The first time I read Roger Fry, my immediate thought was: finally, someone who looks at a painting the way I do. Not emotionally first, not narratively, not in search of reassurance or uplift, but through a disciplined form of attention. What we now call formalism felt, in his writing, less like a theory than a discipline—a way of agreeing to stay with what is actually there. Fry’s focus on line, color, rhythm, and spatial structure was not a narrowing of meaning but a refusal to dilute it.

Vanessa Bell did not set out to be radical. She set out to live honestly. The radicalism followed.

She believed that the way one lived mattered as much as the work one made, and that conventions—marriage, propriety, feminine self-effacement—were only useful if they did not interfere with the truth of daily life. When they did, she quietly stepped around them.

This was not a theory. It was practice.

If Vanessa Bell built a life around coherence, Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey lived inside a more unstable geometry. Their relationships were not anchored by truth-telling in the Bell sense, nor by the steady negotiation that held Charleston together. What animated Carrington and Strachey was something else entirely: intensity without reciprocity, devotion without symmetry, love without a shared object.