Woolf on Fry

"If you said to him, 'This must be right, all the experts say so, Hitler says so, Marx says so, Christ says so, The Times says so,' he would reply in effect, 'Well, I wonder. Let's see.'... You would come away realizing that an opinion may be influentially backed and yet be tripe."

Thus E. M. Forster, a British novelist who wrote one great book (A Passage to India), speared with surgical neatness the essential quality of any great critic. His words were an obituary on his friend Roger Fry, an art critic who died in 1934.

Last fortnight another friend, Novelist Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse, Orlando), laid out Critic Fry for all to see in a stately biography, Roger Fry (Harcourt, Brace; $3.50), as solemn as a satin-lined coffin.

The majesty and length (301 pages) of

Mrs. Woolf's work obscure rather than clarify the question: Why write a book about a critic? Yet Roger Fry's achievements were genuinely great. Hampered by a stodgy Quaker background and upbringing, burdened with a great personal tragedy (his wife early became insane), he was not a successful painter, had a hard time learning how to write and lecture for a living. When he hoped for the directorship of the National Gallery he was passed over; he was made Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge only in the last year of his life. But Roger Fry made more Britons look at pictures and like them than any other man of his time. The term Post-Impressionism, for the art of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, et al., was his invention, and through jibes and jeers he introduced Cezanne to London in 1910.

In 1907 the elder J. P. Morgan made Fry curator of paintings and buyer for Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. Critic Fry appreciated neither the good qualities of the U. S. landscape ("One expects a new continent to be more original") nor those of Mr. Morgan, whom Biographer Woolf describes as a man of prodigious vanity and colossal ignorance. Mr. Morgan's power over the Museum--a "worse than Turkish rule"--soon led to Roger Fry's dismissal.

Best reading in Mrs. Woolf's 301 pages is Critic Fry's account--however colored by his own self-esteeming captiousness--of a picture-buying trip in Italy with J. P.

Morgan, his friend, the "elderly and well preserved Mrs. Douglas," her duenna and a cadging Italian courier. Mr. Morgan, said Mr. Fry, was rude everywhere. When, off Ancona, a choral society serenaded the Morgan yacht, "they shocked Morgan very much by asking for money and they were rudely refused. It was not so much that he minded parting with money as that the request was a blow to the cherished illusion that everything was done out of pure admiration for his personality, just for his beaux yeux. I always wondered that his mistresses in New York got such substantial subsidies as they did. To man it is impossible but to Jews and Armenians and women. . . ."

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