Roger Fry Quotes
Bach almost persuades me to be a Christian.
Fry, Roger. Letters of Roger Fry, edited by Denys Sutton, vol. 2, Chatto & Windus, 1972, p. 445.
This is a very important quotation because it reflects the attitude of many of the leading American expansionists and imperialists of the period—ie that American imperialism would uplift peoples around the world. This was an extension of the religious motive of many of the British imperialists who referred to the “3 Cs”: Commerce, Civilization & Christianity. Seelye himself was a missionary of the Protestant Dutch Reformed Church.
Roger Eliot Fry was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasised the formal properties of paintings over the "associated ideas" conjured in the viewer by their representational content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin ...In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry". The taste Fry influenced was primarily that of the Anglophone world, and his success lay largely in alerting an educated public to a compelling version of recent artistic developments of the Parisian avant-garde.
