Research On The Formalist Criticism Of Roger Fry

As the "Father of Formalism" and "Father of Modern Art Criticism",Roger Fry established the conceptual system of formalism on the basis of opposing the naturalism's autocracy,and laid the foundation of formalism criticism,by defending "Manet and the Post-impressionists" Exhibition.Fry's formalist criticism is the beginning of modernism criticism,which makes art pay close attention to art itself for the first time,and takes objectivism as the main feature to become a polarity of criticism theories under the banner of modernism,presenting as a form-oriented way of expressionism painting art.The formalist aesthetic thought represented by Roger Fry advocates that the value of artistic works lie not in the emotional,literary and other ideological content,nor in the imitation of real life,but on the basis of line,color,volume and their unity of relations.This unity,that is,through the arrangement of line,color,volume,order and diversity combining together,constitutes "significant form" and "expressive form",and strives to achieve the power of expressing thoughts and feelings in the style of primitive artistic masterpieces,and then arouse our aesthetic feelings,so as to achieve the purpose of intellectual happiness.Fry's technique is not to look for the clues of modern art in contemporary art,but to find the long-lost problem of form in classical art,and to accept the German tradition of form and predecessors' thinking on form,that is,repaying attention to the relationship of painting media,and focusing on the purity itself is the characteristic of modernist art's self-discipline.For this reason,Fry also created a large number of critical terms and brought them into the history of art and the history of art criticism.During the two post-impressionist exhibitions,Fry's formalist critical theory was firm,but at other times it was vague,incomplete,sometimes contradictory,and even negative in his later years,which formed the fuzzy zone of his critical thoughts.These fuzzy zones,namely,the duality of Fry's critical thoughts,refer to the dual nature inherent in Fry's art itself,which presents contradictory aspects in isolation and unifies in art as a whole.As the product of consciousness,the duality of Fry's critical thought is inseparable from the duality of Fry's subjective consciousness.To really understand Fry,we must understand Fry's way of thinking,because Fry always seeks some tension between the two attributes of art,and it is this tension of thinking that gives value to Fry's aesthetic thought.Fry's aesthetic thought is always in the middle of the left and right.He always can grasp the tension which arises in a crack in the middle of two extremes,and he always be able to describe it accurately.His critical theory always wander specifically between the terms of in life and art,reality and imagination,classical art and modern art,realism(naturalism)and expressionism(primitivism),abstract and concrete,plane and three-dimensional,order and chaos,reason and sensibility,imitation and expression,even artist and critic,and so on.Fry always try to find a proper balance between the terms and the tension between two extremes.Tracing back to its source,the origin of the duality of Fry's aesthetic thought is based on its rational and emotional thinking mode,which is the result of the collision between rationalism and intuitionism.The content of Fry's thinking on duality is too rich,so doctoral dissertation extracts three pairs of main concepts to discuss the tension of Fry's thinking.First,it shows the opposition and balance between realism and expressionism.The essential feature of realism is representation,while the essential feature of expressionism is figuration.Fry raised the flag of Fry's fonnalism in thinking against and inseparable from imitation.Secondly,Fry abandoned the proposition that art is a response to life and believed that art is self-sufficient,and he hold the view that art is determined by the internal power--structural design.Next,Fry believes that art is imaginary life,so people can focus on the understanding and emotional consciousness of experience instead of the direct reaction with real life,and in this way,they can harvest totally different values and understandings from real life.The third is the opposition and unity between classicism and modernism.Fry found the seeds of modernism in classical art——From the early Italian Renaissance art,especially from Giovanni Bellini,Giotto's art,Fry found "constructive design","structure" and other characteristics of modernism-And provoked the new art movement,and then initiated the course of modernist art with the help of exaggerating the power of the seeds.Art history can be said to be a history of alternation between representation and expression,but with different materials added to each cycle or period.When Fry opened the door to modernism,he looked for the basis of primitive art,Byzantine art and early Renaissance art,and which proved the cyclicity of art.At the beginning of the 20th century,modern art criticism returned to the period during which rational criticism was the mainstream,and the core of criticism is the problem of nonrepresentational art itself.Fry was in the right place at the right time,because his theory of criticism is a progressive aesthetic thought formed on the basis of refuting the social criticism represented by Ruskin and the poetic criticism represented by Pater.The dissertation is divided into eight chapters and conclusion,totally nine parts,and the following is the main content of each chapter.Chapter one is a review or a summary of Roger Fry's formalist criticism.First of all,through the exhibition of Manet and post-impressionist painters and Fry's defensive articles for the exhibition,the relationship between formalist aesthetics and impressionism is made clear,and how Roger Fry's formalist criticism theory lays a foundation in the defense is also clarified.In particular is Fry managed to give us and make clear the terms of "the expressive form","the perceptual power of intellectualization","the visual language of imagination",and so on.As a model of objective criticism paradigm,Fry's formalist criticism theory,occupies an important position in the history of criticism in the early 20th century.The chapter two mainly discusses the evolution process from form to "the significant form".In particular,it discusses the influence of Kant's tradition of formalism,which is not only in philosophical aspect,but also in modern sense.Then,the chapter not only finds out why Fry did not go to complete abstraction,but also shows how Victorian aesthetic taste evolved into "the significant form" with the help of tracing back the origin and connotation of Fry's significant form.Chapter three,four,five and six mainly discuss the duality of Roger Fry's critical thought.Specifically,chapter three demonstrates the duality of Roger Fry's critical thought in its entirety,while chapters four,five and six focus on the exploration of the duality.The main point of chapter three is that the duality of Fry's critical thought is formed in the process of searching for the tension between the two extremes,and the process of self-negation in Fry's thinking.Of course,due to the predicament of formalist criticism itself,it can also be said that Fry's critical thought is the result of self-reflection and self-reconciliation.There are many reasons for the duality of Fry's critical thoughts,the first is the contest between rationalism and emotionalism in Fry's thinking,and the second is the influence of Bloomsbury Group.The fourth,fifth and sixth chapters mainly discuss the fuzzy zone between the three pairs of terms or concepts which appears in the duality of realism and expressionism,art and life,classicism and modernism,so as to clarify the tension problem thought by Fry.In chapter four,the discussion of the concepts of realism and expressionism mainly demonstrates the characteristics of formalism's opposition to the realism' imitation and its return to primitivism,and especially discusses the relationship between formalism and primitivism.In chapter five,the content mainly includes art and life,real life and imaginary life are the meta-problems that Fry thinks about,and the relationship between emotion and form.In chapter 6,the pursuit of classicism and modernism makes us know that the thought source of Fry's modernism is old masters(early Renaissance art),and the self-discipline and purity problem of modernism initiated by Fry.Chapter seven explores the relationship between intuition and Fry's formalist criticism.As the main feature of objective criticism,Fry's theory of formalist criticism has never left intuition and instinct.Especially in Fry's later years,he took sensibility and vitality as the coordinate of his art criticism,and even abandoned his formalist position.Chapter eight give Roger Fry's formalist criticism a position in the overall situation of British art criticism from the end of 19th century to the beginning of 20th century,and Take the view that Roger Fry's formalist criticism is a polarity in it.Starting from the small circle in the history of criticism from John Ruskin to Herbert Read,we know Fry's formalist criticism is under the influence of his predecessors and also under the evaluation of Later critics,and then we know the exact position of Fry's formalist criticism in the circle of artistic criticism,and of course we also know its characteristics of epochal character and boundedness.The conclusion is the summary of the whole doctoral dissertation and the prospect of Fry's formalist criticism.