Refusing to play Vasari: Roger Fry’s Cézannian anecdotes

• Main Author: Benjamin Harvey
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Department of Art History, University of Birmingham 2020-12-01
• Series: Journal of Art Historiography
• Subjects: roger fry; paul cézanne; ambroise vollard; walter sickert; virginia woolf; joachim gasquet; humility; frames; biography; monograph; development
• Online Access: https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/harvey1.pdf

This paper explores Roger Fry’s monograph Cézanne: A Study of His Development (1927) in light of the author’s strong resistance to, and strategic use of, an anecdotal approach to art history. Writing a decade before Kris and Kurz identified the anecdote as the ‘primitive cell’ of artists’ biographies, Fry already associated it with problems of originality and authenticity. In his earlier review of Ambroise Vollard’s biography of the artist, Fry complimented the author for playing ‘Vasari to Cézanne’, but Walter Sickert teased Fry for merely repeating Vollard’s stories. Fry’s review, Sickert noted, was ‘filled with personal details extremely amusing, interesting and illuminating; and, on the whole, Mr Fry re-told us in English… what Vollard said.’ Fry had no personal knowledge of Cézanne, no amusing tales of his own to offer; as Sickert’s words suggest, he needed to take a different approach, for the sake of both the market and his own credibility. Instead of anecdotes, his monograph stressed his first-hand experiences of the artist’s paintings, which, when correctly arranged and described, yielded a ‘developmental’ narrative. Fry would only readmit anecdotes—just two to be exact, both culled from Vollard—because they ‘afford[ed] so vivid a contrast’ with each other and reiterated his main theme. While the first demonstrated ‘the sublime arrogance and self-confidence of the youthful Cézanne,’ the second revealed that ‘a lifetime of solitude and neglect’ had taught him ‘the lesson of humility.’ Ultimately, Fry still needed anecdotes to tell his moralizing tale about the humbling of proud Cézanne.