Judging art involved intense personal rivalries and complex confidence games in a latticework of potentates and institutions. Fry made no forensic claims about the science of connoisseurship, unlike his vaunted contemporary Bernard Berenson, but he, too, appraised works of art and, to make a living, provided attributions and authentications both for the Met and for private collectors. Fry mocked his role as “bearleader to the great man,” but he needed money from clients like Morgan to care for his ailing wife (the artist Helen Coombe) and to realize his own artistic projects. This fusion (or confusion) of private and public mission was characteristic of American museums founded as philanthropic gestures by the magnates of the industrial age. Fry advised Morgan on art with the result that Morgan bought some “fine things for the Museum and some superb ones for Morgan.” The Met had engaged Fry’s services as a connoisseur, but he had been reluctant to swap London for New York and, because of seasickness on his Atlantic crossings (both physical and cultural), he preferred to operate as one of the Met’s European agents. To begin with, their professional relationship was entirely ambiguous. Molesworth dryly recounts the awkwardness that characterized the two men’s interactions. Even the Franciscan monks of Assisi experienced “frenzied excitement” on his arrival, Fry quipped the depth of Morgan’s pockets was legendary. There, Morgan was welcomed as a savior of a different kind. In 1907, as panic hit the New York Stock Exchange, causing a run on the banks - Morgan was later credited with saving the system by using his personal influence to promote liquidity - Fry and Morgan embarked together on a buying tour of Italy. Morgan was the most formidable banker of his day, who earned a bruising reputation before turning to art collecting and becoming president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1904. Fry is best known for his role in the Bloomsbury Group and his promotion of post-Impressionist art. Morgan, Roger Fry, and the Metropolitan Museum of ArtĬharles Molesworth’s The Capitalist and the Critic examines a formative moment in the linking of art and capital through the relationship of the English critic Roger Fry and the American financier J.P.
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