Charles Molesworth, who has written books of literary criticism and biographies of Marianne Moore, Alain Locke, and Countée Cullen, offers in this book an interesting account of the life of the English artist and art critic Roger Fry, with some comments on Fry's brief and disappointing encounter with J. P. Morgan and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Others have written biographies of Fry and Morgan as individuals. Here, Molesworth explores the brief encounter between “the capitalist” and “the critic,” strongly emphasizing the critic's perspective.

This book provides detailed and well-informed observations on Fry's life, emphasizing his experiences at Cambridge University with the group known as the Apostles and later with the Bloomsbury set of writers and artists (a group that introduced Fry to economist John Maynard Keynes), his lifelong commitment to painting, and his engagement with popular education and modern art. As a young man, Fry made an impressive reputation as a student of the art of the Italian Renaissance, helped launch the Burlington Magazine and build it into prominence in the arts, and tried his hand at earning a living by advising art collectors, including Henry Clay Frick.

This reputation, together with his youth and enthusiasm, brought Fry to the attention of Morgan and other leaders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in about 1904. Fry was thirty-eight; Morgan was sixty-seven and, as it turned out, at the beginning of the last decade of his life. Morgan had just assumed the chairmanship of the Metropolitan; Fry was seeking a patron who could solidify his already prominent position in the international art world and give him a chance to earn a substantial income. According to Molesworth's account, Fry viewed Morgan as an imperious, willful, arbitrary American robber baron who took pleasure from dominating both money and other people. Fry felt that Morgan never gave him a fair chance; his appointment as “curator of paintings”—not director—lasted only months, and his revised and ill-defined position as “European advisor on paintings” ended in 1909.

Fry's engagement with Morgan during the years between the creation of U.S. Steel in 1901 and his testimony to the Pujo Committee in 1912, and including Morgan's famous leadership of the New York bankers’ response to the Panic of 1907, might have provided an opportunity for an illuminating analysis of the relation between developments in business and those in museums and the arts. Rather than explore this territory, Molesworth contrasts Morgan's “voracious” acquisition of art and successful effort to “remake the very idea of the museum into an encyclopedic institution” with Fry's impressively effective commitment to public discourse and modern art (pp. 137–39). Like Fry's previous biographers, Molesworth celebrates his protagonist's move from the old masters to Cézanne and the moderns, emphasizing his then-original use of the term “post-impressionist” in organizing a very influential 1910 exhibition in London.

As a contribution to cultural history, this book would have been more persuasive if it had moved beyond its narrow focus on Fry and considered the possibility that Morgan and other leaders of the Metropolitan might have been motivated by more substantial purposes than the mere accumulation of lots of expensive things. No doubt the museum's trustees relished the “cultural capital” they exercised (a classic discussion is Paul DiMaggio, Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts [1986]). But as Neil Harris pointed out long ago (“The Gilded Age Revisited: Boston and the Museum Movement,” American Quarterly [1962]), trustees of great American arts institutions pursue a wide array of cultural and social agendas. Key Metropolitan trustees in addition to Morgan included Beaux-Arts architect Charles McKim; prominent corporate lawyer and Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of war Elihu Root; and Charity Organization Society and Russell Sage Foundation president Robert W. de Forest. Were these men aiming to advertise New York's wealth as a way of establishing its financial credibility as it rose to challenge London, Paris, and Berlin? Were they aiming to demonstrate New York's, and America's, legitimacy as an heir to western civilization—both to impress foreign investors and foreign governments and as a gesture of respect to immigrants? Did they wish to show that a private, nongovernment museum could rival the best state museums of Europe?

Molesworth follows Jeffrey Trask (Things American: Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive Era [2012]) in emphasizing the “encyclopedic” character of the Met under Morgan and his successors. But encyclopedias can never embrace everything in the world—they must always be selective. Until the last decades of the twentieth century the Met emphasized the arts of the great civilizations of Europe and Asia—and included an American wing championed by de Forest that placed U.S. arts within the story of those great civilizations. Did Morgan and other trustees come to the conclusion that Fry's rising commitment to modern art made him a poor fit for their purposes? The Capitalist and the Critic deserves credit for prompting these questions. It leaves the task of answering them to others.