Vision and Design by Roger Fry (review)

Book Reviews 133 (the jacket says) nearly 200,000 copies. One of my colleagues once listed it as a handbook for courses in basic design (which is what the author intended, I guess), and even a couple of blocks from my home, there are six copies of the earlier edition at a store that caters to hobbyists' tastes. Wh¥ do people like this book? What qualities does it possess that prompt some people to believe that it will make them better designers, artists, dalliers, or devotees? I have not found it to be a very helpful book (I think it wouldconfuse both students and teachers in basic design), and I don't have an answer yet. This revised edition is, undeniably, an improvement on the original. The basic format has been changed from roughly square to rectangular; the layout has been rearranged in a somewhat more flexible manner. Some new illustrations have been included (mostly of three-dimensional works), so that there isnow a total of about 100illustrations, 10in color: The cover artist is not clearly credited (the collage may have been the work of the author's daughter), and the credits for all the interior works are given to schools and teachers of art, not to the students who authored the works. The text is only slightly changed, with the intent (the jacket contends) of "updating practical information or clarifying difficult passages". Beyond the introduction (which covers the purpose of basic design), there are seven major chapters, including 'Primary Elements and Forces', 'The Two-Dimensional Field and the Space Frame', 'Spatial Forces', 'Analytical Drawing', 'Visual Kinetics', 'Colour: Fundamental Studies and "Objective" Principles', and 'Colour-Space and Subjective Colour'. Somehow, one is not surprised that this volume now contains a foreword by Gyorgy Kepes, who wrote such influential books as Language of Vision (Paul Theobald, Chicago, 1944) and The New Landscape in Art and Science (Paul Theobald, Chicago, 1956). Presumably, the author was an associate of Kepes at one time and indeed the plates include five works by students ofKepes (and of Robert Preusser) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kepes's foreword is puzzling. Notwithstanding the excellence of his own books, this book does not distinguish itself "from the plethora of visual art textbooks available today." It is competently written and reasonably well-organized, but it is wholly unexceptional. It is, I think, a capricious approach to a subject about which (the book admits) "there has been some confusion of thought." One might even think that this volume has contributed to that confusion. It is not (despite what the jacket boasts) "a must for all teachers and art students." Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, Department of Art, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53201, U.S.A. Visionand Design. Roger Fry. J. B. Bullen, ed. Oxford University Press, London, 1981. 243 pp., illus. Paper, £4.50. There is an appropriate symmetry in the birth and death of Roger Fry. He was born 34 years before the beginning of this century. As a champion of Cezanne (and all of what he liked to call postimpressionism ), Fry tried to shepherd British taste from one century to the other. As Kenneth Clark observed, "In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry." The year before Vision and Design came out (it was originally published in 1920),Fry visited Cezanne's house, combing it from top to toe in search of a sense of the master. As Virginia Woolfe (Fry's biographer) recalled, "the gardener had never even heard of Cezanne, and when Roger Fry tried to get the shopkeepers of Aix to talk about him, they could only remember an old man who was rather cracked." As are virtually all his books, this is a collection of essays, assembled, Fry jokingly said, by "dumping old articles into a basket and shaking them up." This was his first book of essays, comprising pieces that had appeared in the Athenaeum and the Burlington Magazine. The more enduring works include 'An Essay in Aesthetics', 'Art and Socialism', 'The French Post-Impressionists', and 'Retrospect'. There are 25essays in all, with 8 illustrations of works of art, a select...