Vision and Design

"Even if you are primarily interested in modernist literature, I would recommend having a good read of Fry on art. He totally revolutionises the way of talking about a picture. He will shut out the content of the picture and make you see it in terms of forms, blocks, colours and design. Design is one of his key words. One of the jokes about him is that he will look at a crucifixion painting, point to the body of Christ and say “this important blue mass in the centre”. But it also means that a window is opened up onto this whole new realm of aesthetic experience. You start to ask: “What is the difference between looking at a butterfly and looking at a painting of a butterfly?” Fry makes you acknowledge that a painting of a butterfly does something different from the butterfly sitting there, and asks what is it that a painting can do that nothing else in the world can do? That’s a central question for anyone wondering what happens when you walk around the Tate gallery in London – why have patterns on two-dimensional canvases acquired such status in our culture? What is it that they do? Yes, and what it does to our emotions. He’s intent on feeling his way into what happens in our bodies when we look at a picture – what is it that we feel . Most people writing about art in his period wrote like connoisseurs, trying to work out who influenced Michelangelo at a particular moment and giving good, dry, historical facts about a picture. Fry blurts out: “Yes, but why does it make you cry?” He shows you why, for example, a child’s instinct is to draw a human head with the eyes much larger than they should be in proportion, because eyes are important for communication. So he shows you why distortion beyond the photographic is meaningful, and why a brilliant painter will distort rather than simply represent what is in front of him. It was very different. If one thinks about late Victorian and early 20th century painting – lots of conventional, detailed, almost photographic social scenes – Fry caught hold of the great movement in France to post-impressionism. He invented the term “post-impressionism” and introduced to Britain French painters like Cezanne, Gauguin and Manet for the first time. That really was the beginning of modern art in Britain. It starts off with manifesto essays, like his essay on aesthetics and his essay on art and socialism, which politicises the making of art. Part of his politics is a tremendous eclecticism – he’s willing to pay attention to the art of what was then thought of as primitive peoples. He writes essays on African sculpture and the art of the Bushmen. He looks at the art of cave paintings, showing how very early primitive people instinctively distorted the form of an animal but did so with far more intelligence than bourgeois Victorian artists who were simply replicating the look of an animal down to every hair on its head. He really shifted the sense of what it is to be an intelligent artist. He famously draws attention to African and South American art, so there is a challenging of the European supremacy as well. That goes right across modernism – from Picasso looking at African masks to DH Lawrence talking about African sculpture – but Fry very seriously makes people in London think about South American forms and the dynamic of African sculptures."