AP English Literature Students
This segment of the unit is intended for my students in the AP English class, who will read Roger Fry's entire biography, which is not as challenging as Virginia Woolf's short story
Kew Gardens
.
While the reading will be completed at home, in class we will focus on specific excerpts on Roger Fry's vision of art in painting and in writing. The first of these passage – from the very beginning of "Childhood: School" up to Roger's reflection on his garden
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– introduces Roger's family. Beyond confirming that his parents were Quakers, Virginia Woolf adds the note that "undoubtedly, the Quakers society … was very narrow in outlook and bounded in interests; very bourgeois as to its members."
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Being a Quaker means more than being different from other people in society. It means opposing the rules and customs most people follow. Roger, according to his biographer, seems to have the same defying attitude toward the accepted canons of painting and what makes a work of art.
The same excerpt is important because it contains an autobiographical piece Roger has written about his garden where he experiences the "first passion and suffers for his first disillusion."
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The emotions are the focus of his research in a work of art and the red color stands out for its very special effect on Roger's emotions; it is "a real passion, nearly a sincere worship."
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The red color in itself does not correspond to any particular emotion or meaning. It is important because if reflects what the young Roger Fry notices in his diaries. This focus on bright colors becomes a fundamental element he expects in a painting as reflections of the author's emotions. (When we will be reading the short story
Kew Gardens
, I will make the students compare Virginia Woolf's description of the flower bed to this description of the garden. In particular we will focus our attention on the colors and the emotions they arouse.)
The years that follow see Roger Fry in Cambridge at King's College where he begins to develop his interest for art in spite of his family's objections. In the meantime, Roger is learning "how to analyze his impressions more than how to move his pencil" and ultimately to painting very specific details.
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A trip to Italy with his friend, Pip Hughes, is the turning point for him as Virginia Woolf states, "It was a change from compromise and obedience to independence and certainty."
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Roger spends his time seeing the masterpieces of various artists and in the meantime he paints, makes new friends, and dines with them. His next trip is to Paris, but this time he does not seem to be too much impressed by modern French painting. It is only during other visits to Paris that this place and some artists, Cezanne and Matisse, inspire him to become an art critic.
The next chapter in Roger Fry's biography discusses his work as art critic and underlines what he believes is important in a work of art.
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As his biographer states, "it was to take him many years and much drudgery before he forged for himself a language that wound itself into the heart of sensation."
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Essentially, Roger believes that a real work of art is the one that even the "common seer" can understand the meaning behind. He also pushes to abandon all the details that have a glaring effect to focus on the emotional and intellectual conditions through the use of intense colors and the effect of strong opposition of light and shade.
The real artist – the term refers to whoever creates a work of art, a painter as well a poet or writer – approaches nature to analyze not what he sees but how it appears. He has to "penetrate the cause of its form and structure."
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This method "allows inexhaustible possibilities of expressions and of deeper appeal to the emotion."
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A work of art, he also adds, must have the power of making the "outsider" – the audience – "whose eyes are the least active of his senses, aware of something real and exciting, … in perfect simplicity."
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Another excerpt I intend to read and discuss in class with my students is the chapter on "Post Impressionism." In 1910 Roger Fry pays another visit to Paris because he has been asked to arrange an exhibition at the Grafton Gallery. In a letter to his mother he writes he has been "the instigator of an exhibition of modern French art and I am bound to do a great deal of advising."
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As Virginia Woolf notices, he is much more than interested, he is excited by the French Impressionist painters, in particular by Cezanne. He believes that this new way of painting represents a reaction and a transition, a true revolution of the culture of his time. He also thinks that the Impressionist unusual method to paint "penetrates through values to the causes in actual form and structure."
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Roger Fry's interest in French Impressionism has a huge influence on Virginia Woolf's writing style. As her close friend and active member of the Bloomsbury group, he likes to theorize on what makes true art and what a real artist should do to revolutionize the current customs and create something that is simple, in a certain way primitive, but that has the power to shake the reader or the viewer of a painting and arouse intense emotions. Roger thinks that "literature was suffering a plethora of old clothes – the writer's vice of distorting reality through impure associations of contaminating adjectives."
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The development of the unconscious in art – in painting as well in literature –– in such a way as to bring a purer message is also relevant in Roger's belief. Conveying the unconscious in art is how the artist can express spirituality.
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My AP students will annotate these principles and will then analyze the writing style of
Kew Gardens
by Virginia Woolf to determine the extent of his influence on her writing.
At this point, I will let my students continue reading and analyzing the biography. In accomplishing this task, I want them to analyze this text and select those passages which explain his thoughts about art. While doing this, they also have to determine his visions about poets and literature, and compare them to his vision in painting in relations to what he calls true reality, true emotions, and spirituality through colors in painting and words in literature.