false about the whole thing: the dice are loaded: these people are too noble, they would not be like that unless we were looking on"- an anti- theatrical complaint if there ever was one. And another point: "We feel here," Fry says, "an invitation to identify oneself with the doctor; we feel that we, too, are capable of this devotion, and we get a certain moral satisfaction which we have done nothing to earn. I suspect that a great deal of the attraction of sentimental art and sentimental stories comes from an indulgence in this fictitious sense of one's moral worth".
In contrast, the Giotto makes no such factitious appeal to our emotions. On the contrary, we feel that the sleeping soldiers "are shut out completely from the dramatic situation." As for the angels, we are struck by "the awful indifference and serenity with which they watch the scene." Near the right-hand edge of the scene Mary Magdalen reaches out her arms to embrace Christ, who, however, "slides away from her touch." The entire design produces an effect "of loneliness, isolation and mystery" that accords well with the hour of dawn when it is supposed to have taken place. Plus, the Giotto is devoid of the accessory details that clutter The Doctor. "We are dealing," Fry writes, "only with the fundamental psychological facts of the story, the great oppositions and contrasts of the situation, and we see that such a bleak, abstract treatment, shows us the fundamental drama with incredible force". And something more: "For all its dramatic intensity we are not asked to come so close to the action as we are by Luke Fildes. We watch it taking place in a world which is somewhat removed from the actual world, a world which we cannot enter into-wherein we shall never be actors. We cannot identify ourselves with these people; the scene re- mains there for our contemplation rather than for any immediate personal contact".
Once again Fry does not consider the possibility that the very features of the scene he singles out for praise all but allegorize the distance and detachment he seeks: the sleeping soldiers, oblivious to the dramatic situation; the angels, surrogate beholders, whose awful indifference and serenity the actual beholder can only aspire to match; the loneliness and isolation of the overall mood; and especially the central event, the risen Christ evading Mary Magdalen's touch as he exits the picture, his gesture of denial insisting on separation, distance, an un-crossable gulf between worlds.Moreover, throughout the discussion of Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalen there is not a single mention of form or design (granted, these are not his topic), only evocations of the dramatic force and concentration of Giotto's stupendous invention. As in the passage from Cézanne, all this suggests an unexpected closeness to Diderot, an ascetic and dis-identificatory analogue to his conception of the tableau, which itself may be characterized precisely in terms of separation, distance, a gulf between worlds.
The last item I want to consider is a letter Fry wrote to the woman he lived with, Helen Anrep, several months before he died. The letter was written in Paris in March 1934 (Fry would die in September), and it mainly concerns a day he had spent in Milan looking at paintings in the Brera and other museums. He mentions portraits by Antonello da Messina and Tintoretto in the Castello Sforzesco and then begins a new paragraph as follows:
And Correggio. There's something we've both missed in his psychology, I because I've looked too purely at form, you because you're put off by his form, but there's an Adoration of the Magi [1516-17], a rather nasty picture in some ways but with such a rare piece of imagination in the Virgin, who's almost hiding from all these grandees behind a pillar and entirely absorbed in her baby and so incredibly tenderly human. I see I'm in danger of getting shockingly "literary" under your influence. But I see that the pictures that "count" most generally have some quite new and personal conception of the situation.
Is this not revealing? Fry the inveterate museum-goer, once again being moved by an absorptive motif (the Virgin hiding from visitors, absorbed in her baby), and once again unable to think of it other than as a "literary" device, yet struggling, not solely to please his correspondent, to find a way to take it seriously-and not quite succeeding. The quotation marks around "count" and the italicization of "generally" bespeak the failure of his effort, the unclarity of the thought they strain too hard to qualify. It's fitting, therefore, that the letter ends in a bilingual flourish that shows how little Fry's basic values evolved in the course of his long critical career. The last sentence reads: "I send you a few cards-the innocent crank Scaletti [not of interest to us] and the terribly 'averti' Dosso who's much too conscious and anxious to épater."