Theorizing Form

Primary Source D: "An Essay in Aesthetics," by Roger Fry

It is on such experimentations with form and composition as we have seen above which both Roger Fry and Clive Bell theorized and published, contributing to art advocacy, criticism, and theory that shaped British perceptions of modern art and galvanized discussions on form.  

Though Fry was also himself an artist, it is largely the impact of his criticism and theory which fashioned his legacy among British culture and art history. He was a prolific writer, but it was his 1909 “An Essay in Aesthetics” (published in The New Quarterly, which was edited by fellow Bloomsbury Group member Desmond MacCarthy) that largely introduced British society to concepts of formalism in modern visual art. Continuing to promote the fundamentally nonmimetic function of modern art, Fry proposes that art represents “the expressions of the imaginative life rather than a copy of actual life”.[31] For in our day-to-day existence, our focus narrows in on the objects in our immediate vicinity as we are required – often instinctively – to act and respond to “necessary external conditions,” at the cost of being able to dwell on our emotional states;[32] however, in the imaginative life we may spend time in emotional spaces and subsequently “come to notice a number of appearances and relations of appearances” that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.[33] Art, as the “chief organ of the imaginative life,” thus grants us access to the “greater clearness of its perception, and the greater purity and freedom of its emotion”:[34] we reach new modes of perception and emotion when we engage with the imaginative life through art. It is “purposeful order” and “unity” – and, critically, the formal elements of a work which comprise them – that arouse more substantive emotions.[35] Fry then outlines these elements of form which an artist and spectator must consider: rhythm of line, mass and inertia – both the “power of resisting movement, or communicating its own movement to other bodies” – space, light and shade, and color.[36] The significance of art as a formal endeavor, as Fry elaborates in a later essay, is that emotion derived from “the contemplation of formal relations” is more “pure,” more nuanced, and more likely to persist beyond the momentary encounter with an artwork.[37]

Clouds, a textile design by Duncan Grant, 1931

Additionally, much of the Post-Impressionist articulations of form and aesthetics are grounded in interpretations of non-Western or so-called “primitive” art, which gave Western artists a new visual vocabulary to explore. Many European artists identified in “primitive” art an intuitive, uncluttered aesthetic vision – as Fry described it, an “ultra-primitivist directness of vision”[42] – one more attuned with the raw human spirit and inner emotional world.[43] After trade with Japan reopened in the 1850s, a “Japonisme” “craze” for Japanese art and design exposed modern artists to the flatness, stylization, and bright colors of Japanese prints and other art objects;[44] similarly, increased representation of African and Oceanic art in European museums and even artists’ travels outside Europe – perhaps most infamously, Gauguin to Tahiti – exposed them to new patterns, shapes, and iconography which they incorporated into their work.[45] For example, many of the decorative objects made in Fry’s Omega Workshops – studios that sought to incorporate the aesthetics of “fine art” into functional, decorative art objects – bear the influence of non-Western design elements: Duncan Grant’s cloud textile resembles the flat, graphic lines and colors of Japanese ukiyo-e prints, while Roger Fry’s giraffe cupboard echoes the bold geometric forms of African masks and textiles.[46] In this way, “Primitivism” provided the Post-Impressionists a new way to critique and transcend stagnant European traditions of painting – just as Lily Briscoe and her “little Chinese eyes”[47] embodied Woolf’s criticism of British patriarchal and societal expectations.