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Fry's modernist classic
When Virginia Woolf wrote Roger Fry's biography in 1940, she singled out his monograph on Cézanne as his most successful book, saying that it stood out "like Mont St.Victoire" from his other work. In this case at least, it's hard to disagree with Woolf's judgment. Despite the fact that it was published in 1927, before the artist's work had even been systematically catalogued, 'Cézanne : A Study of His Development' still has a remarkable freshness to its prose, and Fry succeeds in giving the viewer a sense of the excitement he himself felt while looking at the artist's works. ('Critical distance' is an obvious problem for Fry: he had been publicly identified with the artist since including his canvases in the notorious Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910-11 and 1912-13.)

Part of the pleasure of reading Fry's book is the way he describes Cézanne's development as if--to borrow another of Woolf's phrases--it were a "double story." In order to explain the radical difference between Cézanne's early works and his mature ones (respectively, before and after his turn to Impressionism), Fry imagines a psychologically troubled artist, who can only find peace by looking outside of himself: that is, away from invented imagery and towards nature. This split, for Fry, corresponds with the difference between the 'Romantic' and the 'Classic' sides of Cézanne's personality; but the schism is never absolute, and even in the artist's maturity, there is always the possibility that the repressed 'Romantic' will return. This, indeed, is how Fry explains Cézanne's continued interest in painting pictures of Bathers and other quasi-erotic subjects.

Such a blend of art criticism and novelistic story-telling makes for a fascinating and provocative read. Certainly that is how D.H. Lawrence seems to have found the book, and his 'An Introduction to These Paintings' is an attempt to wrest Cézanne from the grips of Fry's compelling account.