Roger Fry (Roger Eliot Fry) Biography

British art critic and painter, born in London, educated at King's College, Cambridge. Having read natural sciences Fry turned to painting and became interested in Renaissance art after visits to Italy. He was art critic of the Athenaeum in 1901, co-founded the Burlington Magazine in 1903, and was director of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1905 to 1910. In 1910 he founded the Omega Workshops to produce well-designed and simple objects for daily use. His 1905 edition of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses was highly acclaimed. On discovering Cézanne in 1906 his attention turned towards modern painting; in 1910 and 1912 he organized two celebrated exhibitions of Cézanne's work, together with that of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and other ‘Post-Impressionists’ (a term coined by Fry). His criticism, collected in Vision and Design (1920) and Transformations (1926), together with his monograph on Cézanne (1927), succeeded in stimulating immense enthusiasm for modern French painting. His Last Lectures appeared posthumously in 1939. An associate of the Bloomsbury Group, Fry's biography was written by V. Woolf (1940).