Word: criticizing
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Thus E. M. Forster, a British novelist who wrote one great book (A Passage to India), speared with surgical neatness the essential quality of any great critic. His words were an obituary on his friend Roger Fry, an art critic who died...
Last fortnight another friend, Novelist Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse, Orlando), laid out Critic Fry for all to see in a stately biography, Roger Fry (Harcourt, Brace; $3.50), as solemn as a satin-lined coffin...
...Woolf's work obscure rather than clarify the question: Why write a book about a critic? Yet Roger Fry's achievements were genuinely great. Hampered by a stodgy Quaker background and upbringing, burdened with a great personal tragedy (his wife early became insane), he was not a successful painter, had a hard time learning how to write and lecture for a living. When he hoped for the directorship of the National Gallery he was passed over; he was made Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge only in the last year of his life. But Roger Fry made more...
...elder J. P. Morgan made Fry curator of paintings and buyer for Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. Critic Fry appreciated neither the good qualities of the U. S. landscape ("One expects a new continent to be more original") nor those of Mr. Morgan, whom Biographer Woolf describes as a man of prodigious vanity and colossal ignorance. Mr. Morgan's power over the Museum-a "worse than Turkish rule"-soon led to Roger Fry's dismissal...
...above: and an apology generally results a few months later. For instance, a while back George had some rather disparaging remarks to make about The One Inimitable Band Around Today, for which he subsequently apologized. Now that's all fine, as one seldom sees such downright honesty in a critic. However, it seems to me that George would save himself a lot of word-eating if he'd only refrain from his occasional excursions into adolescent bombast...