Roger Fry, Clive Bell and American Modernism: (44 Cultural Interactions: Studies in the Relationship Between t)

When the Bloomsbury critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell introduced an aesthetically conservative English public to recent Parisian avant-garde painting, they explained its disconcerting imagery by way of a late nineteenth-century metaphysical tradition which had long intrigued musicians and Symbolist writers on the European continent. The Post-Impressionist aesthetic they devised advocated a direct response to the formal ingenuity of the work of art without recourse to prior knowledge and emphasized the significance of visionary genius, albeit to the detriment of narrative acuity and technical accomplishment, values hitherto upheld by the Edwardian art establishment. The provocation was calculated, the author suggests, and its domestic ramifications were predictable: the reaction of an Anglo-conformist public in New York, on the other hand, was anything but. Recreating an Anglo-American dialogue inspired by Fry and Bell, and framed within a period encompassing Fry's Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition in 1910 and Alfred Barr Jr's Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition in 1936, the author demonstrates how key components of Bloomsbury's aesthetic bypassed a pre-existent modernist practice in New York and were instead taken up by an urban intelligentsia which adapted them to the requirements of an increasingly professionalized institutional practice during the 1920s.

About the Author :
Having studied Fine Art at Bristol and then Goldsmith's College, David Maddock taught art while continuing to practice as a painter. In 1989, he enrolled on the Art History master's course at the University of Leeds, where he catalogued the works of George Clausen in the Sam Wilson Bequest at the City Art Gallery, before submitting a thesis on English modernist theory between 1910 and 1914. He returned to the topic, expanding upon it, some years later when he undertook his PhD at Leicester University. He is currently Head of Art and Art History at Leicester Grammar School where, in addition to normal teaching duties, he co-ordinates a programme of exhibitions and visits to cities of cultural interest, finding time, when he can, to paint.

Review :
«For some twenty-five years, Roger Fry and Clive Bell had a significant, if now largely overlooked, influence upon the aesthetics of visual Modernism. David Maddock's deeply researched book skillfully argues for Fry and Bell's philosophical and institutional importance to an intriguing that goes beyond to cast new light on the key artists, movements and critical debates of Anglo-American Modernism.» (Douglas Tallack, Emeritus Professor of American Studies, University of Leicester, UK) «A superb study that reveals the close connections between the aesthetic thought of Roger Fry and Clive Bell and its long-reaching impact on American modernism that makes an important contribution to our understanding of the transnational networks that defined modern art and the ideas and institutions that supported it.» (Anna Gruetzner Robins, Professor Emeritus in History of Art, University of Reading)