Dimensions: support: 362 x 270 mm frame: 546 x 444 x 42 mm
Copyright: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Editor: Here we have Roger Fry's "Essay in Abstract Design." The arrangement of these painted shapes and what appear to be pasted tickets creates a curious interplay of color and texture. What catches your eye when you look at it? Curator: The formal relationships are quite compelling. Note how Fry deploys a restricted palette, blues and greens against earth tones, to unify the composition. The planar arrangement suggests a Cubist influence. Have you considered how the superimposition of forms affects depth? Editor: It's like he's flattened the space, pushing everything to the surface. Curator: Precisely. The interplay between the painted surface and the suggestion of collage is what gives the image its visual tension. A very interesting exercise in form. Editor: It's fascinating how much can be communicated just through abstract shapes.
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http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/fry-essay-in-abstract-design-t01957
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This is one of the very few abstract works by Fry to have survived, and is one of three he exhibited in 1915. His use of the bus tickets was clearly inspired by Picasso. Fry has used real tickets and stuck them down to the painted board. They are for Route 88, which runs past the Tate Gallery, although from a different stage of that route. It was Fry who gave intellectual focus to the Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers. He had trained as a painter in France and Italy, and with Sickert in London, but became best known as a highly influential writer, critic and lecturer. Fry organised two exhibitions of Post-Impressionist art in 1910 and 1912, showing types of European pictures then little known in Britain. Gallery label, August 2004
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