Roger Fry and the Early Aesthetics of Bloomsbury

Abstract

Apart from continuing associations with the Cambridge Apostles, Roger Fry was not much involved with the Bloomsbury Group as a critic or painter before 1910. Yet in the development of Bloomsbury’s critical theory and practice, Fry’s Edwardian writing was important. His authority as critic and theorist converted them to post-impressionism, and thus altered their painting and their writing. Fundamental to Bloomsbury’s aesthetics is a complex analogy of visual and literary art, and that analogy is assumed in Fry’s criticism. By 1906 Roger Fry had established himself in the columns of the Athenaeum as one of the leading art critics in England — and then threw over this career for another as a curator in America. (He was the only member of Bloomsbury to have resided in the United States.) Much of Fry’s early art reviewing lies outside the literary history of Bloomsbury, yet some of the essays and reviews that he wrote have a place in the extended idea of literature assumed in this literary history.