CUT FRAME MAGAZINE INTERVIEW: LAURENCE FULLER

MODERN ART: The Necessity Of Art Education

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

THE NECESSITY OF ART EDUCATION

by Peter Fuller, 1981

This paper was first given in Newcastle-upon-Tyne Polytechnic in January, 1981, when I was Critic-in-Residence there. Subsequent versions of it were also delivered at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford—and at the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education’s Conference, in London, in February 1982. Newcastle University (as opposed to the Polytechnic) was an important centre for the development of the ‘Basic Design’ theories here criticized. When published in Art Monthly this text produced an intemperate response from one of the principal Newcastle ‘Basic Design’ protagonists—Richard Hamilton. I have not felt it necessary to amend my remarks in any way following Hamilton’s intervention.

I have no need to remind anyone involved in education that we live in an era of rabid governmental cut-backs. Unfortunately, there are those in this situation who look upon art education as a sort of optional icing, or even a disposable cherry, on the top of a shrinking cake. Government education cuts have fallen disproportionately upon the art schools: the future of art education in this country is politically vulnerable in a way in which, say, the education of chemical engineers is not.

Peter Fuller

I want to begin by saying that I am an unequivocal defender of art education in general and of Fine Art courses in higher education in particular. I do not make this defence so much in the name of art as in that of society. I believe that ‘the aesthetic dimension’ is a vital aspect of social life: our society is aesthetically sick; without the art schools it would be, effectively, aesthetically moribund.

What do I mean by an aesthetically healthy society? The anthropologist, Margaret Mead, once noted that in Bali the arts were a prime aspect of behaviour for all Balinese. ‘Literally everyone makes some contribution to the arts,’ she wrote, ‘ranging from dance and music to carving and painting.’ This, of course, did not mean that the arts were reduced to the lowest common denominator, or anything of that sort. As Mead puts it, ‘an examination of artistic products from Bali shows a wide range of skill and aesthetic qualities in artistic production.’

If Mead’s account is correct, I would certainly be prepared to say that the Balinese lived in an aesthetically healthy culture: that is one in which individual expression (in all the manifold imaginative and technical variations of each of its specific instances) can be freely realized, through definite, material skills, within a shared symbolic framework. This surely is what Ruskin and Morris were getting at when they contrasted Gothic with Victorian culture. Basically, I find myself in agreement with Graham Hough when he points out in his book, The Last Romantics, that, in the nineteenth century, a spreading bourgeois and industrial society left less and iess room for the arts. As Hough puts it, the arts ‘no longer had any place in the social organism.’

Once, the term ‘art’ had referred to almost any skill; but as so much human work was stripped of its aesthetic dimension, ‘Art’ with a capital ‘A’ increasingly became the pursuit of a few special individuals of imagination and ‘genius’, a breed set apart: ‘Artists’. Of course, high hopes were invested in the new means of production and reproduction—from the mechaniza­tion of architectural ornament, to photography, mass printing, and eventually television and holography. But these things did not even begin to fill that hole in human experience and potentiality which opened up with the erosion of ‘the aesthetic dimension’ and its retraction from social life.

Portrait of Peter Fuller by Maggi Hambling

And so the art education system today is not just the most extensive form of patronage for the living arts in this country: it is the soil without which the arts would just not be able to survive at all. I would go so far as to say that the primary task of the art schools in general, and of Fine Art courses in particular, should be to hold open this residual space for ‘the aesthetic dimension’. In one sense, this is a conservative function—like preserving the forests, or protecting whales. But in another it is profoundly radical: it involves the affirmation that a significant dimension of human experience is endangered in the present, but could come to life again in the future, and once more become a vital element in social life. In other words—and this really is at the root of all the problems in art education—it is the destiny of the art schools, if they are successful, to stand as an indictment of that form of society in which they exist and upon whose governments they are dependent for all their resources.

In such a situation, of course, it is inevitable that art education should be fraught with contradictions and conflicts about its aims and functions. Although the battle lines are rarely clearly drawn, the underlying struggles are usually pretty much the same: they are between those who are basically ‘collaborationist’ in outlook towards the existing culture, and those who perceive that the pursuit of ‘the aesthetic dimension’ involves a rupture with, and refusal of, the means of production and reproduction peculiar to that culture. This may sound a bit complicated, so let me give you a specific example: some of you may have read in the press some months ago about the battles at the Royal College of Art in London. Basically, these were about the ‘usefulness’ of painting and sculpture as taught in the Fine Art Faculty.

Richard Guyatt, who was then the rector, wanted the College to become a servant of industry. Guyatt had a background in advertising and the Graphic Arts: indeed, he was personally responsible for such triumphs of modern design as the Silver Jubilee stamps, the Anchor Butter wrapper, and a commemorative coin for the Queen Mother, issued in 1980. Predictably, when Guyatt was subjected to pressures from the Department of Education and Science, he responded by trying to drive the College along in a commercial, design orientated direction. As The Guardian commented, one question under debate was ‘whether scarce resources formerly offered to scruffy painters and sculptors should be switched to designers who might make some concrete contribution to Britain’s export drive.’

Inevitably, Guyatt clashed heavily with Peter De Francia, Professor of Painting, who clearly thought that it was preferable to teach students to create a ‘new reality’ within the illusory space of a picture, rather than to encourage them to design coins so ugly that consumers would want to get rid of them quickly in return for the slippery delights of New Zealand dairy products, or whatever. The battle was long and hard fought. Fortunately, given the support of his students, De Francia was able to win in the end: he remains as Professor of Painting, whereas Guyatt is no longer rector. But I have not brought this up as an example of academic intrigue: the Royal College affair was symptomatic of that struggle which has constantly to be waged against the anaesthetizing encroach­ments of the cultural collaborationists, even within the art schools themselves.

Of course, it is not often that the values of a major painter are so starkly pitted against those of a designer of coinage and butter-wrappers. In this situation, I think that most people who are involved, in any way, with the Fine Arts would have little doubt about where we stood. But, of course, it is not always as simple as that, and a major problem in recent years has been the betrayal of the ‘aesthetic dimension’ within Fine Art courses themselves. Indeed, I do not think that it is just a matter of protecting and conserving Fine Art courses against the Guyatt’s of this world, but rather one of reforming and rebuilding them, above all of undoing some of the damage that has been done, especially since the last war.

You could, I think, see something of this damage in a recent exhibition ‘A Continuing Process: The New Creativity in British Art Education, 1955-65’, which told the story of the establishment of the so-called ‘basic design’ courses, for Fine Art students, and of the way in which they proliferated until they became, effectively, the orthodoxy for a higher education in art. ‘Basic design’ was pioneered at the University in Newcastle by Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton, and elsewhere, along rather different lines, by Harry Thubron and Tom Hudson.

The fundamental premises of ‘basic design’ are not easily identifiable; the various artist-teachers involved in the move­ment pursued different, and sometimes contradictory, emphases. But this much can be said with certainty: they are all united negatively. ‘Basic design’ involved a wholesale rejection of the academic methods of art education, rooted in the study of the figure and traditional ornamentation. As Dick Field has written, the watchword of the ‘basic design’ pioneers was ‘a New Art for a New Age’, and they set out to be deliberately iconoclastic towards what had become established academic methods of teaching art.

David Thistlewood, who organized the exhibition, has written that, as a result of ‘basic design’, ‘The aims and objectives underlying a post-school art education in this country have changed utterly during the past twenty-five years.’ He says that ‘Principles which seem today to be liberal, humanist and self-evidently right would have been considered anarchic, subversive and destructive as recently as the 1940s.’ He claims that what used to exist, the old academic system, was ‘devoted to conformity, to a misconceived sense of belonging to a classical tradition, to a belief that art was essentially technical skill.’ For decades before the arrival of ‘basic design’, Thistlewood complains, there had been unhealthy preoccupations with drawing and painting according to set procedures; with the use of traditional subject- matter—the Life Model, Still-Life, and the Antique—witn the ‘application’ of art in the execution of designs; and above all with the monitoring of progress by frequent examinations. But, he claims, the advent of the new methods of teaching art constituted a ‘revolution’ against all that: in its place there now exists ‘a general devotion to the principle of individual creative development.’

But was the advent of ‘basic design’ such an unmitigatedly beneficial occurrence? Far be it from me to defend the old academicism; nonetheless, I believe that British art education of the last quarter of a century has, in general, been peculiarly disastrous and the sort of thinking that went into ‘basic design’ has had a lot to do with this. It is not just that today, instead of providing an alternative to academicism, ‘basic design’ is itself a new academicism (i.e. it is just about as ‘revolutionary’ as Leonid Brezhnev!) I also believe that, from the beginning, it exerted a restrictive and finally ‘collaborationist’ influence. I think we really need to get rid of most—although not quite all—of the attitudes which it embodies if art education is to become truly healthy.

Evidently, I cannot do justice to ‘basic design’ philosophy here, but I want to draw attention to two of its most fundamental assumptions—which I believe to be wrong­headed. The first of these is the attitude to ‘Child Art’, which one finds in Pasmore and Hudson in particular, and which has had an extraordinary effect upon the way in which most art students have been taught in recent decades. To put it crudely, the ‘basic design’ view seems to be that the intuitive and imaginative faculties of the child are repressed by culture, and the primary function of art education of adolescents should be to restore that earlier pristine state. Thus the spontaneous and intuitive productions of the child are often supposed to be paradigms of human creativity. All art is assumed to aspire to the condition of infantilism.

I have to be careful here because I believe that enormous gains were made through the recognition of a ‘natural’ potentiality for creativity in all children. As a result of the ‘Child Art’ movement, which began in the nineteenth century and gathered pace throughout the first half of the twentieth, art slowly came to play an integral part in nursery, primary and secondary school education. The ‘Child Art’ movement underlined the fact that learning was not just a matter of the acquisition of knowledge and functional skills: creative living also involved the development of imaginative, intuitive and affective faculties of the kind which play such a conspicuous part in the making of art. And so this movement stressed the fact that the capacity for creative work is an innate, biologically given, potentiality of every human being, of whatever age, class, culture, or condition. This affirmation seems to me to have an importance extending far beyond its immediate applications in nursery, primary, and secondary school educa­tion. Nonetheless, there is a great gulf between the acknow­ledgement of the child’s capacity for creativity, and describing that creativity as some kind of exemplar, or epitome, for adult art.

Indeed, I have been forced to the conclusion that, healthy as the ‘Child Art’ movement may have been, in itself, it was also symptomatic of a profound cultural loss: that is the loss of what I have called the ‘aesthetic dimension’ in adult, social life, of the space for imaginative and fully creative work among those who are no longer children. Surely, in an aesthetically healthy society, the capacity for creative work should develop continuously from the spontaneously individualistic self- expressions of the child (shaped by the proccesses of psycho- biological growth and development) into more complex, meaningful, and fully social (but no less creative) productions of the adult. I came to realize that we have tended to fetishize ‘Child Art’ to such a degree only because aesthetic creativity is so rare in our society at other developmental stages.

To put it another way: I suggested earlier that Bali was an ‘aesthetically healthy’ society. In what sense could a Balinese painter recognize an infant’s immature aesthetic activities as any kind of model for his own? Think, too, of those forms of aesthetic creativity manifest in, say, Amerindian rugs, the Parthenon frieze, Islamic tiles, or those magnificent carvings of leaves which cluster round the tops of the Gothic pillars in the Chapter House of Southwell Minster. Such forms of art do not seem to me, in any way, to contradict the growth of ‘individual creative development’; but, in such instances, that develop­ment has been allowed to mature, to rise beyond and above the infantile, through an adult, social, aesthetic practice.

Even when such practices were driven out of the everyday fabric of life and work, painting and sculpture permitted the creation of a new and definite reality within the existing one, an illusory, re-constituted world within which the aesthetic dimension could survive, mature, and truly develop. Again, as soon as we ask in what sense ‘Child Art’ could have provided an exemplar for, say, Michelangelo, Poussin, Vermeer, or Bonnard, we begin to realize that the celebration of ‘Child Art’ may have reflected an extension of human experience in one direction, but it also revealed its diminution in another.

So one of my quarrels with recent art education in general and with ‘basic design’ in particular is that by venerating ‘Child Art’ as the paradigm of human creativity and expressive activity, they have not, as they claim, served the cause of ‘individual creative development.’ Rather, they have simply institutionalized the fact that we live in the sort of society in which such development tends to be arrested at the infantile level: i.e. everyone engages in the arts in our society, but only up until the age of about thirteen. In my view, higher education in the Fine Arts should involve the search for ways of breaking out of this aesthetic retardation rather than the celebration of it. The child may paint solely through bold, impulsive gestures, covering his surface in a matter of seconds: but that, to my mind, is no good reason why art students up and down the country should seek to imitate him.

Richard Hamilton

But I think that ‘basic design’ type teaching reflects the aesthetic retardation of our culture in another way, too. What I have in mind here is manifest in, say, Richard Hamilton’s contempt for the traditional art and craft practices, his obsession with consumer gadgetry and functional machinery, and his preoccupation with what he calls ‘the media landscape’ —that is with such things as advertising, fashion magazines, pulp literature, television, photography and so forth, which he thinks have replaced nature as the raw material for the attention of the serious artist. More generally, much recent art teaching has tended to foster the view that in order to be a Fine Artist today, some sort of radical accommodation with the mass media—that is with what I call the ‘mega-visual tradition’—is necessary. For Hamilton was not just the Daddy of Pop: he was also the Grandaddy of all those who believe that Fine Art practices should be displaced, or at least deeply penetrated, by such things as ‘Media Studies’, video-tape, and so on, and so forth.

I said earlier that, despite claiming to be concerned with ‘individual creative development’, ‘basic design’ type teaching just institutionalized the retardation of such development, which is so typical of our culture, and I think that Hamilton’s uncritical preoccupation with these non-Fine Art media proves my point. For the proliferation of these media seems to me to be one of the major reasons why infant creativity within our culture so rarely flowers into an adult aesthetic practice. These forms of mechanical production and reproduction of imagery are fundamentally anaesthetic: they do not allow for that ‘joy in labour’, that expression of individuality within collectivity through imaginative and physical work upon materials, within a shared and significant symbolic framework, which is characteristic of aesthetically healthy societies—like Bali, as described by Margaret Mead, or Ruskin’s idealization of ‘Gothic’. Indeed, that ‘mega-visual’ tradition, and those mechanical processes, which Hamilton celebrated are a major reason why ‘individual creative development’ tends to be so inhibited. But instead of challenging the aesthetic crisis, and proposing alternatives to it, the new art education simply mirrored it, encouraging the art student either to regress to an infantile aesthetic level, or to immerse himself in the anaesthetic practices of the prevailing culture. Behind this basic contradic­tion it is not difficult to detect the ghost of Bauhaus, the last movement within modernism which enshrined the belief that individual creativity was fully compatible with the methods of mass-mechanical production. I believe this to be nonsense: it is a simple historical fact that Bauhaus regressed, in its design practices, into the dullest of dull functionalisms—with appalling effects on the whole modernist tradition in architec­ture and design. I think we may have to accept that William Morris was right; machines may be useful to us for all sorts of things. They are, however, fundamentally incompatible with true aesthetic production.

I think the point I am making about the way in which ‘basic design’ type teaching internalizes this aesthetic crisis in our culture is clearly visible if you look at the development of its two principal Newcastle proponents, Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton, as artists: ‘A tree is known by its fruit.’

In my view, Pasmore’s art has regressed steadily since the late 1940s, when he began to apply the kind of principles in his own art which he later inflicted upon his students. I have no doubts about my judgement that his painting of a nude woman, The Studio of Ingres, which he made in 1945-7, is far better than anything that came later: it was made when Pasmore was still under the influence of the ‘objective’ methods of the Euston Road School. I was shocked by the regression from this level of work to the blobs and daubs of Pasmore’s recent work, in his recent retrospective. I really could see no qualities in many of these works at all; indeed, they looked precisely like the offerings of someone who had been seduced by the paradigm of Child Art, and pursued it in a literalist way. Pasmore’s amoeba-like forms, and his barely controlled techniques, like running paint over tilted surfaces, splattering, fuzzing and so forth, remind one—if you will forgive the expression—of the work of a grown-up baby.

Hamilton took the other route. With his bug-eyed monsters from film-land, his quasi photographic techniques, and his modified fashion-plates, he began to offer little more than parasitic variations of ‘mega-visual’ images. All the awkward promise, and half-formed sensitivity of his early pencil drawings vanished into slick, collaborationist practice. I have a lot more respect for Guyatt’s coinage and butter-labels, than for Hamilton’s recent adaptations of Andrex toilet tissue advertisements: although neither have any grasp of the ‘aesthetic dimension’, at least what Guyatt does has some sort of social use.

However, I do not just wish to criticize two individuals. Over the last decade, I have been into art schools all over the country, and (until recently at least) I noticed how frequently the work done divided into two, for me, almost equally unsatisfactory categories. On the one hand there were the slurpy, ‘gestural’ abstractionists, and on the other what I would characterize as ‘media-studies’ styled modernists. I have tried to show you how these two approaches seem to me to be just two sides of the same rather debased art-educational coin, which deprives art students of those real, material skills through which their creativity might develop into something more than that of the child’s, and other than that of the sterile forms of the ‘mega-visual’ tradition.

Maurice de Sausmarez, a spokesman for the ‘basic design’ approach, has said that the new art education set out to teach ‘an attitude of mind, not a method’. This view, unfortunately, gained official sanction when the 1970 Coldstream report on art education declared that studies in Fine Art should not be too closely related to painting and sculpture, because the Fine Arts ‘derive from an attitude which may be expressed in many ways.’ There is, however, an enormous gap between an attitude in the mind, and the realization of a great painting: and I do not, myself, think that it is possible to teach art except through definite material practices in which the student is encouraged to achieve mastery.

In 1973, Charles Madge and Barbara Weinberger, two sociologists, published a book, Art Students Observed, which was in effect a study of the way in which the new art education was working out in practice. They reported that ‘half the tutors and approaching two-thirds of the students of certain art colleges agreed with the proposition that art cannot be taught.’ Understandably, the authors then asked, ‘In what sense, then, are tutors tutors, the students students, and colleges colleges? What, if any, definitionally valid educational processes take place on Pre-Diploma and Diploma courses?’ There can be few involved in art education who have not asked themselves these questions at some time or other. The authors reported, that nearly all tutors ‘rejected former academic criteria and modalities in art’, but none had any others to put in their place.

My own view is that it is quite useless to go on teaching this peculiar mixture of infantilism, media studies, and Fine Art ‘attitudes’ in post-school art education. Of course, I believe that a relatively unstructured situation is healthiest for young children, making their first tentative explorations into drawing and painting. (In such cases, the structuring comes from innate developmental tendencies, rather than from ‘culture’.) None­theless, it is at least worth pointing out that many infant art teachers are now beginning to argue in favour of a more ‘directed’ approach much earlier than has been fashionable in recent decades, and to look again at the creative value of practices like copying, which were once abhorred as being completely sterile.

I believe that, by the time the student reaches post-school level, he or she simply cannot develop creatively without the acquisition of culturally given skills. That is why Fine Art education should be based much more firmly and unequivocally than it is at present in the study of painting and sculpture. Imagination and intuition are indeed essential to the creation of good art; but these faculties are impervious to instruction. There are, however, many others integral to the creation of good art which can be taught. Drawing is, of course, the most significant of these: and, rather than ‘the Fine Art attitude’, I would like to see drawing of natural forms, especially the human figure, reinstated as the core of an adult education in Fine Art.

Of course, as soon as one mentions the figure, those who have been brought up within the ideology of the new art education raise the bogey of ‘academicism’. But this ignores a well-established tradition of anti-academic figure drawing in this country which, for my money, has produced far more impressive results as an educational method than ‘basic design’, or anything resembling it. I am referring to that tradition which emerged in the Slade at the end of the last century, under the influence of that great teacher, Henry Tonks. Tonks saw that there was nothing wrong with learning to draw from the figure, as such, although there was everything wrong with the stereotyped togas, and mannerist pretensions in which the traditional academics swathed this practice. Tonks held that drawing should always be both poetical and objective, but he recognized that only the objective part could be taught. Before becoming an art teacher, Tonks had practised as a surgeon: he denied there was such a thing as outline, and stressed the structural aspects of the figure. If you mastered the direction of bones, Tonks taught, you had mastered contour, too. Tonks certainly taught a method, and not just an attitude of mind. He wanted students to spend all day, every day, in the life room. Now according to today’s art educational theorists, he ought thereby to have strangled any conceivable talent that came his way. But he didn’t. Those pupils interested in the ‘objective’ aspect of painting certainly thrived under his influence: William Coldstream, himself a doctor’s son, went on to elaborate his own clinically ‘factual’ system of figure painting. But those drawn towards the ‘poetical’ dimension often flourished, too. Thus Stanley Spencer—than whom few can be considered more imaginative —learned what he needed to realize his great compositions in Tonks’ life room, too. Similarly, Bomberg, who laid an almost equal emphasis on imaginative transformation and empirical exactitude in his pursuit of ‘the spirit in the mass’, benefited from Tonks’ rigorously methodical approach . . . And then there were Bomberg’s pupils, painters like Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, and Denis Creffield, all of whom show a similar respect for the empirical and imaginative dimensions, and also for the specific traditions and potentialities of their chosen medium: painting. Work of this calibre is, to me, altogether more impressive and worthwhile than anything produced in the wake of latter-day Pasmore, or Hamilton.

But I do not want to be misunderstood: I am not saying that students should be shut up in the life-room all day iong and made to do ‘Tonksing’ against their will. I am however saying that what makes painting a particularly valuable and exceptional form of work is that, in it, the intuitive and imaginative faculties do not stand in opposition to the rational, analytical and methodical: rather, they can be combined together in ways which most work in our anaesthetic society disallows. This, if you like, is the excuse for painting, the reason that, when it is good, it stands as a kind of ‘promise’ for the fuller realization of human potentialities. And I am saying that precisely in order that the student can be helped to realize his individual creative potentialities to the fullest, art education must begin to concern itself with the ‘objective’ end of the expressive continuum much more than it has done in recent years.

It is nature which has somehow disappeared from recent art educational practices. I prefer a much wider view of natural form than that implicit in Tonks’ approach. There are even elements of ‘basic design’ which I would like to see preserved and extended: the most significant of these is the attention which Pasmore and Hamilton, at least in the early days, gave to the structure and growth of natural organisms—like crystals. My only objection to their approach here is that it was much too narrow: the student should be encouraged to attend to the full gamut of natural forms, beginning with the figure, and extending outwards.

Ron Kitaj

Tonks once said that he had no idea what the body looked like to those who had not studied anatomy. I believe that before students involve themselves in the microscopy advocated (though not in fact much practised) as an element in ‘basic design’, they ought to achieve a real knowledge of the structure of the human body itself, of anatomy. It is no accident that Ron Kitaj, who is one of the best figurative artists working in this country, is also one of the very few who has actually conducted an autopsy, and worked with a cadaver. Of course, that guarantees nothing: but, equally, it remains true that neither Leonardo, nor Michelangelo, could have achieved what they did without this sort of knowledge. But I would go further than this: I believe that the practice of drawing needs to be supplemented with certain knowledges, beyond anatomy, which the present art schools simply do not teach. Why, in complementary studies, does one find so little instruction for Fine Art students in such topics as metereology, botany, geology, and zoology: in order to offer an imaginative transformation of the world in one’s work, one must first attend to that world, and above all to the visible forms through which it is constituted. But most art students grow up with an impoverished conception of reality which owes more to cigarette advertisements and sociological theory (with perhaps a dash of art history) than to empirical perception and the natural history of form. Personally, I think you would learn much more about the business of painting if you spent an hour, say, drawing quietly in a natural history museum rather than studying that ‘media landscape’ which seduced Hamilton, or ‘expressing yourself’ in abstract, like a child.

I have put a lot of emphasis on painting and sculpture. What about the ‘other media’? In an ‘aesthetically healthy’ society, the aesthetic dimension permeates throughout all work, and extends to every part of the social organism, regardless of class and condition. But we do not live in such a society: and painting and sculpture, alone, offer this promise of a new reality, realized within the existing one. That is why I think that the priority of Fine Art education should be the preservation and encouragement of these practices.

Nonetheless, I also believe that it should be part of a Fine Art education to learn about, and to practice, other aesthetic pursuits—namely those offered in the whole field of the ornamental and decorative arts. Indeed, this is where recent education has gone so wildly wrong: it has encouraged Fine Art students to engage in the anaesthetic practices of the prevailing culture, not only the sorts of things that interested Hamilton, but the whole field of video, applied photographic processes, mixed media, etc., etc. I think it would be much more valuable if they were encouraged to look at things the other way round: i.e. to think about taking fully aesthetic, creative practices out into that aesthetically sick society.

Peter Fuller

Dennis Gabor was the man who invented the new medium to end all new media, the hologram which offers a fully three- dimensional image. But he certainly did not think that he had rendered traditional aesthetic pursuits obsolete. He once wrote, ‘Modern technology has taken away from the common man the joy in the work of his skillful hands; we must give it back to him.’ Gabor went on, ‘Machines can make anything, even objects d’art with the small individual imperfections which suggest a slip of the hand, but they must not be allowed to make everything. Let them make the articles of primary necessity, and let the rest be made by hand. We must revive the artistic crafts, to produce things such as hand-cut glass, hand- painted china, Brussels lace, inlaid furniture, individual book­binding.’ These are sentiments with which I agree entirely; and there would be nowhere better to start this revolution than on Fine Art courses.

I am not, of course, suggesting that students should set off along that narrow path which leads to a potters wheel in Cornwall: a better paradigm of the sort of thing I have in mind would be say, the revival of mosaic in Newcastle, linked to an officially sponsored project to produce wall decorations for the new Metro system. The project, as I understand it, is that well- known artists will design mosaics, and that students from the Polytechnic Fine Art Department will assist in the making of them. I think that the arts schools could, and should, do much more in this sort of direction. Indeed, in short, rather than allowing Fine Art values to be assimilated by mega-visual tradition, art schools should be encouraging students to take aesthetic values out into that anaesthetic culture: otherwise, one of the most significant of all human potentialities risks being lost altogether.

1981

Authority Magazine Interview

This interview was originally published in Authority Magazine 06/23/2020

The journey of becoming an actor, truly going through the rigors will put you in positions where you are forced to have self-awareness, compassion, and to deal with your demons, most people are simply not challenged in that way and remain in an unconscious state. Some people will see someone chasing their dreams and try to sabotage them. I don’t get that, I see motivated, passionate people and I want to help them.

It’s important to notice whether people are coming at you with support and encouragement or whether they’re seeking to ‘take you down a peg’, I’m not one for ‘tall poppy syndrome’ culture, it’s tough out there, hard for everyone nowadays, if someone does well at something they should be encouraged. That’s my take on it.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Laurence Fuller. He is best known for his lead roles in independent films Road To The Well, Apostle Peter & The Last Supper, Paint It Red and Echoes Of You, but he got his start in British theatre, training at Bristol Old Vic and taking the lead role in the West End theatre production of Madness In Valencia. During the lockdown, he has rediscovered his passion for writing with a screenplay about his father MODERN ART, which so far this year has won awards and placed as a Finalist in 15 of the screenwriting competitions so far this year.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?

Ispent my first years of life in Bath England, the large Robert Natkin painting which hung above our living room called “The Acrobat” signified all that had come before me. The smell of wet plaster wafted throughout the house, emanating from my mother’s studio. She was a sculptor and if she wasn’t casting one of her loved ones in bronze she was creating still lives from fruit and wine bottles. The sound of a tapping typewriter came from my father’s study as he wrote edgy art criticism. Between tadpoles in the pond outside and the snails crawling up the lawn in welcomes yet fleeting sunshine of an English summer, it was ideal.

I was four when my father passed. What hardships then transpired, were counterbalanced by what it conversely instilled in me, a respect for the preciousness of life, and a knowledge of how fleeting it is. It made me more determined to do something with the time I had.

My family moved to Australia when I was Seven, I took to the theatre mostly. Plays by Brecht, Mother Courage, Threepenny Opera, and Shakespeare, Caliban in The Tempest.

Films were like a secret desire, I wanted to make movies about the characters around me, I wanted to portray them, live out great adventures. As I grew up it became not only about adventure but the complexities of the human drama, Scorsese films were my favorite. It was a secret obsession. My stepfather was stringently averse to the encroachment of American Modernism, but I found this to be limiting. What about the great American films? What about the exceptions? What about the cinematic masterpieces?

Can you share a story with us about what brought you to this specific career path?

As I started doing more Shakespeare in small theatre productions in Canberra I remember a few performances really stuck out to me.

John Bell from Bell Shakespeare doing Richard III, he is really Australia’s Laurence Olivier and brought Shakespeare to our generation of young Australians. An incredibly dynamic performer. I don’t know if he has done letter performances then that perhaps he has, but to me it’s so far the best I’ve seen anyone on stage. I don’t think I’ve ever been so gripped from beginning to end in any production.

When I applied to drama schools several years later all my peers were choosing monologues from Hamlet, but I chose Richard III. It was something my late tutor at Bristol Old Vic Bonnie Hurren commented on as well, why at 19 was I choosing this crippled, middle-aged, disfigured slithering King and not the young and spritely Prince Harry from Henry IV?

The first day that I met Bonnie I was several hours early for the audition day, I’d lost the letter with the details on it and thought I should go in first thing in the morning just in case, I was waiting in the lobby of the old Victorian building that would be the home for my course that year, she walked down the creek wooden stairs completely in her own world thinking of time passed, relationships never fulfilled, desires misaligned, a fellow course member would later say to me she thought that Bonnie spent a lot of her time crying in private, I never knew why he thought this, there was a shrill exuberance to her and an unshakable grace, that I suppose in reflection masked a deep unrequitedness. In my eyes, she was a strong figure that knew the secrets to it all if only she would reveal them to me. She was a very tall and slender woman her movements were always graceful and completely synced up with the rest of her mind and voice. Not unlike Lesley Manville's portrayal of Cyril in Phantom Thread. Bonnie was used to a very tidy routine when it came to the running of her course, we were there to learn excellence in our craft, nothing else would be tolerated. As she walked down the stairs I interrupted her thoughts with a confident introduction, impelled purely by the same determination which has seen me through to this point. She was startled, yet I could tell happily so, she told me I was too early and that I should go over the road across the park to get some hot chocolate at her favorite cafe, I did and it was delicious.

Though my audition piece to gain acceptance in BOVTS was not as you would have imagined up until this point, To Be Or Not To Be, it was Now Is The Winter Of Our Discontent from the opening monologue of Richard III. A choice which Bonnie later berated me for, but at the time seemed intrigued enough to talk me out of my placement I had received at the Oxford School Of Drama. There was some connection we’d formed that morning which only intensified the following year, and began the seed of a deep Method rebellion within me that has never died.

Often during that time I would sit on the steps of the building and imagine what Day-Lewis’ time here must have been like, the teachers often talked about him, about performances he gave which foreshadowed the greatness to come. The intensity he had about everything, he’d often stop by on his motorcycle to visit them. I tried to imagine what he had learned from his time there and how much what we now know him for can be attributed to that learning.

I did the piece again when I got to LA and started training at Ivana Chubbuck Studio at first under Michael Woolson. I brought this rotisserie chicken on stage and started ripping it apart half-naked with bare hands and wiping the chicken breeze on my chest. That was a more experimental take, I just thought Richard is so good at playing up to his monstrous reputation and using it to his advantage, why not go all out. My peers still recount ‘remember the chicken?’

Can you tell us the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

Around 2005 I acquired a painting by Peter Booth, who was one of the top painters in Australia at the time, his dystopian view and epic landscape with this mythic narrative was really powerful. There was one painting, in particular, that was shown to me by the art dealer Rex Irwin “Man With Bandaged Head”, a figure of a man who was without identity, internally and externally covered in bandages. I held onto that painting living through poverty as a young struggling artist, with nothing else to my name. And I made a film about the experience, at the time it was semi-autobiographical, heavily doctored by the writer/director Jim Lounsbury, but the core of the story was there and that painting was at its center. Possession(s) was about a man who gave up everything in his life to own a work of art only to have its physical value as an object destroyed. After the film was made I did end up selling that painting and that raised me enough funds to move to LA and start my journey making films.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I should preface this story with the common cultural custom in Europe to kiss someone on the cheek when you hug and greet them, it’s sort of an old fashioned, but everyone is used to it. Probably that custom will be put on hold for a while with all that’s going on in the world, but at this time we were pandemic free.

My first manager meeting in LA was with a lady I had been corresponding with via email at one of the top firms in Hollywood. She had heard good things about me, was excited about my play and my auditions tapes. We were excited to meet each other and I’d finally made it across the pond and I could see her in person. I waited in the lobby of this firm, slightly nervous and she came out to greet me with arms stretched out. I immediately offered my hand to shake, but she battered it away and went in for the hug, I suppose as we had been corresponding for so long. This lady happened to be slightly short, and I’m slightly tall so she came up to just below my neck. As a habit and automatic reaction to a hug greeting, I went for a customary cheek kiss, but as her cheek was not exposed and I could only see the top of her head, I kissed the top of her head, and the kissing sound that accompanies the cool and smooth kiss on the cheek greeting was almost twice as loud. This was immediately followed by a silence which felt like forever, as she totally unacquainted with the custom and being very much a Los Angelean, who for the most part are completely uncomfortable with their personal space being invaded, remained awkwardly frozen in the hug, I could almost hear her thoughts ‘did he just kiss the top of my head?’

The meeting from that point on was pretty much a disaster and I didn’t end up signing with that company. Lesson learned; always know the customs of the culture you’re in!

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?

Obviously productions are up in the air at the moment, but am definitely excited about what I do have coming up:

MODERN ART is a screenplay I’ve been developing for 4 years. I just started submitting the screenplay to competitions this year and already it has won a 3rd place award at a completion for best Screenplay and received Finalist placement in 10 others.

This project has allowed me a dialog with the father I never knew. Until now Peter Fuller was for me, a box of papers at the TATE museum. When I decided to write a screenplay about him, what I discovered amongst those papers has changed my life forever. I’m excited to share with the world, what I have found.

Peter Fuller was like a punch in the guts to the art world from 1969 to 1990, and until his last breath he was radical. His writings spanned art history, psychology, sociology, aesthetics, biology, and religion, all emanating from his primary fascination with the arts. But it was his search for beauty in life and in art which made him so fascinating. The extent to which Peter invested himself in this discovery proved that Modern Art is not only a medium for entertainment and trade, but by engaging with artfully we could come to know ourselves.

His loss was a tragedy not just me but for leaders of the art world, and yet rediscovering him in this way I have perhaps gotten to know him better than I could have living. We need this story now, our world needs healing, its heart is breaking. I know that developing this project has been for me personally a consoling and life-changing experience, my hope is that it will be for others too.

Once you’ve had enough education, make use of it by creating something of your own. There will come a time when putting too much weight on that stuff will hold you back and what you really need to be doing is to put in the hard graft and actually making something to call your own. All actors should write.

I believe that making art should be akin to an act of love, whether it is love for a muse, the piece, or love for oneself, otherwise it doesn’t make much sense. My father, once talked about painting being like a skin between the internal and external world, he was talking about the work of the American Abstract painter Robert Natkin, but I think that idea translates to all the arts. And like the child has objects, toys, teddy bears which he/she transfers their emotional inner life to create their manifestations of the world they would want to see so too do we grow up as adults spiraling over the same behaviors with greater intensity, focus and realization. He also said that ‘Great art, makes great demands upon us’, the best artists lead by example in that sense, as their work comes from inside, it is an extension of their inner world, which like Kiefer or Enrique Martinez Celaya there develops an iconography, language and myth of its own.

I also did a short recently with director Henry Quilici that has interesting parallels and is currently getting some love on Twitter, it is a really heartfelt short about a classical pianist and a homeless boy that seems to be capturing people’s imagination right now. That can now be seen here and is being passed around the Twitosphere: http://www.laurencefuller.art/echoes-of-you

Five Families is a proof of concept short I acted in for director Adam Cushman, taking the point of view that the police are actually the new gangsters. Which has become increasingly relevant in light of recent events and is now becoming an important story. In that one I had the honor of acting opposite screen legend Barry Primus, who comes from that whole DeNiro, Scorsese crew and just had a great supporting part in the Irishman.

We are very interested in diversity in the entertainment industry. Can you share three reasons with our readers about why you think it’s important to have diversity represented in film and television? How can that potentially affect our culture?

It’s very important to be inclusive of all members of humanity and not to discriminate or be racist towards anyone, for any reason. Discrimination, unfortunately, happens a lot in our industry to everyone for different reasons, and that is sad. I believe in meritocracy if you have the passion, the talent, the skill to be the best person for the job, then you should get that job. If your film is the best film, it should be programmed in the festival. It is sad that it’s not necessarily that way. If you grow up with the goal of becoming the greatest piano player, the top lawyer, or doctor, there is a clear path to getting there and more often than not you will be judged on your ability. If your goal is to be the best actor, writer, or filmmaker, you quickly find how political it all is. It’s unfortunate and it also becomes a daily struggle to navigate. Privilege comes in many forms, but it's a positive step that if you are diverse there are now many funds, programs, and scholarships that have been set up since I started in the industry but in the last five years especially.

What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.

1.) When you’re starting out you’re really trying to figure out who you are and what you have to offer, this is actually the most important thing you can do. Drama Schools can only be there to facilitate that and never any more, they can’t give it to you. I remember searching for my artistic identity in my teachers in vain. Like nurses can only be there to facilitate your creative birth, but you have to ultimately be the one to do it and follow through.

I remember going into Bristol Old Vic thinking it would provide me with the secrets to unlocking my soul. Of course the teachers already know that this can only be done from within you. I remember the head tutor of my course at Bristol Old Vic, Bonnie Hurren saying I should read David Mamet’s True & False specifically because it serves as an ideological deconstruction of the institutional art. It inevitably goes too far and it’s hunting of ideology can only can to false conclusions. After I finished the book I went back to Bonnie and asked if I no longer needed to be at the school anymore because I’d read it.

Theory can never surpass the universal values of learning, mastery. Learn from the best, there are many practitioners doing admirable work out there who are capable leaders and dramaturgists. But it’s important to never just get lost in one person’s ideas. Each person should find out for themselves what they believe in, not merely as a polemical response either because there isn’t much use in dwelling on what you dislike or what you do not identify with, this usually just leads to a cankering of the creative force, the libido, the will and doesn’t go anywhere. Find out who you are and what you love, be that and foster that. The lesson for me was: beware of false prophets.

2.) The feature I had out earlier this year “Paint It Red” was about the search for faith, but not in a religious sense, faith in the realization of one’s own artistic vision, in this case, the survival of a struggling artist in his quest to get out of poverty and survive a very fortunate and very threatening bit of good luck. At the same time, the underlying themes and relationships deal with artistic integrity and ethics. I had a brilliant time exploring the life of a painter for a while. It inspired me to paint my own first painting, which was a long time coming.

I wrote this poem about working on that character; “Alone in the darkness of our own avoidance to the beast of feeling that lurks in the passionate night unseen, chained to the stumps of reason, practical, bland objects, unrelated interactions in the presence of other people which relate solely to food or to sex or to expending less effort. All these things make me want to smash those chains and for all those things to dissipate. All these perspex surfaces hiding the truth. Ciaran is running through the hills of a dream of the world he wished to create, sprinting up mountainsides to grab at a feeling for something real. He is a man of faith, who knew what he stood for and would demand it of life. And yet he knew that if he let any of it slip even for a moment, it would all fall apart and that dream he so carefully cherished and held onto would fall into the hands of another equally hungry LA dream chaser.”

3.) I remember punching the floor with excitement when my agent called me telling me I’d booked the role.

The first draft that I read when they called me in to audition was initially a full 90 minutes of the Last Supper of Jesus Christ. The casting director Billy Damota initially brought me in for a much smaller role, it was one of the apostles that I think was actually cut from the final draft, the piece was a monolog, a moral dilemma. Jesus had just told his 12 disciples that one of them was about to betray him, of course, we know in hindsight it was Judas, but the narrative explores what was going on in the minds of the apostles in that moment, their doubts and insecurities, as they wrestled with their humanity. I remember the final line was “is it me lord?” as in, is it me that betrays you? As I was walking out the audition the casting associate Dea Vise stopped me and said ‘wait Laurence, there’s another role they wanted you to read for’, she then handed me a 20 pages script titled The Fisherman about a Roman soldier talking to an older apostle as he is progressively converted to Christianity. They gave me an hour to read over the script, then they brought me back in to read for the director Gabe Sabloff who was the mastermind behind all this. A week later I got a call from my agent saying ‘you’ve got the part’, it was one of the most exciting moments of my life.

The casting director, Dea Vise tells the story like this; “Laurence Fuller was reading to play a Roman guard. He had a few lines and was basically just in a few scenes as the story was originally about Peter at the Last Supper with Jesus and the Apostles. Well, Laurence came in the room, read his few lines so thoughtfully and with such brilliance that he got the job to play the guard watching over Apostle Peter (played by Robert Loggia) while he was in prison. As a matter of fact, Laurence was SO GOOD that they rewrote the movie to be about the relationship between the guard and Peter. So, the names above the title in the movie are now Robert Loggia and Laurence Fuller and, of course, Jesus was played by Bruce Marciano. Three names above the title and one of them started out with a few lines. Be that good. Be that interesting to watch! Break a leg out there!”

4.) The film ECHOES OF YOU is about a classical pianist who finds fulfillment in an unlikely place. As he’s auditioning and falling short of becoming a concert pianist he meets a young homeless boy and teaches him how to play a song he wrote for his father. This all comes back around in a really surprising, karmic and spiritual experience.

The director Henry Quilici really nailed that concept of the spiritual in art, and how the arts can be a compassionate, humanitarian thing. We treat it as a gift to someone else. And do I think I found it? Yeah. The experience of making this short was very emotional. It was an emotional part, and so it did require me to go into some vulnerable places within myself.

I remember first reading the script and bursting into tears when I came to the end. That message of faith in the capacity for even the smallest of moments can be reimagined through the artist’s lens to something illuminating and beautiful.

I think it’s rare to find that sort of message in the modern world, there’s a lot out there that’s just attention-grabbing nonsense. It also depends on the person receiving the thing, to one person a flower could bring them to tears in pure exaltation at the complexities of existence, to another, it might be nothing but a wet twig. It depends on the capacity for sensitivity and sensual faculties of the individual. As an artist that is the aspect that’s pointless to even try and control, any attempts to do so will leave the work itself feeling inauthentic. For those reasons I really have become immune to what the reception to my work is a lot of the time. To make anything of worth you have to have that sort of conviction in your own ability to create what you know to be good work and to do what you want to do. The artist Anselm Kiefer said that each work of art cancels out those that precede it. He was talking about the language of history as a contribution to culture.

I knew for this piece specifically if it was structured for the effect of a beautiful karmic experience, that was designed to inspire compassion. That in itself is very difficult to accomplish, so it had to be real love, really beautiful and powerfully compassionate. It had to be the biggest moment in this man’s life. Bigger than winning an Oscar. Like being rekindled with the love of one’s life, seeing their child or anyone they have loved and felt really deserved it, become a success in the world. I knew I had to open up and be vulnerable in front of the camera, which is impossible to fake, the camera sees everything, it took digging deep and talking to the ghosts of my past.

That’s the only way to get through to people with this sort of message, is to speak the truth from the depths of your humanity and have faith that people will listen, because if it is authentic then, they will, they will. All the lead roles I’ve had so far in “Road To The Well”, “Apostle Peter & The Last Supper” and “Paint It Red” have been about a person losing their faith and then finding it again with stronger conviction in some other form later on, that is much the same with this piece too.

Henry showed me a short documentary he made about discovering his grandfather through a box of letters and journals he found in the attic. We discussed how eerily similar the project which fills my days is, a film about my father, the late art critic Peter Fuller and going through his journals almost every day from the TATE archive. I’ve made my way through a huge chunk of his writings public and private, to piece together who he was. Of course, to understand him I also needed to read through the work of his collaborators and all his influences as well. And now his echoes speak to me, and some things are so special they take more than just one lifetime to complete. That’s really what this piece is about, the Greek philosopher Hippocrates said: “Life is short, but art is long”.

I saw this film as an opportunity to contribute to something beautiful. The biggest thing was finding the internal objects for what the piano meant to me and my journey. The struggle that I’ve been through as an artist, and the people in my life I’ve been doing this for. I saw the ghosts of my ancestors who I imagined knowing, what it would mean to them to see me on that stage, the underlying sense of loss knowing that I will never have that, I will never see their faces in that audience. But to live it out like Stanislavsky would say ‘as if’ for the rest of us living to enjoy.

The accent was one aspect to this performance, I’ve worked with an American accent a lot in LA it’s bread and butter. Speaking in my natural voice out here people say to me ‘you have an accent’, but everyone who speaks a language speaks with an accent and we learned that accent when we were young from the people around us. The same can be done in adulthood if need be.

Andrew is very masculine, and very feminine at the same time. That paradox is something I could identify with. I’m a heterosexual male, but I also feel left out of the discussion when it comes to rigid gender definitions, I feel misrepresented. In my daily practices of writing poetry and Martial Arts, I feel in touch with the extremities of both the masculine and feminine within myself. I wrote a poem about it which took me the better part of a year to finish, thirty pages of prose, representing the extreme forces of male and female within me battling it out for Elysium. In part I was inspired by three female artists in England right now who have depicted The Minotaur, there is this masculine sensual creature that has a physicality, a powerful frame, a capacity to rule as king of paradise and yet by that same token a beautiful emotional complexity as he sits reading through pages of poetry. There’s something amazing and compassionate about that to see the redeemable and positive qualities of this creature's contribution to the world when all else would see him as something frightening to destroy. Regardless of some of the more superficial representations of The Minotaur throughout art history, I feel there’s something a lot more genuine and passionate about these female’s extension of where Picasso left off, the myth of the minotaur. In the paradox of extremities of both the masculine and the feminine and finding love for oneself.

With “Echoes Of You” the first meeting with Henry Quilici happened at the end of last year shooting his USC short “Tweaker Speak” about a meth addict dealing with the demons of addiction as he tried to get his daughter back. A very different piece. I noticed the things Henry would say were very to the point, very clear, uncluttered by doubts or abstract theory, his notes always referred back to the story or to human experience.

A couple months later I was contacted by Henry and his producer Cam Burnett (a young filmmaker with similar sensibilities). When I first read the script and came to the end, I burst into tears, it had come to me soon after I had finished reading a passage by John Berger in his book “A Painter Of Our Time” which detailed the life of an artist, most often one of constant sacrifice for their work. Henry had captured that plight so beautifully with this story, I had to do it.

Henry showed me a short documentary he made about discovering his grandfather through a box of letters and journals he found in the attic. We discussed how eerily similar the project which fills my days is, a film about my father, the late art critic Peter Fuller and going through his journals almost every day from the TATE archive. I’ve made my way through a huge chunk of his writings public and private, to piece together a singular man of principles in his writings. And now his echoes speak to me. Some things are so special they take more than just one lifetime to complete. That’s really what this piece is about, the Greek philosopher Hippocrates said “Life is short, but art is long”.

I found Henry to be incredibly clear about what he wanted, everything very specific in emotional terms, he spoke very subjectively and compassionately, not the sort of move your head a little to the left which can leave actors feeling like meat puppets and end up with mechanical performances. He worked as many of the best directors do, from the inside out.

In many ways, I feel Echoes Of You is about time. Man and time have such strange relationship, as we exist in time but the way we experience it is never as it actually unfolds. As our internal clock passes with a tether to society's expectations of us, we too little consider the effect our actions are having on the people around us. The echoes of not just our voice in a cave, but our movements in the world each day. To show up each day sit down at the keys, explore the depths of our unconscious.

Echoes have are a vital component in the acting process, because what we end up becoming in performance is an echo of that first reading of the script, and that feeling which bounces off the walls of our unconscious, the ever-expanding and retracting self, is reshaped with every bump. Like throwing clay against a wall, picking it up and throwing it again against another. Time forms a totally new object, with the heart of the original idea, but with time and movement a new object entirely.

The time it takes for something truly special to emerge in our culture can be an arduous one, this is why it is so important for artists to have faith, to have the strength to step back and see a bit further into the future and into the past with all their actions.

For instance, there is the intention to hit a piano key, the thought, the will to create music, the doing of it, the vibrations in wood and in the air which causes the sound and then there is the trace memory the sound makes into us. The next day the vibrations are gone but what is it that remains, what else can we call it but a feeling.

Pushing into these echoes of ourselves man finds again another feeling, another self, rewriting of one's own personal history reveals many selves splintered off into a kaleidoscope of you.

Even the best and brightest fall prey to doubts because of the time it can take from the conception of an idea to its real-life manifestation. And yet there are moments that are eternal for us, moments which last in eternity as long as we last and when we give them to another they last forever in them. Those things we cherish that make the world better for our existing and their creation pushing forward a spiritual progress.

The compassionate passing on to generations is an important part of this story. If we chose to listen, we can take the best of somebody with us on the hardest roads in life that stretch out before us. It can feel like whispers in the wind sometimes when we talk about something that has a deep and powerful resonance to us.

This piece made me think deeply about the effects of what I wish to leave behind. What marks in the sand I wish to make. We’re all scratching up the dirt at the moment, thousands of impressions made, often without thought for their effects.

What matters are not the constant floods of change which define our generation, but the development of the spirit, the inner world which we must cherish and rely on to provide us with hope.

In the week before shooting, I read Viktor E Frenkel’s “Man’s Search For Meaning” in which he suggests the survivors of the concentration camps during WWII of which he himself was a survivor, had something to live for, that they could cherish on the inside. That they had been touched by great works of art, literature, theatre and music and these moments in their life were the memories which got them through.

Confronted with a boy who is living through possibly the worst conditions a child could be subjected to in our society, I think Andrew gave him all that he had, and aside from the odd sandwich and a place to crash, what he had to give was music, the stronger Andrew could instill this dream of music, the better chance that echoes had of speaking through all the overwhelming obstacles this boy had to encounter.

Photographer - Stev Elam

Henry’s brother Max Quilici wrote the main theme to Echoes. The piece was so minimally and yet effectively done, I felt there was no way I could do this part without learning at least some of the piano in order to play this song. With the couple weeks of preparation, never having laid hands on a piano before, I managed to learn how to play the first half of the song.

I came across a documentary preparing for the role called Pianomania, about a piano tuner for some of the world’s best pianists. He was someone whose love for the piano extends beyond the performance, becomes almost an intellectual pursuit, like preparing for a role that one never acts. The language that he began to use to describe moments within a sound was complex, abstract and beautiful. The joy and the passion for the music then became a dedication to the development of someone else’s craft.

That has always been something that’s interested me, how much should we use art of the same medium to influence our work. I feel that art should be the language to express the fullness of life. But the conflict then comes when confronted with another’s work that we stand in admiration, that admiration must then come from an ideal within us that we wish to reach. Then the choice becomes whether to run forward towards that same goal, almost like an Oedipus trying to surpass the father, or whether to stand back and remain in a place of fixed and constant admiration allowing it to either influence one’s work in another medium, or is it enough to touch a place within a performance, to shape the artists work by pushing a sound, an aesthetic a feeling further than they could have by themselves. The position of a conductor to a musician, a director to an actor, or a parent to a child, shaping the raw materials of a human being in a particular direction, for the purpose of benefiting humanity.

5.) Brace yourself, because you’re going to need to have a lot of patience, as well as determination and persistence, bear in mind, people are reading into everything you put out there so approach your professional relationships with confidence and love and with the intention to help communities of people make art.

Make peace with yourself, deep down find an inner resolve that is self-rewarding. Don’t expect much from others, just be thankful to be there and to have the opportunity to do what you love. It’s a job and it’s also a gift that you’re giving, even in the strangest of characters, you’re reflecting a part of humanity back at itself. Stay away from high conflict people in your personal life as much as possible. That can be quite a challenge, especially in LA for some reason, people who feed off drama are dangerous to your precious faculties as an artist and can drain you, look instead to the people who show you love and encouragement, know that’s happening for a reason and seek more of that. I’ve seen people shoot themselves in the foot enough times to know that attitude is a huge factor. Even talking to agents can be really insightful when they have to deal with a client who's just bitching at them instead of being grateful for the positive things they’ve done. Just like you want to avoid high conflict people, don’t be one!

Focus on what you are and what you want to become, notice the people who are helping you become that and walk away from the people who are not.

I personally do a lot of reflecting and learning from mistakes, by doing so I feel I have a very attuned gauge to fairness, if someone consistently does not take accountability it’s a sign to limit exposure as much a possible.

Obviously there’s a lot of advice already out there about cracking into the business etc, so that should be easy enough to google. My input about that is to spend time on your business, on your social media, unfortunately, that is important now. But curate your social media, for what you put out and what you take in, protect your cognition and your internal objects. Too much flicking around the unimportant stuff will dull the senses. I do think there is a higher use of social media in a sense. If you can train yourself to use it sparingly but to use it to seek out things that you like and the people in your communities that are regularly engaging with those same things. Theatre and independent films are great places to start. I love going to the film festivals that my films get into and then meeting the other filmmakers and actors there, talking to them and going to their screenings. The ones in California I love are Dances With Films, Newport Beach Film Festival and San Diego Film Festival, a few others too, then you have all the majors everybody knows about Sundance et al.

And while you’re looking to get cast in your next project in between auditions I would personally advise writing everyday.

When Adam Cushman approached me to play Seymour in “Five Families”, we discussed how there was something Romantic about Seymour’s longing for the past, he told me to read Shelley, that sort of emotional intensity was something I wanted to capture for this character. I’d met Adam on his last feature “The Maestro” which turned out to be a hit at the film festivals, I was cast in that to play the young John Williams by producer David J Philips, and I met David at the premiere of “Road To The Well” at Dances With Films Festival in Hollywood not long before that.

Barry Primus was playing my Grandfather, we rehearsed on location which turned out to be Barry’s house. As he showed us around we walked past a poster of the film he directed and DeNiro was peering out, Barry had directed him in the film “Mistresses”, I looked around and there were family pictures with one of the people who I was reading about in books back in my early discoveries of cinema, whose performances had inspired me to go on this journey in the first place. And a few weeks later I was sat opposite Barry peering into his eyes as he was playing my grandfather locked in a power struggle with the young Oedipus that was my character. It felt like I was apart of that legacy in some way.

I couldn’t have predicted something like that would happen and I would be there on that day. I just knew when I met the director Adam Cushman there was something special about this artist and I wanted to be apart of his journey. Like Day-Lewis, I had been inspired by DeNiro’s capacity to push the boundaries of film acting and to take what I’d learned from the British theatre to the American screen. I wrote this one about the experience;

“Adam Cushman helped me find my darkness with this piece, it was rooted in a longing for the past in adolescence and lost love, a time when people followed their desire without consideration for every consequence, but to challenge the status quo with action.

The last of a dying breed of gangster, nostalgic and Romantic for another time when passions followed glory and the challenges of the will, were met with the force of present days. Today I am a better man, today I feel that carnal longing, tomorrow is destroyed by the turning of coming authority. They pressure me to give up my sword, but I shall die by valiance and go down in history as the first forever gangster glory.

Six shooters shuddering in the pockets of my armed forces, there I am wishing for you to change your ways to musty running hallways of life and lofty dreams.

Protect your family, know who they are, know that legacy will be written on your tombstone carved in marble, heroes are carved in marble and the weak go silently by.

Shelley’s letters of time in a course of crossroads between God and invention told the story a man and monster, broken by his own innate creation.”

By a twist of fate “Five Families” just had its premiere at the same festival I met David three years before, Dances With Films. Networking is a karmic experience, it’s more like a spiritual journey than anything else, we’re all little beacons transmitting our message out to others in the darkness of consciousness, follow the light.

Some people can read the entirety of a poet like William Blake and all they’ll choose to focus on is the word ‘bottom’, or some other salacious misrepresentation of the author, whereas someone else will read the exact same piece of work and walk away transformed and reignited by all the passions a Romantic poet has to offer. Not that Blake’s poems are for the innocent, some are but not all, neither are Charles Baudelaire’s “Flowers Of Evil”, nor Lord Byron’s body of work, almost none of the truly great works of art are wholly pure, and why should they be? They do not cross anyone else’s boundaries but are self-accepting of both humanity's chaos and its light, its masculine and its feminine, the paradox within. The greatest works of art of all mediums are undeniable, unrepressed.

In this sense, I try to have a higher consciousness about what you see in other people. Entertainers, filmmakers, writers, performers of all kinds are not just characters in your own personal fantasies, they’re real people with all sorts of longings, fears, desires, pains and joys. It’s not just about who you know, not who knows you, but what you see in someone else and how you choose to relate to others. I worked with Jane Berliner (talent manager at Authentic) for a number of years and she talked about having integrity in business, and I watched how she had a well-tuned sense of fairness with how she went about things, positive and negative, and I respected that and tried to learn as much as I could from her as an arts entrepreneur. I suppose my career advice is about that, have integrity in your professional relationships, and see yourself as a budding arts entrepreneur, trust that the rest will follow.

For instance, who knows where “Five Families” will go, who will get to see it and what will happen next.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?

I think one should just focus on the personal journey, I wouldn’t even know how to begin trying to be a rival to other actors, unless it was part of a scene, what would be the point?

It has to be a personal, spiritual journey, that is really about trying to find out who you are and investing your passions. If film has fed your soul like it has mine. By filmmakers like Terrence Malick, Stanley Kubrick, Christopher Nolan, PT Andersson, Lars Von Trier, Barry Jenkins, Nicholas Winding Refn,

Films like “The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Crawford” and “The Assassination of Richard Nixon”, are both brilliant performances, two of my favorite films of all time for the acting alone, but also the scores and the cinematography. However, I think anyone with a serious interest in becoming an artist and therefore a public figure should watch these movies as a letter of caution to the flip side of what happens when you do start to get attention for your work. It’s not so much the people who are happy with themselves and doing well that you have to worry about, it’s the people who are not accomplishing their goals and project onto you all their fears and desires. That is actually the thing to be careful of, fellow creatives are colleagues and usually want to collaborate and form healthy connections.

So far I have had to deal with some invasions of privacy, so I would advise if you start to notice creepy things start to happen, fortunately, there are laws in place to protect you from people who become too much. Unfortunately in all realms of life, you’re likely to come across abusive or toxic people, people with mental health issues or difficult upbringings. I’ve actually not had this as much from my fellow creatives or people who are fulfilling their true purpose in life so much as people who are unhappy with their lot. The journey of becoming an actor, truly going through the rigors will put you in positions where you are forced to have self-awareness, compassion, and to deal with your demons, most people are simply not challenged in that way and remain in an unconscious state. Some people will see someone chasing their dreams and try to sabotage them. I don’t get that, I see motivated, passionate people and I want to help them.

It’s important to notice whether people are coming at you with support and encouragement or whether they're seeking to ‘take you down a peg’, I’m not one for ‘tall poppy syndrome’ culture, it’s tough out there, hard for everyone nowadays, if someone does well at something they should be encouraged. That’s my take on it.

Personally I look up to people like Leonardo DiCaprio, he’s really never put a foot wrong on the movie star climb, he’s definitely had his fun; yachts at Cannes et al and why not bask in a bit of that once you’ve earned it, there’s also an aspect of the showman which is important to promote a film, a lot of that stuff, red carpets, etc, it looks glamorous from the outside, but what’s actually going on is hard work.

But Leo’s also been the executive producer to some of the best films in cinema history and his social media is 90% him traveling the world to help charitable causes, develop natural sanctuaries to make the world a better place, help tribes in the Amazon, spread awareness about climate change and protecting endangered animals. That is modern chivalry in my opinion.

It’s still a ways off for me to be able to do much of that stuff, but still, I’ve supported the arts in many ways, been executive producer on a number of artistic indie passion projects and also individuals in my life, helped them to develop their careers and artistic outlook in different ways. As well as supporting various environmental charities as much as I can, I also look up to Lucy Fry in that regard, she’s constantly doing positive things for the environment and at the moment is on a mission to save and plant trees.

Surround yourself with people who believe in themselves, hold people accountable for their behavior towards you, but mostly focus on attending your own garden, leave others to tend their own, leave salacious or slanderous gossip to low thinkers and you will not have any problems with rivalry.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I believe art is incredibly important to us right now, poetry, painting, great cinema, these things are precious to us in these times, for the preservation of our souls if we have hope and belief in humanity, we will get through this.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I would like to take this opportunity to thank every director that has believed in me enough to trust me with a role in their production and collaborate with me on the development of a character.

Simon Evans in Madness In Valencia, we took that little unsuspecting play from a 40 seat theatre in south London to Trafalgar Studios in the West End and I delivered possibly the wildest performance of my career so far, and I have Simon to thank for giving me that freedom. That play really gave me my start, allowed me to come to LA with a bit of something behind me and book roles like the lead in Road To The Well. The director of that film Jon Cvack also was a great collaborator and pushed me intellectually to delve into the mindset of a philosophy dropout who has his will tested to the extremes when he framed for murder. That film opened a lot of doors and I’m still surprised at how many people reach out to me that have caught it on streaming on Amazon Prime.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Great art makes great demands upon us” — Peter Fuller

Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

The Saffie Brothers, ever since I saw Heaven Knows What at Arclight after its Sundance premiere, I knew I’d just witnessed something special they truly are the auteurs of our generation and I can see them sticking around for a long time.

How can our readers follow you online?

I’m pretty active on Twitter, I like posting about the films I watch and my favorite performances, as well as updates about my own films — https://twitter.com/LaurenceFuller

My Instagram is — https://www.instagram.com/laurencefuller

And my website with my films and writing projects is www.laurencefuller.art

This was very meaningful, thank you so much! We wish you continued success!

MODERN ART: 30 years

Today marks a 30 Year memorial for Peter Fuller. In light of this and the current situation, I have made available a number of Peter’s major essays, some unpublished pieces from the archive that are of interest and a few previous Peter Fuller Memorial Lectures, now available for free online for people to read during quarantine. My late father might have said; a passionate engagement with the arts is one salvation for our inner sanctity, during such challenging times. 

Peter was a rebel who questioned cultural values, never the value of culture, and if not to convert then to affirm in the other their own sense of truth. A great example of this was the passionate and at times heated correspondence between Peter and the sculptor Anthony Caro:

The noise of the towering machinery that rumbled in our ears these past decades, ground to a halt and is replaced by the silence of the streets, the courage to sleep and reawaken again anew. Can we really say this was time well spent if we do not in this century’s quietest moment, take the time to question But Is It Art? 

MODERN ART intertwines a life-long battle between four mavericks of the art world, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty, and the preciousness of life. Based on the writings of Peter Fuller, adapted by his son.

Before the shut down MODERN ART had just won Best Screenplay (3rd Place) at Hollywood Reel Film Festival and had been accepted as Official Selection in competition or Finalist placement in Beverly Hills Film Festival, Manhattan Film Festival, Big Apple Screenplay Competition, Firenze FilmCorti International Festival (Italy), Film Arte Festival (Madrid), Drama Inc Screenplay Competition, and Twister Alley Film Festival. All of which have been postponed by at least a couple months to protect public health and safety. But the good news is they will be back on soon and in the meantime you can read selected essays by Peter Fuller here on my blog during down time!

I have spoken before of my own brief yet powerful encounters with John Berger, my father’s mentor and surrogate father figure, one of the most influential art critics of all time, certainly for Peter’s generation. Controversial for his Marxist perspective. Recently I had the good fortune to speak to his son Yves Berger who shared with me some of his poetry and said of MODERN ART: “If the caracteres reveal a great depth and complexity within their mind and spirit, then the film would leave enough space for this mixture of knowledge and mystery to form what we call « destiny ».”

Their correspondences which I found in the TATE archive were among the most insightful and poignant I had ever read. It seems the convergence and Though they feature heavily in the MODERN ART screenplay, they remain unpublished, references are sprinkled throughout Peter’s controversial book Seeing Berger:

I’ve found many of my collaborators and mentors among the directors I’ve worked with in theatre and film, two of them responded to the MODERN ART screenplay recently:

Jim Lounsbury: “I remember sitting in Hollywood with you a number of years ago and you telling me about your desire to bring this film to life. You have lived and breathed art. Bled art. Dreamed art and, well… become it… It is a unique opportunity, to get to know your father this intimately… to become him in order to know him. I couldn’t imagine anything that would make me more proud as a father myself. 

I feel honoured to be a part of this journey with you. Seeing those images from Possessions in your mood reel for the screenplay I realise now, more than ever, that I was a single step in your waltz. Well, maybe two, but It’s amazing how the images we captured with such youthful exuberance and optimism fit within an overall tone, and feel almost destined to sit alongside some of the greatest artists and filmmakers of our time. I’ve read the treatment and watched the interviews and very much look forward to reading the screenplay.

What better time to create and enjoy art? The world is wounded, and people are scared. More than ever we need to be challenged. To be reminded of our humanity. Of our truth.”

Hunter Lee-Hughes: “Laurence, the most fascinating thing about this script and film project is that you will be playing the role of your own father, who died when you were young. You are seeking a way to recreate the man so that you can have a relationship with him as an adult, something of which you were deprived. It's a profound loss that the movie attempts to rectify. No one really knows if this will help you in the end or not, but there's obviously a very deep desire to "go there" with the idea that something amazing may happen or may be resolved.”

This project started not out of a need for catharthis nor grief, it was an endeavor, a spiritual journey, to meet a man who stood for something, that was worth the fight it would take to cherish it. Who found this fight, ultimately returning home from the battlefields of cultural revolution, in a secular spiritual way, that his passing only brought more depth and substance too, the preciousness of life and the purpose of beauty. 

We cannot attend exhibitions right now like Peter did with such fervency, the communal aspect of the arts are suffering, as with empty seats in our cinemas. We make this sacrifice for our elders, frequent chats with my grandmother remind me of this, as she tells me about tending her garden and her writing projects, the value of what we are protecting. But we can imagine Peter marching into the aesthetic battles of the exhibition halls.

Or it is possible to lie down on the couch and reflect on the psychological symbols of art which also male up the foundations of our own subconscious":

Peter was one of the loudest voices championing the London School, which just last lost Leon Kossoff.

This project has been an experiment with my own humanity. Yet at the same time I feel this is true of every artistic endeavors, self portrait or reflections of another. The spiral of life drives deeper into our souls with each stroke, each expression, each turn of phrase or release of emotion in a scene. This is the nature of adaptation and yet so many of my peers want to see me beneath the cloak of my father’s words. What is he doing back there? 

Annabel Ludovici Gray who worked for Modern Painters asked me recently asked me but where are you in all this?

“You are very sensitive as your father was. I wonder if you will ever find peace or does making this film only fuel more questions, enquires and challenges ? Understandably you are caught up in the anniversaries of your father's death. I hope I am wrong, but it appears to me that it consumes so much of your living, and I do wonder if it is not allowing your own life's happiness to flourish. What about a family of your own, children? This film is your mission. It is your art, your self portrait  and your interpretation of all that you have read, watched and of course your younger memory's understanding, and your mature imagination. It must be comforting to have all the books he wrote, but it isn't enough. Not to be able to engage and argue and interrogate your father's mind is a great frustration I am sure.”

A dear artist friend Sima Jo painted this recently, she showed it to me after walking around Enrique Martinez Celaya’s exhibition at Kohn Gallery with the art critic Lita Barrie. It reminds me of one of Peter’s quotes “Perhaps loss is the birth point of imagination”. If you believe as I do the past can provide a map to the future then Romantic nostalgia takes on a new dimension, of action, rebirth, renewal, and a path towards something great.

Distracting me from this journey never worked either, I only had a desire to meet him again in my own flesh. To meet my father and by doing so meet myself. To feel the martyr of my dreams place his hand on my shoulder and tell me at long last that I exist. 

My mother recently painted this portrait of me, as she isolates, protecting herself with an underlying lung condition. A great painting is a mystery. A modern painting tells us as much about its creator as it’s subject and where they meet. This meeting place is shared, with you. The three of us conspire to tell a story in your mind and there it begins a new meeting place for others. An image in the language of our lives. A beginning. 

MODERN ART: Matthew Collings BBC Tribute to Peter Fuller 1990

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

Today marks the 30 year memorial of Peter’s passing, below is Matthew Colling’s BBC tribute to Peter from 1990.

Modern Art: 30 Years - Marches Past

MODERN ART chronicles a life- long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

Marches Past

By Fuller, Peter

MODERN ART: Caro & Fuller Saga III - The Letters

MODERN ART chronicles a life- long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

These letter correspondences with Caro were some of the more interesting and quirky documents I found during my research for MODERN ART, it’s a great example of why Peter was so effective in challenging these underlying values in the art world and in our culture and if not converting people, then further informing and affirming their own perspectives. In short what makes him so interesting to watch as a character.

That Cassio Loves Her?

Taken from one of Iago’s speeches from Shakespeare’s OTHELLO

MODERN ART: But is it Art?

MODERN ART chronicles a life- long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

This essay is a great example of why Peter was so controversial. He asks provocative questions, that challenge the reader. I do believe it is both important and yet surprisingly uncommon to ask these sorts of questions internally and deeply. To make these enquiries, to know one’s own truth, is to meet oneself at the end of it. Today we have pieces like The Joker, a banana duct taped to a wall that sold for six figures, should we really just laugh this off, or place it on the court of culture and question it to the same standards we question a Lucian Freud?

BUT IS IT ART?

by Peter Fuller, 1990

In my time as a critic, considerable prominence has been given to 'works of art' of a kind previously unseen. That is, works which apparently embody no imaginative, nor indeed physical, transformation of materials; no sense of belonging to any of the particular arts, such as painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving, etc.; no sense of tradition nor of skill. Such works possess no identifiable aesthetic qualities and offer, in my view at least, no opportunity for aesthetic experience or evaluation.

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain

The prototype for works of this kind was Marcel Duchamp's Fountain - a urinal signed 'R. Mutt', which he submitted to the 1917 Salon des Independants. Duchamp was the start of all the trouble and there is nothing I would wish to say in his defence. Even so, it must be stressed that, in its time, the urinal was a relatively isolated phenomenon, while an overwhelming proportion of the institutionally-approved art of our own time is of the same character.

Over the past twenty-two years I have been invited to attend to all manner of objects and events. They have ranged from a document entitled 'A Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs' to folded blankets; a man seated in a bath of bull's blood; another who successfully amputated his sexual organs; used nappy liners and sanitary towels; a beach covered in polythene; thousands of old tyres arranged in the shape of a Polaris missile; a huge ceramic blow-up of a Pink Panther; a tray of cow brains and used fly-strips set in resin, and of course, the Tate Gallery's notorious Equivalent VIII - a stack of fire-bricks arranged by Carl Andre. All these things have been presented to me as 'Art'.

These are extreme cases, but many less bizarre works of recent years have no less tenuous affiliations with the recognisable arts of painting or sculpture. For example, I'd argue that there is little or no aesthetic content in much Pop art, Minimalism, New Expressionism, Neo-Geo or New Sculpture of the 1980s. A 'painting' these days tends to be identified with the mere presence of paint as a substance. A 'sculpture' can be anything. In a pamphlet accompanying the Hayward Gallery's despicable 1983 Sculpture Show, Norbert Lynton declared that 'sculpture is what sculptors do. No other definition is possible.' This is ludicrous. After all, sculptors get up in the morning, read the paper, take the dog for a walk, and so on. None of this is necessarily sculpture, although it's possible that it could all be designated as such. For Gilbert and George, life is sculpture.

This proliferation of anaesthetic art has been a problem. The temptation is simply to say, 'This is not art', and to pass on without hesitation to consider those things which appear more worthy of attention. That, after all, was the approach favoured by Bloomsbury. In his book, Art, Clive Bell's aesthetic hypothesis was that the essential quality of a work of art was 'Significant Form', which gave rise to aesthetic response and experience. Significant Form was 'the expression of a peculiar emotion felt for reality', and anything which did not possess Significant Form was not a work of art. For Bell, most of that which was presented as art was not art at all. 'I cannot believe,' he wrote, 'that more than one in a hundred of the works produced between 1450 and 1850 can be properly described as a work of art.'

Bell claimed that calling something a work of art, or not, was a 'momentous moral judgement'. He would have experienced no difficulty in dealing with the anaesthesia of late Modernism. He would simply have expressed the view that less than one in a thousand of the works produced between 1950 and 1986 were works of art.

It must be said, however, that Bell's concept of Significant Form (borrowed from Roger Fry), and his idea of aesthetic emotion, are rather unfashionable nowadays. More characteristic of current thinking is the view put forward by the aesthetic philosopher, B. R. Tilghmann, in his book But is it Art? Tilghmann is concerned with the inadequacy of traditional aesthetic theories to deal with the sort of phenomena I have been discussing, from Duchamp's urinal to Andre's bricks. Tilghmann argues that the very idea of a theory or definition of art is a confused one. This confusion, he believes, arises from the fact that the language of aesthetic theory has simply lost contact with the sort of everyday practice we engage in when we look appreciatively at urinals, piles of bricks, muddy smears or acts of castration. Instead of trying to stretch the old aesthetic theories to accommodate these new kinds of artistic practice, we should be elaborating new theories appropriate to the new sorts of practice.

These, then, are two opposing approaches to the problem of anaesthetic art objects: the Bell position, which dismisses those objects which do not give rise to aesthetic effect - anaesthetic objects - out of the category of 'Art' altogether; and the Tilghmann position, which includes everything which anyone ever designated 'Art' as art, but recommends a rejection of traditional concepts of what is and what is not aesthetic experience.

While most discussions of this issue tend to take up a position somewhere between these polarities, I'd like to argue that this whole line of reasoning should be refused.

From Baumgarten onwards, aesthetic response and experience were never regarded as being synonymous with what was called 'art'. The early philosophers of the aesthetic recognised that a great many natural phenomena - flowers, minerals, waterfalls, landscapes, forests and the song of the nightingale among them - also gave rise to aesthetic response; a disinterested response, unrelated to price, necessity or whatever. It may well be that this view depended upon a 'Natural Theology'. That is, the belief that the natural world was, in some sense or other, a revelation of the handiwork of God. As Friedrich Schlegel put it, 'As God is to His creation, so is the artist to his own.'

Natural Theology is no longer very popular, even among Christians. And this may have something to do with the fact that most aesthetic theories do not even pay lip service to the 'non-artistic' aspects of the aesthetic experience. My own belief, however, is that the aesthetic faculty has its roots in our continuities with - and ultimately helps establish our differences from - the remainder of the animal kingdom. It can be understood in terms of our specifically human natural history. This aesthetic potentiality, though threatened by the decline of religious belief and the growth of industrial, and latterly, electronic production, is not necessarily destroyed by it.

Rather than see aesthetic theory rewritten in such a way that it incorporates anaesthetic 'Art', I think we should be attending to the independence of 'the Aesthetic Dimension' from 'Art'. If this implies that we should not go along with Tilghmann, I think it also means that we should not go along with Bell's argument. There is, perhaps, something inherently wrongheaded in the view that most works of art are not 'really' works of art at all. (It is reminiscent of that Left argument which accounted for repression in Socialist countries by arguing that most of these countries weren't really Socialist.)

I think one can, indeed should, concede to the Post-Post- Structuralist contextualisers that art is a category constituted within ideology and maintained by institutions, especially the institutions of contemporary art. But the same does not apply to aesthetic experience and aesthetic values, which are orders of innate and inalienably human potentiality. Aesthetic experience of an imaginative order is a terrain which we can enjoy because we are the sort of creatures that we are. Some art embodies aesthetic values and gives rise to aesthetic experience of the highest order, but much art does so only minimally or not at all.

This statement may seem Lea platitude, but important consequences flow from it, since it implies a new - or, more accurately, an old - set of priorities. We must first of all recognise that the freedom to engage and develop innate aesthetic faculties is being impinged upon by present social and cultural policies. Here I am not launching into a defence of 'artistic freedom', a catch-cry which has been used to justify so many contributions to the spread of General Anaesthesia, and which so often proves to be little more than a rallying cry for philistines. On the contrary, I see my practical task as a critic, as one of fostering those circumstances in which the aesthetic potential can thrive, even if it means opposing certain kinds of 'art'.

One question which I have left in brackets is 'Why, in our own time, has there been such a preponderance of anaesthetic art?' For a start, I believe that post-second world war theories of art education must bear much of the blame.

About fifteen years ago, Dr Stuart MacDonald, an historian of art education, referred to what he called 'articidal tendencies' among art teachers. In my language that would be 'aestheticidal tendencies', but that sounds even worse. He was, I think, concerned with counteracting the continuing effects of the 'Basic Design' approach to art education, which was effectively debilitating the idea of Fine Art.

'Art educationalists,' he wrote, 'have been busy demolishing the subject which supports them . . . "Beauty" as a quality of an artefact was vaporised some years back. "Craft", with its connotation of old-fashioned hard work, has been given short shrift. "Artefact" is now being replaced by "museumart". Art education was deleted recently in favour of "visual education".' Dr MacDonald concluded that 'Art itself will go shortly', and he has since been proven right.

This is not to say that art itself has disappeared. Art remains in abundance, but aesthetic education, the nurturing of aesthetic intelligence and, inevitably, the creation of objects of aesthetic value, have all but gone. What is happening in our schools and colleges of art is a calamity of national proportions. Children in some schools receive lessons in 'Design Education' and 'Information Technology' but not in art. An education in art is becoming indistinguishable from an education in design, which is anything but disinterested.

However, it isn't simply education which is to blame for the general anaesthetisation of our culture. One must not forget how left-wing thinkers have long blamed everything on the market in art. This was, in essence, the teaching of my teacher, John Berger, who argued that there was a special relationship between oil painting and capitalism, and that pictures were 'first and foremost' portable capital assets. This led him to express hostility towards the very idea of 'true' aesthetic values, or of connoisseurship, which he saw as being merely derivatives of oil painting's functions in exchange and as property. Despite my respect for Berger I came to feel that there was something strangely circular in the argument that aesthetic discourse and connoisseurship were simply derivatives of the market. If they were, it was not at all clear what it was that the market could be said to be corrupting, distorting or infecting.

Indeed, there was a very real sense in which the left-wing aesthetic theories of the 1960s and 1970s provided the 'programme' for the right-wing governments of the 1980s; for that unholy alliance between philistines of the Left and the Right. For example, John Berger argued that photography had displaced painting as the uniquely modern, democratic art-form of the twentieth century. Margaret Thatcher's Government squeezed the Fine Arts courses and shifted everything towards design. Berger argued that museums were 'reactionary' middle-class institutions that should 'logically' be replaced by children's pinboards. Margaret Thatcher proceeded to pressurise every one of our art institutions in a way which the Director of the National Gallery likened to the destruction of the monasteries during the Reformation.

Berger led the assault on the idea of Fine Art values, which he dismissed as 'bourgeois' and anachronistic. Mrs Thatcher initiated a regime of stunning philistinism and destructiveness, which aimed to sweep away the last vestige in public arts policy of exactly those things to which the Marxists had objected. If the point is not to understand the world but to change it, then in England the palm must be awarded to Mrs Thatcher. She 'deconstructed' aesthetic values much more effectively than a thousand polytechnic Marxists and art school Post- Structuralists.

Nowadays, the philistine complicity of Left and Right is a fact of life for Britain's art institutions. Charles Saatchi, the advertising man (inventor of the slogan 'Labour isn't working', which did so much to bring Mrs Thatcher to power), has amassed a large collection of anaesthetic art, praised by many of the trendiest Left theorists of recent years. Meanwhile, Gilbert and George have become the salon artists of our times. Praised by Left critics for their hatred of unique objects, painting and 'elitist' aesthetic ideas, they are vociferous supporters of Mrs Thatcher.

Even though I believe that the left-wing thinkers have provided the best moral justification for the growth of institutional anaesthesia, there is also a ring-wing version of the 'corrupting market' theory, as put forward by Suzi Gablik in her slim and slight book, Has Modernism Failed? Here she suggests that the market somehow corrodes 'Higher Values' through the very nature of commercial activity. However, there remains strong empirical evidence against any such line of reasoning. Gablik does not mention Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Barbara Hepworth or Ben Nicholson, all of whom were enmeshed in the higher reaches of the art market but whose work embodies precisely those spiritual and aesthetic values which are so often absent from the work of those less commercially- successful artists of today's official, state-subsidised avant- garde. It also seems to me that the evidence of history is against Gablik's view. The market, in and of itself, did not corrupt the art of sixteenth-century Venice or seventeenth-century Holland. On the contrary, in these cases at least, intense activity in the picture markets seems to have been inextricably bound up with extraordinary efflorescences of aesthetic life.

But this observation must also be qualified, since I have no wish to draw any neat equations between the vitality of capitalism and aesthetics. While it is perfectly true that much anaesthetic art involves an element of subsidy, both historically and in our own time public subsidy has also been associated with high aesthetic achievement. One doesn't have to look back to the heyday of Athens or the Gothic period to find instances of such successful uses of public funds. Not so very long ago, the Arts Council and the British Council helped foster an exceptional generation of British artists, including Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.

While some dealers may prefer to deal in works of quality, rather than in trash, if the art institutions foster a demand for trash, then most dealers will happily service that taste. From this, all one can conclude is that the market clearly does not cause good art (i.e. art of high aesthetic value) or bad art (anaesthetic art, art of low aesthetic value). The operations of the market are, in a certain sense, neutral; neither implying nor eliminating aesthetic values. On its own, the market is simply insufficient or incapable of creating that 'facilitating environment' in which good art can be created. If the Left is wrong to blame the market for destroying art, the Right is equally wrong to suppose that art can be preserved and invigorated by the market.

So what does create a facilitating environment for high aesthetic achievement? Beliefs, faith and even will - but in a very different sense to the way those qualities were manifested in the culture of Modernism or in that of fashionable Post- Modernism.

Modernism resembled the other great styles of the past in at least one important aspect; it aspired to universality, and sought to become 'the genuine and legitimate style of our century' - to use Nikolaus Pevsner's phrase. In this sense, the Modern movement had to be rooted in the Zeitgeist, to be expressive of what Pevsner called 'faith in science and technology, in social science and rational planning, and the romantic faith in speed and the roar of machines'.

Or, as the scientific populariser, C. H. Waddington put it, from a slightly different angle, the artist who wished to paint, or the architect who wished to build for a scientific and sceptical age, 'had to, whether he liked it or not, find out what was left when scepticism had done its worst'.

For a critic of American painting like Clement Greenberg in the late 1940s, 'Cubist and Post-Cubist painting and sculpture, ''modern'' furniture [as he called it], decoration and design,' were all part and parcel of the Modern Movement, which he described as 'Our Period Style'.

'The highest aesthetic sensibility,' Greenberg wrote, 'rests on the same basic assumptions as to the nature of reality as does the advanced thinking contemporaneous with it.' For Greenberg, as for Pevsner and Waddington, this 'advanced thinking' was a belligerent, scientific materialism, which, in terms of painting, meant an art of sensation and materials 'uninflated by illegitimate content - no religion or mysticism or political certainties'. Hence Greenberg's hostility to Neo- Romanticism and to the spiritual and humanist aspirations of a sculptor like Henry Moore, whom he accused of being 'half- baked'. (Even Jackson Pollock was reprimanded for his 'Gothickness'.) Hence, too, Greenberg's notorious talk about the ineluctable search for the material essence of the medium, and the pursuit of 'the minimum substance needed to body forth visibility'.

Greenberg's Modernism has had its day, but its passing entailed not merely the waning of a style of architecture or painting, it was bound up with the decline of those beliefs I have outlined above. It became sceptical of its own aspirations to triumph over nature, it began to recognise the limits of that rampant materialism embodied in Pevsner's 'faith in science and technology'. While we may make ever greater use of gadgets such as personal computers and car phones, who among us now believes that such things are initiating us into a brave new world? As for Modernist ideals of social planning, they are quite routinely despised, now that we can see the horrors to which they led. Modernism is, quite simply, no longer open to us as an option.

So what is Post-Modernism? The critic, Charles Jencks set out to answer this question in a pamphlet of that name, and numerous ancillary tomes on Post-Modernism in architecture and art. Jencks's What is Post-Modernism? essentially argues that Post-Modernism is the Counter-Reformation to Modernism. Jencks even contends that it involves 'a new Baroque'. This is disconcerting to those of us still trying to accommodate ourselves to the idea that Post-Modernism in painting simultaneously involves some kind of appeal to classicism, especially to Poussin, the opponent of the Counter-Reformation, par excellence. But matters become even more perplexing when Jencks declares that, unlike the real Counter-Reformation, Post- Modernism involves 'no new religion and faith to give it substance'. Where then is the parallel? A Counter-Reformation without faith? But this is precisely the point. Post-Modernism is the first of the world styles to have no spiritual content at all, not even the misguided faith of materialist Modernism. For what the Post-Modernists are saying is that the certainties of Modernism - its 'meta-narratives' in Jean-Frangois Lyotard's overused phrase - can only be replaced by self-conscious incredulity about everything. Jencks echoes Umberto Eco, who says that Post-Modern man cannot say to his beloved, 'I love you madly', but must express his passion in such terms as, 'As Barbara Cartland would say, "I love you madly'' '; or perhaps 'as Fuller said Jencks said Eco said Barbara Cartland would say "I love you madly".' Likewise, the Post-Modern sculptor cannot build a monument to his nation's dead, he can only build a structure which refers to what such a monument might look like if honouring the dead were what one did, any more, as it were.

Post-Modernism knows no commitments. It is the opposite of that which is engage. Post-Modernism takes up what Jencks himself once described as 'a situational position', in which 'no code is inherently better than any other'. The west front of Wells Cathedral, the Parthenon pediment, the plastic and neon signs of Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, even the hidden intricacies of a Mies curtain wall: all these things are equally 'interesting'. We are left with a shifting pattern of strategies and substitutes, a shuffling of semiotic codes and devices varying ceaselessly according to audience and circumstances. This is authenticity dissolved. Historicity takes precedence over experience and knowingness is substituted for a genuine sense of tradition.

Speaking as an absolutist and a dogmatist, it has always seemed to me that this Post-Modernist stuff does not escape from the dilemma of all relativist, eclectic and pluralist positions; namely that they are constrained to exempt themselves from those strictures and limitations with which they wish to hem in every other position. For relativism is never able to turn back on itself, to view itself relatively. No relativist will ever proclaim his own position as being only an option, with no greater claims than rival dogmatisms. And so, by subsuming all other positions, relativism is doomed to re-establish itself on the pedestal of the very authoritarianism which it was its sole raison d'etre to challenge. In other words, for all its shifting pluralism, like Modernism before it, Post-Modernist radical eclecticism wants us to know that it is 'the genuine and legitimate style of our century'.

Now I happen to believe, with John Ruskin, that the art and architecture of a nation are great only when they are 'as universal and as established as its language; and when provincial differences of style are nothing more than so many dialects'. I am not a Modernist because I don't believe in a style rooted in the values of triumphant, technist, scientific materialism, and I am not a Post-Modernist because I don't believe in the historical necessity of culture succumbing to a shabby, fairground eclecticism.

Perhaps to prove how all-encompassing Post-Modernism really is, at the end of What is Post-Modernism? Charles Jencks even mentions me. He writes: 'The atheist art critic, Peter Fuller, in his book Images of God: The Consolations of Lost Illusions, calls for the equivalent of a new spirituality based on an ''imaginative yet secular response to nature herself.” ' (This is a bit Post-Modernist - quoting Jencks quoting me.) He continues by arguing that, like himself, Fuller is seeking 'a shared symbolic order of the kind that a religion provides, but without the religion'. He asks, 'How is this to be achieved?'

To answer this question I would like to emphasise three points: the human imagination, the world of natural form and the idea of national traditions in art. In these, I believe, lies the framework for a 'facilitating environment' in which the aesthetic dimension of life can still flourish.

To begin with the imagination, I think it is very important to resist the idea that Post-Modernism is 'the language of freedom'. It would be more appropriate to see it as the language of corporate uniformity in fancy dress. A greater relativist than Jencks was Walter Pater, who, in the mid-nineteenth century, wrote vividly of the fragmentation of human experience into 'impressions' that seemingly did not add up into a coherent whole. Like the Post-Modernists he argued that one ought to take the best from Hellenic and Gothic or Christian traditions, and synthesise them. But, he added, 'what modern art has to do in the service of culture is so to rearrange the details of modern life, as to reflect it, that it may satisfy the spirit'. For Pater, unlike the Post-Modernists, 'a sense of freedom' was rooted not in stylistic eclecticism, but rather in the cultivation of what he called 'imaginative reason'.

To turn specifically to the case of British art, when Baudelaire wrote in the 1850s that British artists were 'representatives of the imagination and the most precious faculties of the human soul', I think that what he was referring to was the persistence in British cultural life of a Romantic tradition, whose twin characteristics were a belief in the human imagination and a close, empirical response to the world of natural form.

I believe that this tradition, a particular national version of a wider Romantic tradition, persisted in England and gave rise to some of our best art in the twentieth century - the work of such artists as Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, David Bomberg and Peter Lanyon - which was all created as much in resistance to the ideas of Modernism as in acceptance of them. Moore, who has often been acclaimed as the greatest sculptor of the twentieth century, far from showing any faith in science and technology, turned his back on what he called 'synthetic culture'. Using a claw chisel, he carved stone into symbols of the unity of man and nature, in what was an essentially anti- Modern vision. In the spirit of Pater, Moore conjoined elements of the classical and the Gothic, but his work could never be considered 'Post-Modern' in that it affirmed the human spirit and, however fractured, the human subject. This was not an art in quotation marks or parentheses.

In Britain, in the late twentieth century, this powerful humanist and Romantic tradition persists, and may even be undergoing a renaissance comparable to that which it underwent in the 1940s. The stimulus this time is not war, but the collapse of the Modern movement and the spiritual bankruptcy of Post-Modernism. Here are the lineaments not of a new heroism - a triumph over nature - but rather of a new imaginative relationship to it.

'There is,' wrote Clement Greenberg, 'nothing left in nature for plastic art to explore.' This has been the tacit assumption of Post-Modernism too. But all human needs are ultimately dependent upon nature, in which and through which we have our being. The best British artists of this century continually set out to explore and reaffirm the primacy of the natural world.

This is not nostalgic, or not necessarily so. Modernism incorporated within itself a view of science as somehow a reduction to the rectilinear, the upright - the exposure of the essential simplicity of phenomena. Yet recent science, one might even say 'Post-Modern science', is very much concerned with the way in which complexity springs out of the combination and recombination of simple elements. I'm thinking, for example, of the fractal geometry of Benoit B. Mandelbrot, and his fascinating doctrine of 'self-similarity', which seems to have so much in common with the insights of poets and philosophers throughout the ages, who thought to see the whole world reflected in a grain of sand. Now some artists in England, and elsewhere, are beginning to take on board the insights of this new science. This, I find far more exciting than more junky pilasters and shifting semiotic codes, intent on demonstrating the equivalence between Poussin and Disneyland. I'd like to think that true Post-Modernism will take on Post-Modern science and explore the immense imaginative possibilities and aesthetic potential which it proposes. This may even lead to an architecture which has more in common with the Gothic than the classical, although this is still merely speculation.

For the time being, I feel that, in Britain, the best chance of a national aesthetic revival lies in the improbable hands of Prince Charles, heir to the throne. The Prince has already-by virtue of his position, which is outside the political and economic arguments - challenged conventional Modernist and Post- Modernist wisdom in architecture. In his speeches he has criticised both the commercial imperatives of the free market and the utopian materialism of the Left, which have often suited each other so well. The Prince seems to echo Ruskin in his longing for an architecture which finds ways of 'enhancing the natural environment, of adding to the sum of human delight by appreciating that man is more, much more, than a mere mechanical object whose sole aim is to produce money'.

'Man,' he has said, 'is a far more complex creation. Above all he has a soul, and the soul is irrational and mysterious.' By his intervention in architecture, the Prince has helped change the fundamental terms of the leading debates. It is to be hoped that he may take a closer interest in the fine arts as well.

When one tries to sum up some of the elements that might sustain aesthetic life in the face of growing anaesthesia, I think the general principle that must be stressed is that the universal can be achieved only through a recognition of the particular. We must return to the 'sense of place' which international Modernism and contemporary Post-Modernism have done so much to devalue. This entails a return to nature and a reconsideration of national tradition for which there are a number of useful guides, from Pater to secular pantheism, from Post- Modern science to the Prince.

Virtue? A Fig!

Reading of: Edward Hopper: Loneliness Thing

My first post amid social distancing, is a narrated article on Edward Hopper. Hopper’s paintings and the ideas about his work in this essay spoke to me as I picked up groceries from the store and saw expressed in the people around me that underlying sense of loneliness I often feel is present in urban American life in Los Angeles, but sitting quietly beneath the surface of our niceties. The changes we have all faced in the last week seem to have made that quiet loneliness much louder. But I for one am not impartial to a sense of nostalgia, a feeling of longing and persistent incompleteness that could live happily in me forever. Trying to fill in that whole in my chest is the fuel for my creative work.

I hope you also feel that this time of solitude will bring out a great new wave of creative flourishing that has been humming just below the surface. This essay was written by my late father Peter Fuller, the screenplay I recently completed about him called MODERN ART, before the shut down had just won Best Screenplay (3rd Place) at Hollywood Reel Film Festival and had been accepted as Official Selection in competition or Finalist placement in Beverly Hills Film Festival, Manhattan Film Festival, Big Apple Screenplay Competition, Firenze FilmCorti International Festival (Italy), Film Arte Festival (Madrid), Drama Inc Screenplay Competition, and Twister Alley Film Festival. All of which have been postponed by at least a couple months to protect public health and safety. But the good news is they will be back on soon and in the meantime you can read more of Peter Fuller’s essay on my site.

William Blake selected poems read by Laurence Fuller (Part 1)

MODERN ART: Questions Of Taste

MODERN ART chronicles a life- long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

The arts across the world are under attack right now, the telling comments by the likes of Rishi Sunak that artists should ‘re-train’, clearly show the administration’s priorities when it comes to supporting the arts at this time. i know that my father would have had a great deal to say about this. So you can read selected essays by Peter Fuller here on my blog during down time! I will be posting regularly.

Questions of Taste

by Peter Fuller, 1983

Design likes to present itself as clean-cut, rational and efficient. Taste, however, is always awkward and elusive; it springs out of the vagaries of sensuous response and seems to lose itself in nebulous vapours of value. Questions of taste have thus tended to be regarded by designers as no more than messy intrusions into the rational resolution of ‘design problems’. Alternatively, others have attempted to eradicate the issue altogether by reducing ‘good taste’ to the efficient functioning of mechanisms.

But taste has conspicuously refused to allow itself to be stamped out - in either sense of that phrase. As the premises of the modern movement have been called into question, so taste has been protruding its awkward tongue again. For many of us, it is becoming more and more evident that pure ‘Functionalism’ is, and indeed always has been, a myth; taste enters deeply even into design decisions which purport to have eliminated it. But, more fundamentally, it is now, at least, beginning to be asked whether good taste and mechanism are in fact compatible, i.e. whether the Modernist ethic did not build into itself some fundamental thwarting or distorting of the potentialities of human taste.

A recent exhibition at the Boilerhouse, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, reflected both the revival of interest in questions of taste, and the confusion among designers concerning them. Stephen Bayley’s exhibition, called simply ‘Taste’, chronicled the history of the concept through ‘The Antique Ideal’; the impact of mechanisation in the nineteenth century and the reaction against it; ‘The Romance of the Machine’; contemporary pluralism; and the growing ‘Cult of Kitsch’ - or bad taste which acknowledges itself as such.

But Minale Tattersfield, who designed the exhibition, opted to exhibit those items which had gained approval in their own time on reproduction classical plinths, and those which had not on inverted dustbins. An exhibition which attempted to tell us that ‘Taste’ was a neglected issue of importance was thus, itself, in the worst possible taste. I believe this contradiction reflects a deep- rooted contemporary ambivalence about the nature and value of the concept of ‘Taste’, an ambivalence which is nowhere more manifest than in Stephen Bayley’s muddled commentary.

In the introduction to the little book produced to accompany the exhibition, Bayley committed himself to the view that taste is ‘really just another word for choice, whether that choice is to discriminate between flavours in the mouth or objects before the eye’. Thus Bayley claimed that taste did not have anything to do with values, beyond questions of personal whim. He claimed there really can be no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ taste: ‘These adjectives were added more than a hundred years after the concept was defined by people seeking to give the process of selection particular moral values which would help them justify a style which satisfied their image of themselves... or condemn one which affronted it.’ So, Bayley claimed, ‘Taste derives its force from data that is (sic) a part of culture rather than pure science.’ Taste, he argued, should be separated out from design ‘so that in future each can be better understood’.

Just a few pages later on, however, Bayley took a different tack. Unexpectedly, he began to argue there was a transcultural and transhistorical consensus about those qualities of an object which led to good design. (These he itemised as intelligibility in form; an appropriate choice of materials to the function; and an intelligent equation between construction and purpose, so that the available technology is exploited to the full.) Bayley then went on to say that those ‘principles of design’ were in fact ‘the Rules of Taste’. In an interview, he once said his own taste was ‘just Le Corbusier, really’: and his universals turn out to be suspiciously close to the sort of thing Le Corbusier might have said about his own style, though they would appear to eliminate numerous works in other styles.

And so, in effect, there are two Stephen Bayleys: one who believes that the issue of taste is as unimportant, and as unresolv- able, as individual whim or fancy; and the other, who, like every good Modernist, wants to assimilate taste to the inhuman author­ity of the machine. This confusion about taste in the heart and mind of the Director of the Boilerhouse project is at least fashion­able in that it is symptomatic of a confusion which prevails among the ‘cultured’ urban middle-classes at large. With the weakening of Modernist dogmatism - at least outside the bunker of the Boilerhouse - it is the tendency to trivialise taste, however, which is uppermost. Again and again aesthetic taste is reduced to the lowest level of consumer preference; almost always, it is assumed to be a mere sense preference and usually the paradigm is taste in food. Such attitudes are inevitably commonly associated with the cult of Kitsch.

For example, among the extracts reproduced in Bayley’s book is one from an American writer, John Pile, who wrote an influen­tial article, ‘In Praise of Tasteless Products’. Taste, according to Pile, means, ‘simply “preference” - what one likes or dislikes’. He notes that taste is the name of one of the five senses which lead ‘one person to prefer chocolate and another to prefer strawberry’. The very concept, he claims, ‘suggests an element of arbitrariness or even a lack of sense, that is, irrationality’. Taste, Pile concludes, ‘is a somewhat superficial matter, subject to alteration on a rather casual basis’.

Similarly, for John Blake, Deputy Director of the British Design Council, ‘the notion that qualitative judgements can be made about a person’s taste makes little sense if the word is used correctly.’ In an article entitled ‘Don’t Forget that Bad Taste is Popular’, Blake defends that pariah of all ‘good design’: the electric fire, embellished with imitation coal. For Blake, the designer has no right to reject such things if the market indicates that people want them. ‘A person’s taste’, writes Blake, ‘is charac­teristic of the person, like his height, the shape of his nose or the colour of his hair.’ He adds, ‘I have a taste for Golden Delicious apples, but my son prefers Cox’s. Does that mean that my taste is therefore superior to his, or vice versa?’

As we shall see, perhaps it does. But, for the moment, let us leave on one side the fact that in matters of taste it would be advisable to trust neither an American (who comes from an anaesthetized culture) nor someone who prefers Golden Delicious apples to Cox’s. My argument runs deeper than that. I believe that modern technological development, in conjunction with a market economy, has demeaned and diminished the great human faculty of taste. Bayley, Pile, Blake and Co. passively reflect in their theories a tragic corrosion brought about by current productive and social processes. Unlike them, I am not interested in rubber- stamping what is happening; rather, I am concerned about seek­ing ways of reversing these developments so that taste, with its sensuous and evaluative dimensions, can flourish once again.

But what sort of faculty is (or was) taste? In Keywords, Raymond Williams explains that ‘taste’ dates back to the thir­teenth century, when it was used in an exclusively sensual sense - although the senses it embraced included those of touch and feeling, as well as those received through the mouth. Gradually, however, the associations of ‘taste’ with sense contracted until they became exclusively oral; while its metaphorical usages ex­tended, at first to take in the whole field of human understanding. By the seventeenth century, taste had acquired its associations with aesthetic discrimination.

‘Taste’ was like having a new sense or faculty added to the human soul, as Lord Shaftesbury put it. For Edmund Burke, ‘what is called Taste ... is not a simple idea, but is partly made up of a perception of the primary pleasures of sense, of the secondary pleasures of the imagination, and of the reasoning faculty, con­cerning the various relations of these, and concerning the human passions, manners, and actions.’

Immanuel Kant, too, insisted again and again that true taste went far beyond the fancy to which Bayley, Pile and Blake would have us reduce it. Kant once argued that, as regards the pleasant, everyone is content that his judgment, based on private feeling, should be limited to his own person. The example he gives is that if a man says, ‘Canary wine is pleasant’, he can logically be cor­rected and reminded that he ought to say, ‘It is pleasant to me .’ And this, according to Kant, is the case not only as regards the taste of the tongue, the palate, and the throat, but for whatever is pleasant to anyone’s eyes and ears. Some people find the colour violet soft and lovely; others feel it washed out and dead; one man likes the tone of wind instruments; another that of strings. Kant argues that to try in such matters to reprove as incorrect another man’s judgment which is different from our own, as if such judgments could be logically opposed, ‘would be folly’. And so he insists, as regards the pleasant, ‘the fundamental proposition is valid: everyone has his own taste (the taste of sense).’ Thus, one might say, Bayley, Pile, Blake and Kant would all agree that it is a matter of no consequence if a man prefers lemon to orange squash, pork to beef, Brooke Bond to Lipton’s tea, or, I suppose, Golden Delicious to Cox’s.

But Kant immediately goes on to say that the case is quite different with the beautiful, as distinct from the pleasant. For Kant, it would be simply ‘laughable’ if a man who imagined anything to his own taste tried to justify himself by saying, ‘This object (the house we see, the coat that person wears, the concert we hear, the poem submitted to our judgment) is beautiful for me.''

Kant argues a man must not call a thing beautiful just because it pleases him. All sorts of things have charm and pleasantness, ‘and no one troubles himself at that’. But, claims Kant, if a man says that something or other is beautiful, ‘he supposes in others the same satisfaction; he judges not merely for himself, but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things.’ Thus Kant concludes that in questions of the beautiful, we cannot say that each man has his own particular taste: ‘For this would be as much as to say that there is no taste whatever, i.e. no aesthetical judgment which can make a rightful claim upon everyone’s assent.’

Kant, of course, regarded such a position as simply a logical reductio ad absurdum-, but it is just this reductio ad absurdum which Bayley, Pile, Blake and Co. wish to serve up to us as the very latest thinking on taste. It does not even occur to them that there may be a category of the beautiful which seeks to make claims beyond those of the vagaries of personal fancy; for them, all ‘aesthetical judgments’ are not only subjective, but arbitrary. The only escape from such extreme relativism is Bayley’s last-minute appeal to the ‘objectivity’ of ‘principles of design’ rooted in talk about efficiency, practical function, technological sophistication and so on.

But my argument against Kant works in the opposite direction from theirs: for I believe that he conceded the relativity of even sensual taste much too quickly. For although tastes vary, it is not true to say that everyone has his or her own taste, in any absolute way, even in matters of sense. For human senses are rooted in biological being, and emerged out of biological functions; though variable, they are far from being infinitely so. Even at the level of sensuous experience, discriminative judgments about taste are not only possible, but commonplace. It is not just that we readily acknowledge one man has a better ear, or eye, than another. Judgments about sense experience imply an underlying consensus of qualitative assumptions. For example, a man who judged excrement to have a more pleasant smell than roses would, almost universally, be held to have an aberrant or perverse taste.

The problem is complicated, however, because this consensus is not simply ‘given’ to us: rather it can only be reached through culturally and socially determined habits, and these can obscure even more than they reveal. For example, we can easily imagine a society in which the odour of filth is widely preferred to the aroma of roses, and no doubt the social anthropologists can tell us of one. But what of individuals who prefer, say, rayon to silk; fibreglass to elm-wood; the dullness of paste to the lustre and brilliance of true diamonds; insipid white sliced bread to the best wholemeals; cheap and nasty Spanish plonk to vintage Chateau Margaux; factory-made Axminsters to hand-woven carpets; or tasteless Golden Delicious to Cox’s apples?

I am suggesting that modern productive, economic, and cultu­ral systems, in the West, are conspiring to create a situation not so very different from that of our hypothetical example in which the odour of excrement was widely preferred to that of roses. In our society it may well be that a majority prefers, say, white, sliced, plimsoll bread to wholemeal. Bayley, Pile, Blake and Co. advocate uncritical collusion with this distortion and suppression of the full development of human sense and evaluative responses. But the judgment of true taste will inevitably be made ‘against the grain’, and equally inevitably run the risk of being condemned as elitist.

In aesthetically healthy societies a continuity between the re­sponses of sense and fully aesthetic responses can be assumed. The rupturing of this continuity is, I believe, one of the most conspi­cuous symptoms of this crisis of taste in our time. This continuity still survives, of course, in numerous sub-cultural activities: for example in the sub-culture of fine wines. The production of these wines has only the remotest root in the function of quenching human thirst; they constitute the higher reaches of sensual re­sponse, where taste reigns supreme. In the connoisseurship of them, questions parallel to those Kant raised about true aesthetic response, as opposed to merely pleasant sensations, soon bubble towards the neck of the bottle. For, when he pronounces, the connoisseur certainly wants to say that such and such a wine is (or is not) good ‘for me’; but that is not all he wants to say.

Our connoisseur will certainly be prepared to admit his person­al fancies, and even, perhaps, the idiosyncratic or sentimental tinges and flushes to his taste. He may well have a general preference for clarets rather than burgundies, and a particular liking for that distinctive, though hardly superb, wine he first drank on his wedding day. But, he will tell us, his fancies do not prevent him from discriminating between a bad claret and a good burgundy; nor from recognising that there are, in fact, better vintages of his wedding day wine than the one he personally prefers. When he makes statements of this kind, our connoisseur is acknowledging that he, too, is not merely judging for himself, but for everyone. He regards quality more as if it was a property of the wine itself rather than an arbitrary response of the taste buds.

Furthermore, he is aware that he exercises his taste in the context of an evolving tradition of the manufacture of and response to fine wines. Of course, this tradition is inflected by a plethora of local and regional preferences and prejudices; but such variations do not exclude the possibility of an authoritative consensus of evaluative responses. Indeed, most disputes between connoisseurs concern the fine tuning of the hierarchy of the vintage years. Connoisseurs assume that the tradition has arrived at judgments which are something more than individual whim or local prejudice. Anyone who consistently inverted the consensus, e.g. who regularly preferred vin ordinare to the supreme vintages of the greatest premier cru wines could safely be assumed to have a bad or aberrant taste in wines.

Even taste of the senses, therefore, can take us far beyond the arbitrariness of pleasant ‘for me’ responses; and as soon as we move into the various branches of craft manufacture, of, say, tapestry-making, furniture design, jewellery and pottery, we real­ise just how inadequate such responses are. For example, if a man said that a mass-produced Woolworth’s bowl, embellished with floral transfers, was as ‘good’ as a great Bernard Leach pot, I could not simply assent that he was entitled to his taste; rather I would assume that some sad occlusion of his aesthetic faculties had taken place. In the case of the fine arts, Bayley, Pile and Blake notwith­standing, it is quite impossible to evade the universalising claims of judgments of taste. It may be that there are those who believe David Wynne’s Boy on a Dolphin is a greater sculpture than Michelangelo’s last Pieta. But it is nothing better than vulgar philistinism to concede that this judgment is as good as any other, even if it happens to be a majority judgment.

The concept of taste then was an attempt to describe the way in which human affective, imaginative, symbolic, aesthetic and eva­luative responses are rooted in, and emerge out of, data given to us through the senses. The idea of taste acknowledges the fact that, in our species, the senses are not simply a means of acquiring practical or immediately functional information for the purposes of survival. Nor is it just that we come to enjoy certain sensuous experiences for their own sake; the senses also enter into that terrain of imaginative transformation and evaluative response which seems unique to man.

Elsewhere, I have tried to explain this phenomenon, upon which the capacity for culture depends, in terms of the long period of dependency of the human infant upon the mother. For us, the senses play into a world of illusion and imaginative creation before they become a means of acquiring knowledge about the outside world. Even after he has come to accept the existence of an autonomous, external reality he did not create, man is compen­sated through his cultural life; there, at least, things can be imbued with value, and tasted through this faculty added to the human soul.

Predictably, the concept of taste only required conceptualisa­tion and philosophical analysis at that moment in history when it became problematic. So long as men and women could ‘Taste and see how good the Lord is’, so long, in other words, as sensuous experience continued to flow uninterruptedly into cultural life, evaluative response and symbolic belief, the idea of taste (as something over and above sensuous experience) was simply redundant. It is not surprising, therefore, to discover that almost from the moment it was first used, ‘taste’ was already a concept fraught with difficulties.

The eighteenth century, for example, was preoccupied with the idea of ‘true’ educated taste, rooted in the recovery of the Golden Age of the classical past, as against popular taste - or the lack of it. The assumption was that this rift could be healed through educa­tion. But even before the end of the century, educated ‘Taste’ had acquired a capital ‘T’ and become suspect. Wordsworth and others railed against the reduction of taste to empty manners. In his history of Victorian Taste John Steegman argues that about 1830, taste ‘underwent a change more violent than any it had undergone for a hundred and fifty years previously.’ This change, he says, was not merely one of direction. ‘It lay rather in abandon­ing the signposts of authority for the fancies of the individual.’ Throughout the later nineteenth century, lone prophets like Rus­kin, Eastlake and Morris denounced the decay of taste into ‘Taste’ or manners among the elite, and its general absence elsewhere in society. But they were bereft of authority. By the twentieth century, all the great critical voices had fallen silent. Even high aesthetic taste was widely assumed to be a ‘for me’ response. The thin relativism of Bayley, Pile and Blake became the order of the day. Commentators began to argue there was ‘no aesthetical judg­ment which can make a rightful claim upon everyone’s assent.’ Even a knowing middle class turned enthusiastically to Kitsch.

The causes of this destruction of taste are various and complex. The puncturing of the illusions of religious faith certainly made it harder and-harder to sustain belief in a continuity between the evidence of the senses and affective or evaluative response. Values came to be characterised as being ‘subjective’ and therefore, by implication, arbitrary; that area of experience which had once united them with physical and social reality began to disappear.

Mechanism began to replace organism, not only as the assumed model for all production and creativity, but as the paradigm for cultural activity itself. Modernism celebrated this elevation of the machine, decrying the ornamental and aesthetic aspects of work in favour of at least a look of standardisation and efficiency. The prevalent taste became the affirmation of those elements in con­temporary productive life inimical to the development of taste; hence the attempt to identify the universals of taste with the principles of functional design.

Meanwhile, the growth of a market economy based on the principles of economic competition tended to lead to the triumph of exchange values over the judgments of taste. Indeed, the intensification of the market led to the eradication of many of the traditional and qualitative preconditions for the exercise of taste. The market in fact encourages the homogenisation of sensuous experience: it gives us Golden Delicious rather than more than two hundred local varieties. Simultaneously, however, through advertising and ideology, the market proclaims the value of choice. But a preference for Coke rather than Pepsi really has no qualitative significance; there can be no such thing as a connois­seur of cola. At the same time, political democratisation has somehow become co.nflated into a cultural rejection of any kind of discrimination or preference: taste has become bereft of authority and has sunk back into the solipsistic narcissisms of the sub­cultures, or the trivialising relativisms of individual fancy.

And yet, and yet. . . despite nerves and doubt about the status of taste, most of us still try to exercise it. And most of us demonstrate by our actions that we believe it to be something more than a ‘for me’ response. Indeed, proof against the assertions of Bayley, Pile, Blake and Co. is readily to be found in everyday life. Today, it is possible to question with relative impunity the politics, ethics, actions and even religious convictions of most of the men and women one encounters. There is widespread under­standing that all such areas and issues offer legitimate scope for radical divergences and oppositions. No such generosity prevails over questions of taste. Rare indeed are the circumstances under which it is acceptable ‘decently’ to challenge an individual’s taste in, say, clothing, interior design, or works of art.

Indeed, I find that because, as an art critic, I offer preferential judgments of taste, by profession, I am exposed to intemperately energetic responses of a kind that simply do not arise in other areas of human discourse. Whatever these responses may or may not indicate about the nature of taste, they do not suggest that there is a general agreement that it is a ‘somewhat superficial matter’, of no greater significance than whether a man has black or brown hair, or prefers Scotch to gin.

Rather, this continuing agitation about taste suggests that it is a significant human responsive faculty, whose roots reach back into natural, rather than cultural or social history. But taste requires a facilitating cultural environment if it is to thrive — and it is denied this in a society which, as it were, chooses mechanism and competition, rather than organism and co-operation, as its mod­els in productive life. Elsewhere, I have argued the case for the regulation of automated industrial production; and for restraint and control of such effects of market competition as advertising and market-orientated styling. I have suggested that, even in the absence of a religion, nature itself can provide that ‘shared symbolic order’ which allows for the restitution of a continuity between sense experience and affective life. But even such drastic (and improbable) developments as these would not, in them­selves, be sufficient to ensure a widespread revival of the faculty of taste. For, if it is to emerge out of narcissism and individualism, taste requires rooting in a cultural tradition; taste cannot trans­mute itself into anything other than passing fashion if its conven­tions, however arbitrary in themselves, are lacking in authority. There is, of course, no possibility that the church, or the court, can ever again be guardians of more than sub-cultural tastes. The history of Modernism has demonstrated that it is folly to believe that the functioning of machines can provide a substitute for such lost authority. We therefore have no choice but to turn to the idea of new human agencies.

One of the most interesting texts in Bayley’s little book is a private memorandum by Sherban Cantacuzino, Secretary of the Royal Fine Art Commission, which deals with this possibility. Cantacuzino, too, cites Kant’s view that although aesthetic judg­ment is grounded in a feeling of pleasure personal to every individual, this pleasure aspires to be universally valid. Thus he seeks a greater authority for the Commission - an authority rooted in democratic representation, rather than public participa­tion. ‘The Commission,’ he writes, ‘as a body passing aesthetic judgment, must feel compelled and also entitled to, as it were, legislate its pleasures for all rational beings.’

Many people understandably have a revulsion against any suggestion of social control in matters of taste or aesthetics; and yet the greatest achievements in this terrain, along with some of the worst, were effected under conditions where such controls applied. In our society, in their absence, the market and advancing technology, are having unmitigatedly detrimental effects on the aesthetic life of society. It is not the fact of institutional regulation, so much as its content, that should concern us: and I am arguing for an institution which, as it were, exercises a positive discrimina­tion in favour of the aesthetic dimension. Unlike Cantacuzino, I do not believe this institution should necessarily be the Royal Fine Art Commission: rather, it might be some new agency, drawn from the Design, Crafts and Arts Councils, as well as from the Commission. But, unlike these bodies, it would have powers of direct patronage, and, as Cantacuzino puts it, ‘feel compelled and also entitled to . . . legislate its pleasures for all rational beings’. Indeed, I believe that such a rooting of taste in the authority of an effective institution of state would not be a limitation on aesthetic life so much as a sine qua non of its continued survival. For what is certain is that left to their own considerable devices, the develop­ment of technology and the expansion of the market will succeed in holding the faculty of taste in a state of limbo, if not in suppressing it altogether. But some kind of effective cultural conservationism, in the face of the philistinism even of ‘experts’ like Bayley, Pile and Blake, seems to me to be as much an obligation of good Government as the protection of our forests and national parks from the intrusions of technological develop­ment; or the provision of adequate educational and health facili­ties, free from distorting effects of market pressures.

1983

MODERN ART: Auerbach versus Clemente

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

Auerbach versus Clemente

by Peter Fuller, 1984

If you too are sick of ‘bad painting’, you should have seen Frank Auerbach’s exhibition at Marlborough Gallery. (Auerbach does not exhibit frequently: this was his first one-man London show since the retrospective at the Hayward in 1978.) If you had done so, you would have seen some very good pictures indeed.

J.Y.M. Seated I, Frank Auerbach, 1981

I especially enjoyed a head and two seated portraits of J.Y.M.; and a reclining head of Gerda Boehm who has modelled for Auerbach over many years. But there were many fine paintings, both portraits and landscapes based on familiar territory for this artist - Primrose Hill, Euston Steps and The Studios, where he works. Auerbach also offered a consummate series of drawings, mostly of heads, including those of the Arts Council’s Catherine Lampert, Charlotte Podro, Julia, and J.Y.M.

In ‘Fragments from a Conversation’, a gnomic interview pub­lished in a quarterly review, X, in 1959, Auerbach once explained that he had painted the same model as many as thirty times. (I wonder what the relevant figure would be today, almost a quarter of a century later. How many times can Auerbach now have painted, say, E.O.W., J.Y.M. or Gerda Boehm?) But Auerbach confessed that he got the courage ‘to do the improvisation’ only at the end. This improvisation he identified with ‘gaiety’, which he described as ‘a serious word’.

But what has been true of his relationship with individual sitters may be even more so of his project as a painter itself. Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1931 and is thus still in his early fifties; I do not wish to suggest for one moment that he is near the end of his working life. He is, however, getting better as a painter all the time; and the strength of his recent work (so apparent in this exhibition) seems to have a great deal to do with qualities which derive from his increasing confidence in his own ability ‘to do the improvisation’.

J.Y.M. Seated II, Frank Auerbach

This statement requires some explanation. Just a few years ago in an article in Art Monthly (reprinted in Beyond The Crisis in Art) I compared Auerbach and Kossoff. I argued that Auerbach’s work was manifesting a growing detachment from perceived objects and persons. At that time, I felt that Kossoff was superior to Auerbach, and I suggested that the qualitative distinction between the two might have something to do with this difference. I felt Auerbach was tending to pursue the sensual qualities of painting (as substance and process) in a way which meant that his pictures were becoming more and more severed from empirical response to the real world. I tried to relate this difference to certain biographical distinctions between the two painters. But, without seeking for one moment to diminish the high esteem in which I hold Kossoff’s work, I would like to emphasise the degree to which these marvellous new paintings by Auerbach show up certain fallacies in my previous line of reasoning.

For it is now clear to me that the ‘looseness’ (if that is an appropriate word) of Auerbach’s recent painting is not the result of any loss of the sense of real, beyond the world of painting itself. Indeed, Auerbach’s superb drawings - and what a draughtsman this man is - seem to me to be the proof of this. He is certainly drawing from the model better than ever before - and he was always among the best. (Look, for example, at the fine Head of Julia, of 1981, illustrated on the cover of the Marlborough catalogue.) Whatever is happening in Auerbach’s painting cannot be ascribed to any attempt to veil given reality before he has taught himself to see it clearly; Auerbach is not intent upon evasion, or the drowning of the appearances of the real in numbing illusions, or a curtain of subjective, expressionistic gestures. Rather, he seems less and less intimidated by the imping­ing facticity of the real (to use the sorts of words he understand­ably rejects as being too ‘windy’) only because he is more and more familiar with it.

If the outside world was once like a forbidding father with whom he had to wrestle, and ultimately to subdue, it has recently become more like the face of a well-loved friend with whom he can afford a reciprocal relationship. Auerbach has thoroughly confronted its otherness, scrutinised its physiognomy, and accurately observed its changing moods; because it is no longer intract­able to him, he has acquired the courage to take what some might mistake as cavalier liberties in his painting and drawing. Look how that brush-stroke seems urgently to be seeking not the twist of a particular lip, but itself! But, in Auerbach, these are signs not of incompetence, or some brash insensitivity, but rather of a true intimacy with both the visual world, and his own practice, painting.

Gerda Boehm, Frank Auerbach

Indeed, I think his willingness to improvise from a position of achieved mastery is edging his work from the good towards the great. For Auerbach is among the very best of our living British artists. Indeed, I know of only one other British painter alive today whose work is of comparable stature, and that is Kossoff. Beside Auerbach, Francis Bacon is simply an able caricaturist and sen­timentalist: the emotions Bacon wishes to evoke are all too rarely earned in the material handling of his forms and colours.

There are those who say that such distinctions are arbitrary and unimportant; that they reveal only the ‘taste’, or the arrogance, of those who make them; and that all such judgments are no more than the exercise of personal whim, or fancy. The case of Frank Auerbach, however, demonstrates why evaluation is so important in our response to works of art.

Auerbach has long enjoyed the admiration of a limited and discriminating circle of artists, critics, collectors and other viewers. His paintings have not lacked buyers. But, as I have argued before, he has rarely been allocated even a niche in ‘The Story of Modern Art’. (Not a mention, let alone a reproduction, in Lynton’s book of that name.) For reasons I have tried to analyze elsewhere, during the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s the art world was blind to the fact that in the late David Bomberg, Auerbach, Kossoff and Creffield Britain had artists every bit as good as, say, De Kooning, and incomparably better than all the fashionable rubbish brought to prominence through the successive vogues of Late Modernism.

But today this position is changing. In ‘A New Spirit in Paint­ing’, at the Royal Academy two years ago, Auerbach was ‘reha­bilitated’ as the precursor, or Old Master, of a new expressionistic movement. Even though Auerbach is at last getting the sort of exposure he deserves, this ‘rehabilitation’ is as distorting as the previous neglect. Let me explain. If you pick up any history of Pop Art, you will see on around page eight a reproduction of Edward Hopper’s painting, Gas: the text will imply that the importance of Hopper lies in the fact that, as an early painter of petrol pumps, he anticipated Pop. Or have a look at the catalogue for ‘The Art of the Real’ exhibition which introduced American Minimalism at the Tate in 1969. A Rothko is similarly reproduced as if his true significance lay in the fact that he precursed all those blank squares and dead cubes, all that insensible ephemera.

Now the fashions for Pop and Minimalism have mercifully gone the same way as wide lapels, no one except the art historians should need reminding that Hopper was opposed to the anaesthe­sia the Pop artists instigated; or that Rothko’s pursuit of a symbolism of pure forms and colours which could convey high sentiments had nothing in common with that trendy renunciation of illusion, emotion and material skill which characterised mini­malist anti-art.

Auerbach’s ‘relation’ to today’s ‘New Expressionism’ is equally fortuitous. It has been elaborated from the observation of trivial and contingent resemblances, which depend upon putting all substantive question of value in brackets. The relationship be­tween Hopper and Pop, Rothko and Minimalism, or Auerbach and the Transavantgarde is really no stronger than that between Piero della Francesca’s Nativity and a plastic madonna from Lourdes.

Plot 78 by Francesco Clemente

Some will undoubtedly want to know in what Auerbach’s superior quality resides, and how it is to be recognised. Aesthetic quality is not some figment constructed outside the work through discourse, ideology, interest or promotional opportunism. Rather, it is realised, or not, as the case may be, through material transformations of paint, canvas and pictorial conventions. The capacity to recognise it, however, appears to be rooted in a genetically variable ability for intuitive judgment and/or the cultivation of exceptional taste.

But painting, as Auerbach once said, is a ‘practical thing’, and ‘words are so windy’. Although we can never strike the ground and reveal the source of aesthetic quality in a way which places it beyond dispute, we can always indicate its necessary, if not sufficient, conditions in things more practical and substantial than verbal exhalations. I would, for example, emphasise here Au­erbach’s consummate mastery of drawing; his relatively recent flowering as a colourist capable of playing the full emotional range; the increasing sureness of touch, which has enabled him to shift from mere accretion of pigment to a vividly lyrical handling which loses nothing in sensuousness; and his evocation of the ‘Great Tradition’ of Rembrandt’s humanist painting, which he calls upon to redeem his expressionism from solipsistic sub­jectivity.

But the mastery of such material and technical elements, though seemingly essential, guarantees nothing. And I believe Auerbach to have been right when he spoke of the seriousness of those qualities (like painterly gaiety) which spring immediately from improvisation.

For, in the absence of a widely accepted iconography, the way in which such improvisation is elaborated becomes decisive. As you can currently see at the Royal Academy, a painter like Murillo could call upon the iconography of the Madonna, celestial utopias and flying putti as the means of changing his childhood yearnings into a present and socially comprehensible vision of a spiritually redolent world. But that transformation of the physically per­ceived which could once be made manifest by allegoric devices, like haloes and ‘human’ wings, can now only be realised through the transfiguration of formal means like drawing, colour and touch. And I think it is because his indubitable technical mastery has transcended itself and entered this arena of imaginative, and improvised, transfiguration that Auerbach is able to produce works of such exceptional quality.

This transfiguration, or what I have called elsewhere ‘redemp­tion through form’, is the hallmark of successful expressionism. It is something which Auerbach shares with Rouault (in his great paintings of Parisian whores) or Soutine (especially in the carcass of beef canvases.) However sour the subject matter they are presenting, or angst-ridden the emotions that inform their work, these painters know how to bring about an illusory aesthetic redemption, and to leave their viewers with a feeling of the ‘good’, through the way in which they improvise upon the formal means they have learned and mastered.

But today’s new expressionistic painters know nothing about this; they want to evoke their feelings, to allude to them, not really to express them at all. Go and look at Clemente at D’Offay’s, and the Whitechapel . . . and then return to Auerbach. Clemente has never looked at the world; at least, he has not yet seen it. He has no idea how a head meets the shoulders, a limb the torso, or a wall the ceiling. But nor can he have looked much at art. He is pictorially illiterate. He has not achieved competence, let alone mastery, in the necessary material skills of painting: he cannot draw; he has no sense of colour at all; his grasp of composition is weak; and he seems to have no virtuosity in the handling of his materials. Little wonder then that there is infinitely more of this magic of aesthetic transfiguration in a single drawing by Auerbach of Catherine Lampert’s head than in both Clemente’s bombastic series of daubings. Clemente cannot even come out fighting, let alone dance like a butterfly, or sting like a bee.

If we compare Auerbach to Clemente we can see revealed (as clearly as it is ever revealed) the palpable difference between work of potentially enduring stature and fashionable trash. Clemente has been elevated to his present cultural prominence on tides of fashion and interest (tendentious as well as financial). But Au­erbach is one of very few painters working in Europe or America today of whom it is possible to say with any degree of credibility that here, I believe, is a master in the making.

1983

MODERN ART: The Rise Of Modernism

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

Today marks the 30 year memorial of Peter’s passing, below is Matthew Colling’s BBC tribute to Peter from 1990.

The Rise Of Modernism

by Peter Fuller

This series of seminars began by pointing to a weakness in the traditional Marxist approach to art, a weakness manifest in the writings of Marx himself, which is immediately raised when we ask the question: How do works of art outlive their origins? I suggested that Sebastiano Timpanaro had pointed to the direction in which we might look for an answer by emphasising the relative biological constancy of ‘the human condition’, a constancy which underlies socio-economic historical variation. I further argued that psychoanalysis, at least psychoanalysis understood as a theory of biological meaning, could thereby be expected to provide a significant component in any materialist aesthetics.

In these last two seminars we will look at what would be another Achilles’ heel of Marxist approaches to works of art, were it possible to have more than one. We will approach the problem of abstraction, or, more generally, why it is that certain types of art which seem to bear no discernible relationship to the perception of the objective world not only appear to us to be ‘good’ but are also capable of giving us intense pleasure.

However 1 am afraid that once again it is going to be necessary to burrow towards tentative answers in a rather labyrinthine way. To hark back to our last session, it may well appear to you at times that I have arrived here with a bag of disjointed fragments. But I would ask you to bear with me. Although it may sometimes seem that we are toying with an extraneous left foot that got attached to the torso of the argument in error, I think, in fact, it does add up.

I would like to begin by referring to a book called, On Not Being Able to Paint, written by Marion Milner, and published in 1950. This book is well-known among educationalists and psychologists, though not, I think, among artists, nor indeed anywhere within the art world. In one sense I suppose that is not surprising: what title could be more seemingly irrelevant to someone who does paint than, On Not Being Able to Paint! In fact, however, Milner’s book is among the most interesting of all texts by practising psychoanalysts on art.

In her introduction, Milner explains how she had spent five years in schools making a scientific study of the way in which children were affected by orthodox educational methods; she found herself subject to growing misgivings about this work and felt that these misgivings were connected with the ‘problem of psychic creativity’. Gradually she came to the view that ‘somehow the problem might be approached through studying one specific area in which I myself had failed to learn something that I wanted to learn.’1 That something, for Milner, was painting:

‘Always, ever since early childhood, I had been interested in learning how to paint. But in spite of having acquired some technical facility in representing the appearance of objects my efforts had always tended to peter out in a maze of uncertainties about what a painter is really trying to do. ’2 The choice of painting as the means towards finding out something about ‘the general educational problem’ was facilitated when Milner discovered that ‘it was possible at times to produce drawings or sketches in an entirely different way from that I had been taught, a way of letting hand and eye do exactly what pleased them without any conscious working to a preconceived intention.’ The book chronicles her attempt to learn to paint largely through the making of drawings in this way. Now I cannot summarise the richness of Milner’s text here, but I do want to focus upon two moments within it. One is what she has to say about her problems with perspective; the other concerns the nature of outline.

Milner explains that at first instead of ‘trying to puzzle out the meaning’ of her free drawings, she carried on ‘trying to study the painter’s task from books’. Up until this point she had assumed that all the painter’s practical problems to do with representing distance, solidity, the grouping of objects, dif­ferences of light and shade and so on were matters for common sense, combined with careful study. ‘But,’ she writes, ‘when I tried to begin such careful study there seemed some unknown force interfering.’ It soon became clear to her the difficulty was that ‘the imaginative mind could have strong views of its own on the meanings of light, distance, darkness and so on.’ A particular instance of this was the interference of imagination in perspective drawing. This is how Milner describes it:

‘In spite of having been taught, long ago at school, the rules of perspective, I had recently found that whenever a drawing showed more or less correct perspective, as in drawing a room for instance, the result seemed not worth the effort. But one day I had tried drawing an imaginary room . . . and after a struggle, had managed to avoid showing the furniture in correct per­spective. The drawing had been more satisfying than any earlier ones, though I had no notion why. ’3 It then occurred to her that ‘it all depended upon what aspects of objects one was most concerned with’:

‘It was as if one’s mind could want to express the feelings that come from the sense of touch and muscular movement rather than from the sense of sight. In fact it was almost as if one might not want to be concerned, in drawing, with those facts of detachment and separation that are introduced when an ob­serving eye is perched upon a sketching stool, with all the at­tendant facts of a single-view-point and fixed eye-level and horizontal lines that vanish. It seemed one might want some kind of relation to objects in which one was much more mixed up with them than that.’4

Now at first it seemed to Milner that her ‘unwillingness to face the visual facts of space and distance must be a cowardly at­titude, a retreat from the responsibilities of being a separate person.’ But it did not feel to her entirely like a retreat; it felt, she writes, ‘more like a search, a going backwards perhaps, but a going back to look for something, something which could have real value for adult life if only it could be recovered. ’5 Milner had read that ‘painting is concerned with the feelings conveyed by space’, but she realised that before she herself set out to learn to paint she had taken space for granted and never reflected upon what it might mean in terms of feeling:

‘But as soon as I did begin to think about it, it was clear that very intense feelings might be stirred. If one saw it as the primary reality to be manipulated for the satisfaction of all one’s basic needs, beginning with the babyhood problem of reaching for one’s mother’s arms, leading through all the separation from what one loves that the business of living brings, then it was not so surprising that it should be the main preoccupation of the painter ... So it became clear that if painting is concerned with the feelings conveyed by space then it must also be to do with problems of being a separate body in a world of other bodies which occupy different bits of space: in fact it must be deeply concerned with ideas of distance and separation and having and losing.’6 Milner also comments:

‘There were many other aspects of the emotions conveyed by space to be considered. For instance, once you begin to think about distance and separation it is also necessary to think about different ways of being together, or in the jargon of the painting books, composition. ’7 Thus Milner came to see that original work in painting ‘would demand facing certain facts about oneself as a separate being’, facts, she felt, ‘that could often perhaps be successfully by­passed in ordinary living. ’

I now want to turn to what Milner says about outline. It was, she writes, ‘through the study of outline in painting that it became clearer what might be the nature of the spiritual dangers to be faced, if one was to see as the painter sees.’ She then points out that, until she set out on this attempt to learn to paint through free drawings, she ‘had always assumed in some vague way that outlines were “real” ’. In a book about drawing, however, she read that ‘from the visual point of view . . . the boundaries (of masses) are not always clearly defined, but are continually merging into the surrounding mass and losing themselves, to be caught up again later on and defined once more.’8 She then started to look at the objects around her more carefully and found that this was true:

‘When really looked at in relation to each other their outlines were not clear and compact, as I had always supposed them to be, they continually became lost in shadow. Two questions emerged here. First, how was it possible to have remained unaware of this fact for so long? Second, why was such a great mental effort necessary in order to see the edges of objects as they actually show themselves rather than as I had always thought of them?’9 Milner then says that outlines put objects in their place\ this seemed the crux of the matter. ‘For,’ she writes:

‘I noticed that the effort needed in order to see the edges of objects as they really look stirred a dim fear, a fear of what might happen if one let go one’s mental hold on the outline which kept everything separate and in its place.’ Milner then goes on to describe a key experience:

‘After thinking about this I woke one morning and saw two jugs on the table; without any mental struggle I saw the edges in relation to each other, and how gaily they seemed almost to ripple now that they were freed from this grimly practical business of enclosing an object and keeping it in its place. This was surely what painters meant about the play of edges; certainly they did play and I tried a five-minute sketch of the jugs . . . Now also it was easier to understand what painters meant by the phrase “freedom of line’’ because here surely was a reason for its opposite; that is, the emotional need to imprison objects rigidly within themselves. Milner began to perceive that we believe outlines are real (unless we learn to paint) despite the fact that they are, as one ‘Learn to Paint’ book puts it, ‘the one fundamentally unrealistic, non- imitative thing in this whole job of painting’. But because the outline represents the world of fact, of separate, touchable, solid objects, ‘to cling to it was therefore surely to protect oneself against the other world, the world of imagination.’12 Milner thus came to see that insistence upon the reality of outline was associated with:

‘. . . a fear of losing all sense of separating boundaries; par­ticularly the boundaries between the tangible realities of the external world and the imaginative realities of the inner world of feeling and idea; in fact a fear of being mad. ’13 She even ventured the aside:

‘. . . I wondered, if perhaps this was one reason why new experiments in painting can arouse such fierce opposition and anger. People must surely be afraid, without knowing it, that their hold upon reason and sanity is precarious, else they would not so resent being asked to look at visual experience in a new way, they would not be so afraid of not seeing the world as they have always seen it and in the general, publicly agreed way of seeing it.’

Later, we will return to the question of the relationship between insistence upon perspective and outline and history; however, for the moment let us leave Milner with her intriguing problems over objective space and the rippling boundaries of her jugs, at least for the time being, and pick up another of the pieces that I am trying to fit together in this seminar.

This section, as a matter of fact, concerns me intimately: we have reached what seems to have become a regular feature in these seminars, the autobiographical interlude. Now I want to tell you something about the changes, I would say the growth, in—I’ll keep the word for the moment—my ‘taste’ since childhood.

As far as I can remember, I first became interested in paintings when I was seven or eight years old. My father had a great many illustrated art books, and I would take these down from his shelves and look at them. My family also frequently visited art galleries and stately homes but, significantly perhaps,

I think I got more at least at first, from the art books. Initially there was an element of naked sexual investigation about my looking. I saw a lot of different works of art in reproduction, but by and large I was most impressed by those of women without their clothes. At first my art appreciation was ac­companied by some guilt feelings; the books belonged to my father and I did not have his permission to gaze upon them. The Oedipal component in this looking is so transparent that it is hardly worth commenting on. Incorporation of visual images is one of the ways in which from infancy to old age we take possession in fantasy of that which we cannot (but wish we could) possess in reality. But despite the primitive character of my interest in art at this time, it would be wrong to suppose that it was entirely without that which someone like Clive Bell might have diagnosed as a rudimentary ‘aesthetic sensibility’.

Let me explain more fully: at first, I did not make much distinction between medical books (of which my father also had a great many) and art books. But soon I was aware of a sense of goodness when I set eyes upon, say, the Rokeby Venus in reproduction, which I did not feel when I looked at, say, Plate V of ‘An Atlas of Gas Poisoning’ contained in a Medical Manual of Chemical Warfare which illustrated, as it so happens, ‘Blistering of the Buttocks by Mustard Gas’. Now this sense of ‘goodness’ could not be explained by reference to the im­mediate sensuousness of the subject matter alone, which was often similar in those art books and medical manuals which interested me—though in the latter, of course, it tended to be more explicit. Nor, I think, could it be wholly accounted for by saying that art allowed me to indulge my unacceptable ‘in­stinctual’ voyeuristic impulses in an acceptable way. This could be no more than a part of the truth, if that. Borrowing art books was no less an offence than borrowing medical books. Despite the specificities of the latter I soon came to prefer the former.

This rather vague sense of ‘goodness’ which I derived from certain paintings, even in black-and-white and colour repro­ductions, had much to do with the development of my ‘taste’. If I was a certain kind of writer about art, I would no doubt claim that this sense of ‘goodness’ and my quest for it represented the awakening of a pure, unsullied, autonomous, ‘aesthetic sensibility’ to ‘Significant Form’, or something of the kind, in the midst of all that crudely sexual researching. But personally, I am inclined to doubt this.

To speak formally, for a moment, it seems to me when I look back that my pursuit of ‘goodness’ was bound up, among other things, with a growing capacity to take greater risks with outline in my perception and enjoyment of images. At first, I was not greatly interested in either colour or what is now called the ‘materiality’ of the paint. Subject matter and drawing were what concerned me most, which was why a black-and-white reproduction was almost as good as the real thing. I began by liking Ingres, where the woman’s body was tightly contained within a constraining outline. I progressed towards Botticelli: despite his ‘naturalism’, his paintings had an abstracted, arabesque quality which was somehow much less insistent on being ‘real’. For example, I was fascinated by the fact that in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus you can still see where the artist changed the position of the outline of the right arm, a degree of ambivalence which would have been quite inconceivable in a major painting by Ingres. Then I became interested in Modigliani, a painter again who insists on the reality of line— where would Modigliani be without it?—but who often hints at a kind of mergence between the figure bound in by the outline and the background against which she is set. (There are some Modiglianis in which it is hard to tell whether a particular passage of paint is depicting flesh, wall, or both.) Later still, I became interested in Matisse—yes, still outline of course, but in him it becomes provocatively fluid, as tremulous and variable as we see it in the real world, rather than as rigid as the non­painters among us often imagine it to be.

I remember that I was stimulated both to start looking seriously at modern art (which was, of course, ignored when it was not derided within the ‘19th century’ culture in which I spent my childhood) and to paint myself through a triggering contingency: seeing Tony Hancock’s film, The Rebel. I was fourteen at the time. Some of you may remember what, in truth, was a rather banal plot. Hancock plays a ‘modernist’ artist of little ability who shares a Parisian garret with a representational artist of great ability. The only thing they have in common is that they are both poor and unknown. One day, Hancock is in the garret and is ‘discovered’; however, he is assumed to be the producer of his friend’s works. These are duly exhibited and Hancock is celebrated on account of them. But soon the pressure is on him to produce more canvases of similar quality, which, of course, he cannot do. Eventually his friend, who for reasons I cannot recall colludes with the mistaken identity, supplies him with a fresh batch of works. These turn out to be abstract paintings; Hancock is horrified and convinced that ‘his’ career is finished. But the backers and critics acclaim these abstract works as loudly as they did the representational ones. Hancock, who thought it was all a question of style, shrugs his shoulders and gives up any attempt to make sense of the art world.

All right: the film was silly enough. I’m certainly not recommending it. It may well have been intended as a satire on the values of the art world, but the message I took away from it was that facility in ‘objective’ representation was not decisive. Up until this time, I had always been relatively indifferent to drawing and painting myself because I was hopelessly inept at what seemed to be the essentials of these practices, and which had indeed been taught as such in my preparatory school, i.e. mastery of such things as perspective and ‘realistic’ outline. Perhaps at this stage in my life I was simply too dissociated from the external world: anyway, I could not even begin to draw in that sort of way. But, when I saw The Rebel, it confirmed a dawning realisation that these were not the only things which counted in image making: this was given tremendous en­couragement by a sympathetic art teacher at public school. And so I entered into a prodigious period of pictorial productivity which really persisted, whatever else I was doing, until I was twenty-one. This was checked, at various times, by a desire— never to be fulfilled—to master the ‘objective’ aspects of drawing. I remember my art teacher once patiently trying to teach me how to draw light and shadow using the surface of an egg as a model—at my own request. It was no use, and I gave up in despair. On another occasion, I abandoned all imaginative explorations, and tried to study artist’s anatomy, and ‘How to Draw the Nude’ books. That did not last either. These two images—both done about the same time, when I was sixteen—indicate the discrepancy between my capacity to depict, as it were, representations of objects in my ‘inner’ and in the ‘outer’ world.

As a matter of fact, that discrepancy never was resolved in terms of my practice as a maker of visual images. My ‘taste’ however did not develop in harness with my creativity. I continued to admire those who were exemplary of that which I was least able to do myself. (I spent many hours gazing at Leonardo’s drawings in a book in the school library.) Of course,

I did become increasingly interested in abstract painting; by the time I was fifteen, I had developed a passion for Mondrian. I even remember writing a poem about him in the style of Robert Browning’s marvellous ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’. Looking back on the development of my relationship to abstract art I am inclined to the view that what was important for me was the affective meaning of the space, and that there was a sense in which at times, though not often and not for long, I could do without the presence of the figure itself. At least I am aware that, once established, the trajectory of my pursuit of abstract painting closely paralleled that of my changing interest in the figure. I got to know Mondrian largely through colour reproductions: I did not realise, therefore, just how painterly some of his works are. I read him essentially as a painter of outline, an Ingres, if you like. I responded to something almost clinical, contained and restrained, linear and ‘objective’ in his ‘classical’ works. Nonetheless, it was through Mondrian that I went on to look at Kandinsky, and later still, Klee, where I felt lost in a world of almost magical transformations and transfigurations. (On looking back at the copy of Klee’s On Modern Art which I had in adolescence I was interested to note that I had underlined the words, ‘I do not wish to represent the man as he is, but only as he might be’15—an idea which was to play a central part in my later aesthetics.)

The painters I was able to appreciate last were those whose space seemed to me to be an attempt to fuse internal and ex­ternal: this was, of course, something I responded to affectively (often initially by defensive boredom) rather than something I thought through intellectually. Although I looked voraciously at everything I came across, I had difficulty with impressionist painting for a long time, because the concrete world just seemed too subjectivised there, too insubstantial, too close to diffusion and dissolution. (I think the lateness of my interest in colour had much to do with this, too. Again, to speak af­fectively rather than epistemologically, colour seems to be the most subjective of an object’s properties; to depict the world through colour alone felt, to me, like depriving it of actuality and solidity, qualities which, psychologically speaking, were difficult enough for me to recognise anyway.) Much the same went for Cezanne, too. Cubism simply did not interest me, or enter my world, until I was at least seventeen.

But, as my interest in painting deepened, artists who were involved in this fusion came to interest me more and more. For example, among painters of the female figure whom I began to enjoy after initial indifference with what I can only somewhat pompously describe as a sense of ‘awakening goodness’ were Bonnard and De Kooning. I am not sure when I first began to like Bonnard: I saw the Royal Academy show in 1966. It must have been about that time. But it is only very recently that I have allowed myself to realise just what an important painter he is for me. In his work, the woman is entirely unleashed from her outline. Berger has brilliantly described what he calls ‘the risk of loss’ in a Bonnard painting, the fact that the figure is ‘simultaneously an absence and a presence,’ because she is ‘potentially everywhere except specifically near.’16 He describes how in a Bonnard painting one is confronted with ‘the image of a woman losing her physical limits, overflowing, overlapping every surface until she is no less and no more than the genius loci of the whole room.’17 You can see this most literally in paintings like The Open Window of 1921—and it is by no means the only one like this—where you sense the fleshly presence of a woman in the whole picture surface, but you do not at first (and sometimes not even at length) notice that Bonnard has literally included an equivocal representation of a woman, in this instance in the extreme bottom right-hand corner of the picture. Although Berger has described this aspect of Bonnard better than any other writer I have read, he is rather critical of it, indeed of Bonnard’s work as a whole.

For myself, let me just say at this stage that this apparent loss of the physical limits of the woman’s body, this restless overlapping, was, I think, what prevented me from enjoying Bonnard when I first saw his work. I was frightened by it, and I covered my fear, as is so often the case, with a veneer of in­difference. Later, the painter Robert Natkin told me the story of a visit by Balthus to an art gallery where a Bonnard hung between a Picasso and a Soutine. Balthus looked at the Picasso, and then at the Soutine, and finally at the Bonnard—at which he exclaimed, ‘Ah! At last, real violence.’ I knew what he meant at once. Today I would say that it is this very in­determinacy of outline, the peculiar kind of space one gets in Bonnard which both is, and is not, based on a perspectival pictorial structure, which, in its imagery as well as through the way that it is painted fuses inner with outer—(it is no accident that one of Bonnard’s favourite themes is an open window simultaneously revealing interior and exterior, another a body almost literally dissolving in water)—that accounts for the intensity of pleasure which I can derive from looking at his works. Do you know Bonnard’s drawings? His lines at first seem to be a literal con-fusion: he seems to me to draw fluently in a way which Milner was struggling towards in that moment with her two jugs.

Pierre Bonnard, The Open Window, 1921

Now Bonnard offers a highly equivocal sort of space. When he paints a woman, an interior, or a landscape, he makes it very unclear indeed who is separate from what, what merges with whom, who belongs where, out there, or in here. I see works of this kind as almost, but not quite, the culmination of that search for ‘goodness’ which began, I suppose, when I noticed that slight blurring or warm fuzzing in the outline of the Rokeby Venus which differentiates it from Ingres, and in­cidentally from pin-ups. Now I am aware that much of my interest in certain ‘abstract’ painters, like De Kooning, Rothko, and Natkin, could be seen as the final step in what has been a relatively continuous, if uneven transformation of an aspect of my taste from the time when I first started poring over Ingres in reproduction. Harold Rosenberg once wrote of De Kooning that in his mature work, ‘landscapes and the human figure become in Shakespeare’s phrase “dislimned and indistinct as water”.’18In Natkin one just goes right over the edge. Out­line vanishes altogether; one is confronted with a sensuous skin of paint which then bursts open into a limitless vista. One moves into a painted world where nothing is locked by line and everything exists in a boundless and plenitudi- nous state of transformation and becoming. I look upon it, and find it ‘good’, though more than a trace of the fear that would have stopped me looking at Natkin at all a few years ago remains. Now I will have a lot more to say about this change in my taste later on. Next time, I will talk in detail about the affective meanings of the space in Natkin and Rothko. But, for the moment, I want to stop here and pick up another of the pieces out of which this seminar is made. This will involve us in a little art history.

Some of you may have an idea of the particular historical perspective with which I have surrounded my art criticism over the last few years.19 However, for the purposes of our argument it is necessary to outline it briefly here.

I try never to let people forget that the idea of ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) is of extremely recent origins. In England, we do not find the words ‘Art’ and ‘artists’ used in the sense in which they are used today, i.e. as referring to imaginative skills and practitioners, rather than to just any skills, until the end of the 18th century. The word ‘Art’ came into being with the rise of the middle-classes and the emergence of a professional'Fine Art tradition. The nature of the Fine Art tradition varied con­siderably from country to country: for example, in the Italian city states at the time of the Renaissance some artists seemed to spring directly out of the indigenous craft traditions; they were acclaimed as men of ‘genius’ and, unlike the ‘primitives’, their own name was attached to their work. In Britain, however, such immediate transcendence out of the craft traditions was not possible. The craft traditions had fallen into decadence before the waning of High Feudalism; they were obliterated through the iconoclasm of the British Reformation. Until the 18th century, fine artists were effectively imported. However, everywhere that national Fine Art traditions established themselves they were characterised by a particular training. Professional fine artists acquired the skillful use of a specific set of pictorial conventions: conventions of pose, anatomy, chiaroscuro and above all perspective. Now these were not taught as historical variables, but as being the way of depicting ‘The Truth’. Hitherto, with Berger, I have argued that these conventions equipped fine artists to depict the world from the point of view of that class which they served, and that only the exceptions tried to defy their training by, as it were, forcing the conventions they had learned to serve the point of view of another class. I still consider that there is much truth in this. Nonetheless, I would now maintain that the science of ex­pression, as elaborated theoretically by Alberti and as practised by such artists as Leonardo and Michelangelo, had a concrete, cultural and class transcendent basis in anatomy, which prevented it from being reducible to a mere ideological in­stance.

It is, however, undeniable that the growth of professional Fine Art traditions was accompanied by the efflorescence of an accompanying ideology of ‘Art’ which was elaborated by artists, art historians, critics, and later museum officials. This ideology turned ‘Art’ into a transhistorical universal and projected it, together with its values, back into the earliest known social formations. As the great archaeological discoveries of the 19th century were made, fine artists came more and more to see themselves as the consummation of an unbroken continuum of ‘Art’ stretching back from the Royal Academy to prehistoric caves.

However, the reality behind this ideological mystification was rather different. Although in every known civilisation men and women had always made visual images of one sort and another, they had done so in a great variety of different ways, and these images had served a multitude of different functions. (Nonetheless, and this is a point insufficiently emphasised in my previous analyses, certain specific practices, most notably painting and sculpture, can be shown to have a material continuity since the beginnings of human civilisation.) Prior to the rise of the professional Fine Art traditions, there was no equivalent of either ‘art’ or artists; but Fine Art’s mystification of itself allowed it to disguise the fact that its status was changing profoundly with the development of new means of visual image making—like photography and lithography. These really came into their own when monopoly capitalism displaced the old entrepreneurial capitalist system, and the bourgeoisie as a progressive class began to wither. Associated with the emergence of monopoly capitalism was the ef­florescence of what I have designated as ‘The Mega-Visual Tradition’: by that I mean that whole welter of means of producing and reproducing images which includes not just photography, mass colour printing, lithography, and hol­ography, but the moving pictures of cinema and television, too. Indeed, I argue that just as free-standing oil painting was the dominant form of static visual imagery under en­trepreneurial capitalism, advertising is the dominant form of static visual image making under monopoly capitalism.

Now this process of displacement of the old Fine Art tradition from the task of conveying the world-view of the bourgeoisie initially had the effect of opening up possibilities for the imaginative artist. He was no longer pinned down within a particular ‘visual ideology’. For a very brief period— roughly from the time of Cezanne’s maturity in the 1880s until the death of Cubism — what I would characterise as a ‘progressive’ Modernist movement (or rather plethora of related movements) thus came into being.

Certain of the artists in some of these movements at­tempted—in some instances consciously, in others not—to act as visual prophets of the new world order which they felt was in the process of coming into being. We must not forget the exhilarating promise which seemed to be implicit in the advance of the bourgeoisie throughout the 19th century, a promise which seemed to be on the very threshold of realisation in the technological progress associated with emergent monopoly capitalism. An attainable vision of the transformation of the world into a place where the problem of need had been solved and natural resources fully socialised seemed to be at hand. I agree with Berger when he depicts Cubism as an attempt (even if it was not recognised as such by those engaged in it) to struggle out of the old perspective-based Fine Art conventions towards a half-expression of a new way of seeing and represent­ing the world appropriate to what seemed to be the new, emergent world order.20 Actually, this initiative was smashed to pieces by the First World War and the long, and still con­tinuing, series of historic calamities and catastrophes which put an end, forever, to hopes for a peaceful, ‘evolutionary’ tran­sition to the new Utopia.

By and large, it is possible to characterise Modernism after the decline and disillusionment of the great avant-garde movements as a retreat, by artists, from even the attempt to articulate a historic world-view to replace the now displaced 19th century, middle-class optic and perspective. The reasons for this retreat appear to have been two-fold: on the one hand, history seems simply to have dazed and outstripped artists; on the other, the ‘Mega-Visual Tradition’ continued to pump out an ever escalating quantity of banalising lies as the century progressed, swamping, marginalising, disrupting and eclipsing the products and practices of fine artists.

Thus Berger has described most post-First-World-War Western Art as a sort of epilogue to the European and American 19th century professional Fine Art traditions, an epilogue in which painting is reduced to a dialogue with itself, about itself, because there is no other area of experience upon which it can touch meaningfully, except itself. I have elaborated the notion of the kenosis or self-emptying of the Fine Art tradition: kenosis is a term I borrowed from theology. I am using it to refer to the apparent relinquishment of the professional and conventional skills by Fine Artists and to the abandonment of the omni­potent power the painter once seemed to possess to create, like God, a whole world of objects in space through illusions on a canvas. I see this general kenosis as having been ruptured at various points—most notably after the Second World War in Europe, New York, London, Chicago and elsewhere—by tremendous outbursts of expressionism in which artists at­tempted to find ways of speaking meaningfully of their ex­perience, including historical experience, once more. Nonethe­less, the process of kenosis, with these occasional regenerative hiccups, proceeds.

That is the historical perspective which underlies my critical practice. By and large, it still seems to me to be a truthful and a useful analysis. But I now want to modify it slightly. I want to approach the problem in a rather different way.

To this end, I now wish to produce the next fragment of that statue which I am piecing together. It consists of a book by Clive Bell, called simply Art, first published in 1914, that pivotal year in the destiny of the old professional Fine Art traditions and, as it turned out, of much else besides. Together with Roger Fry, Bell is often regarded on the Left as the source of all the trouble. Fry and Bell are seen as the theoretical precursors of the self-critical formalism of late Modernism. In them, we find the elaboration of the idea that ‘Art’ constitutes an autonomous, self-contained, entity which we can only truly experience if and because it evokes in us certain types of sui generis emotion, which have nothing to do with other human emotions, or with lived experience beyond the experience of art. Art, they maintain, should thus be appreciated without reference to the representational, psychological, social, politi­cal, religious, or other non-aesthetic considerations which it might evoke.

Let me say straight away, to preclude the possibility of misunderstanding, I am absolutely not about to re-habilitate Bell: he was opinionated, arrogant, ultimately down-right reactionary—one of the nastiest weeds to have flourished in Bloomsbury, and he got it all (or almost all) wrong to boot.21 But equally, if I am not going to rehabilitate Bell, I am not going to kick him either: that would be much too easy. The brand of aesthetic formalism to which his kind of critical thinking gave rise has been getting an atrocious press recently. Formalism is no longer a cultural danger or a worthy opponent. On the other hand, I would maintain not just that Bell’s book is a key text in the emergent ideology of late Modernism (which it is), but also that embodied within it are kernels of truth which have escaped almost all of those who have put forward critiques of formalism from left positions. With a little help from psychoanalysis, I want to isolate one of those kernels of truth, to extract it, unravel it, and preserve it. It not only constitutes something germane to my argument, but also that which ‘Social Criticism’, the rising orthodoxy, seems in danger of losing sight of altogether.

Let me explain.

Bell claims to offer ‘a complete theory of visual art’, and in many ways it is a very simple theory. He argues that ‘all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we speak of “works of art” we gibber.’22 He then asks, ‘What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions?’ And he arrives at what seems to him the only possible answer:

‘—significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call “Significant Form’’; and “Significant Form” is the one quality common to all works of visual art. ’23 You can spot right away the sort of clangers which this rope of reasoning is going to wring from our Bell. What can be the status of ‘works of art’ which fail to stir his aesthetic emotions? According to the theory, they must lack Significant Form, and therefore, cannot by definition, be thought of as works of art at all. It is, I suppose, to Mr. Bell’s credit that he pushed this view through to its logical conclusion: most works of art are not works of art at all. The book is peppered with such observations as:

‘I cannot believe that more than one in a hundred works produced between 1450 and 1850 can be properly described as a work of art.’24 Or again:

‘. . . the Impressionists raised the proportion of works of art in the general pictorial output from about one in five hundred thousand to one in a hundred thousand. . . . Today I daresay it stands as high as one in ten thousand.’25 You also quickly come to realise that whatever stirs Clive Bell’s aesthetic emotion, it is not the products of the professional Fine Art tradition. It is no exaggeration to say that Bell had an almost hysterical disregard for the Renaissance (although he modified this position in his later works) and especially for its discovery of perspective. He calls the Renaissance ‘a strange new disease’, and ‘nothing more than a big kink in a long slope’. He often makes such comments as, ‘the decline from the 11th to the 17th century is continuous,’ or, ‘more first-rate art was produced in Europe between 500 and 900 than was produced in the same countries between 1450 and 1850,’ or:

‘This alone seems to me sure: since the Byzantine primitives set their mosaics at Ravenna no artist in Europe has created forms of greater significance unless it be Cezanne. ’26 Now the curious thing about the way in which Mr. Bell argues is that it is precisely ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) in the historically- specific sense which he effectively denies to be art at all. Art, for Bell—i.e. that which stirs his aesthetic emotions—flourished among the so-called European Primitives of the Dark and Middle Ages, was all but extinguished by the Renaissance and that which followed it, and came to life again with Cezanne who ‘founded a movement’, a movement which Bell (writing before the First World War at a time when he would still have described himself as some sort of socialist) described as ‘the dawn of a new age’.

What did Bell have against the Renaissance? Well, he felt that during it ‘Naturalism’ and ‘Materialism’ had driven out what he called ‘pure aesthetic rapture’. He compalined that in the art of the Renaissance, ‘intellect is filling the void left by emotion’, and that the work of artists was being supplanted ‘by Science and culture’. These things, in Bell’s view, had nothing at all to do with art: he was even more scathing about 17th century Holland, another place where, he felt, art barely existed at all. ‘We have lost art,’ he wrote of Dutch painting of this period, ‘let us study science and imitation.’27 In short, he complains that ‘the outstanding fact is that with the Renaissance Europe definitely turns her back on the spiritual view of life.’28 Bell could not even accept the Impressionists, because, in his view, they were too scientific.

At this point, I simply want to raise the fact that Bell’s view of art is exceptionally close to his conception of religious ex­perience. He says that ‘Art and religion belong to the same world. Both are bodies in which men try to capture and keep alive their shyest and most ethereal conceptions. The kingdom of neither is of this world.’ He describes art as ‘an expression of that emotion which is the vital force in every religion . . . We may say that art and religion are manifestations of man’s religious sense if by “man’s religious sense’’ we mean his sense of ultimate reality.’2'' At one point, he even exclaims, ‘from the beginning art has existed as a religion concurrent with all other religions.’

Is all this, as Bell himself might have said, mere ‘gibbering’? In one sense, yes, I am afraid that it is: but, like religious piffle itself, it does contain that vital kernel which I referred to earlier. It is not enough simply to laugh at Bell and to throw ‘aesthetic emotion’ otlt of the window as so many of both the ‘left’ social critics and ‘right’ formalists have done. We have to do to Bell’s aesthetics what Feuerbach did to Christianity: we have to invert them, to locate the experiences which they describe in this world, to resolve them into their anthropological and biological determinants. I think this may be possible. For the moment, let us leave Bell with a passage in which he contrasts ‘the superb peaks of aesthetic exaltation’ with ‘the snug foothills of warm humanity’. The latter, he writes, is ‘a jolly country’:

‘No one need be ashamed of enjoying himself there. Only no one who has ever been on the heights can help feeling a little crestfallen in the cosy valleys. And let no one imagine, because he has made merry in the warm tilth and quaint nooks of romance, that he can even guess at the austere and thrilling raptures of those who have climbed the cold, white peaks of art.’30

We will return to examine those thrilling raptures and those cold white peaks later, but I hope that by now at least some of you will be beginning to see where all our threads are going to be tied. I am suggesting that there is something significant in common between the difficulties Milner had with perspective and outline; the development of my taste from Ingres to Natkin and Rothko; the historical crisis in the Fine Art tradition; and Bell’s rejection of the most characteristic products of that tradition in favour of raptures on those cold, white peaks. That something was not just a retreat from experience: it was also a retrieval of it.

You will remember that I made some reference to Adrian Stokes’ ideas about ‘modelling modes’ and ‘carving modes’—a distinction which, of course, he regarded as being as relevant within painting as sculpture. Stokes, a Kleinian, tended to associate the carving mode with ‘the depressive position’, with the separateness, autonomy and otherness of the object; whereas he links the modelling mode with the ‘paranoid- schizoid’ position, with flatness, decoration, and failure to establish a separate identity, or to recognise the distinction and space between the self and the mother.

For a moment, I want to talk in gross generalities. I want to say, preposterously, that, prior to the Renaissance, the ideology of space and its representation in visual images was essentially a projection of the fused and con-fused infantile space of what Stokes calls the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position. Before I make what I mean by this a little clearer, I want to offer a warning: it is very difficult indeed for us to think ourselves back into an earlier spatial system, whether we are talking about an his­torical, or a biographical-developmental one. The commonest mistake when attempting to do so is to assume that the spatial system out of which one is, oneself, operating must have dawned upon those who first began to discover it like a self-evident truth, whereas in fact, of course, they felt it as a violent disruption of self-evident truths.

Let me give you a good example of this. Writing in 1876, Leslie Stephen commented on how the emergence of a new cosmology through the rise of modern science changed men and women’s perception of themselves and their world:

‘Through the roof of the little theatre on which the drama of man’s history had been enacted, men began to see the eternal stars shining in silent contempt upon their petty imaginings. They began to suspect that the whole scenery was but a fabric woven by their imaginations. ’31 Now that image seems to me vivid and good: but what is in­teresting is that elsewhere in the same book, speaking of his own late Victorian age, which was the inheritor of a world in which the old stage cloths had finally been, if not torn down, then ripped to shreds, Leslie Stephen could write:

‘Our knowledge has, in some departments, passed into the scientific stage. It can be stated as a systematic body of established truths. It is consistent and certain. The primary axioms are fixed beyond the reach of scepticism; each subordinate proposition has its proper place; and the conclusions deduced are in perfect harmony.’32

In other words, he saw the Victorian scientific world-view in very much the same way that a medieval school-man regarded his own cosmological world-view as a ‘systematic body’ of eternal truths existing in ‘perfect harmony’. Stephen, per­ceptive as he was, had no intimation of the fact that within thirty years of writing this passage, his cosmology would begin to be devastated as thoroughly as when Newtonian science finally revealed the ‘imaginary’ character of the medieval world-view. In the first of these seminars, we considered the way in which that water-shed of history, the First World War, was associated with the disintegration of the Victorian way of conceiving of the world, part of which was the rise of a new physics which put everything once more well within the reach of scepticism.

With that warning, let us turn to a text by the mathematician Kline about ‘early Christian and medieval artists’ who, he says:

‘. . . were content to paint in symbolic terms, that is, their settings and subjects were intended to illustrate religious themes and induce religious feelings rather than to represent real people in the actual and present world. The people and objects were highly stylized and drawn as though they existed in a flat, two dimensional vacuum. Figures that should be behind one another were usually alongside or above, Stiff draperies and angular attitudes were characteristic. The backgrounds of the paintings were almost always of a solid colour, usually gold, as if to em­phasize that the subjects had no connection with the real world.’33

That sort of description of medieval art seems true enough to us: essentially, I think that it is true; but it also leaves out of the account the degree to which the medieval painting was a depiction of ‘the real world’ as the medieval painter conceived it. Certainly, medieval painting is highly conventionalised, but then, as we have seen, outline and perspective are themselves conventions. It may be that there was a much greater correspondence than this quotation implies between the flat, planar earth of medieval cosmology, with its ascending and descending angels not subject to the laws of gravity, and its over-arching dome of a heaven above, and a hell below, and the flat, two-dimensional, ‘unreal’ way in which the painter depicted the world. I suspect that there is a sense in which the space in medieval paintings is expressive of the way in which men and women felt themselves to be within their world. We must therefore be careful when we say that the medieval painter worked ‘in symbolic terms’. Such statements are not entirely untrue. However they greatly over-emphasise the degree to which the painter conceived of the ‘real’ world in one way and then turned away from it and set about painting another ‘unreal’ or ‘religious’ world of symbol.

What I am saying is, of course, that the medieval painter was—as Milner put it when she had problems with per­spective—much more mixed up with his objects than were the painters of the Renaissance. He made much less distinction between internal and external space—and religious ideol­ogy encouraged, indeed enforced, this confusion. Religious cosmology was effectively the institutionalised version of a projection of a subjective space into the real world. Up there, you have the good heaven with its sustaining "and nurturing deities; down there, the bad hell into which all one’s own evil, destructive and aggressive impulses can be projected. The ‘real world’ is no more than an integral part of this system, which is freely peopled with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ father and mother imagos, and with winged and weightless creatures representing benign impulses, and hooved and cloven ones standing for bad. This, of course, is what I mean when I say that the conception of space prior to the Renaissance was, if we accept the Kleinian terminology, ‘paranoid-schizoid’.

The Renaissance changed that. To persist with our ex­travagant generalisations, the Renaissance involved that sifting out of mind from matter, of self from other, that recognition of space, distance and separateness which in individual de­velopment characterises the achievement of the ‘depressive - position’. Evidently, this can today be seen most clearly in those Renaissance paintings in which the conventional means were found for the introduction of the third dimension, that is, the rendering of recessive space, of distance, volume, mass, and visual effects. The initiation of these conventions, particularly through the re-creation of perspective, is, for me at any rate, what makes the painting of Duccio, Giotto, Lorenzetti, and Van Eyck so exciting. By the early 15th century, in the work of Brunelleschi—the elaborator of a complete system of focused perspective and the tutor of Donatello, Masaccio, and Fra Filippo—painting became very like a science; not only was it based upon its own laws and mathematical principles, but it had also become a significant means for the investigation and propagation of knowledge about the external world.

Perspective, too, was conventional; I do not wish to be thought to be saying that it allowed ‘truthful’ representations of the ‘real’. Like the medieval spatial representations before it, perspective did not even represent as the eye sees:

‘The principle that a painting must be a section of a projection requires . . . that horizontal lines which are parallel to the plane of the canvas, as well as vertical parallel lines, are to be drawn parallel. But the eye viewing such lines finds that they appear to meet just as other sets of parallel lines do. Hence in this respect at least the focused system is not visually correct. A more funda­mental criticism is the fact that the eye does not see straight lines at all . . . But the focused system ignores this fact of perception. Neither does the system take into account the fact that we ac­tually see with two eyes each of which receives a slightly different impression. Moreover, these eyes are not rigid but move as the spectator surveys a scene. Finally, the focused system ignores the fact that the retina of the eye on which the light rays impinge is a curved surface, not a photographic plate, and that seeing is as much a reaction of the brain as it is a purely physiological process. ’

As I have already suggested, perspective also became inflected by the class interests of those whom the professional artists who elaborated, practised and developed it, served. Nonetheless, when all this has been said, it remains true that perspective was essentially an attempt to explore the character of the world out there, the external world, and the properties and material relations through which exterior space was constituted. Tech­nically, perspective involved a literal carving, pushing or cutting back through the surface of the picture plane. Neither artists, nor other men and women, were any longer so ‘mixed up’ in the objects which they perceived. Affective representa­tions of space became increasingly rare.

As Bell perceived, we can (ignoring for a moment all the possible exceptions, of which there are many) say crudely that this separation out of men and women from the ‘paranoid- schizoid’ space of the medieval world characterised the task of the painter from the decline of Primitive Christian Art (which, you will recall, Bell loved) to the rise of Cezanne (whom he also loved). Michelangelo’s paintings, for example, seem to me in general less masterful than his sculptures because, in the paintings, he is, as it were, endeavouring to constitute ‘real’ bodies within what is essentially the older spatial modality and mythology.) During the long period from the rise of the Renaissance, until the emergence of Modernism, painters were, to continue with the Kleinian terminology, working through, or at least within, the ‘depressive position’.

At the time of Cezanne, however, we have already seen that the ideological obligation upon artists to elaborate an external world-view was rapidly diminishing. As the painter’s cultural position was usurped through the rise of the Mega-Visual tradition, he became in one sense at least, freer. I would also emphasise that, by the end of the 19th century, with the emergence of a new physics—i.e. a new conception of the nature of the physical world—and the transformation of science, the old system of ‘objective’ perspective representation was itself exposed, except for those who were ideologically over­committed to it, as largely a conventional and historically relative means of representing the world. This was one reason why, as we saw in the first seminar, the generation of Freud’s mechanist teachers became interested in the depiction of movement. But, evidently, the camera and film played a large part in that too.

At this point, I want to raise a question mark about Cezanne. Much has been written about Cezanne by other Marxist writers, for whom I have the greatest respect. One theory suggests that Courbet produced a ‘materialist’ view of the world; Cezanne a ‘dialectical’ view; and the Cubists a 'dialectical materialist view. ’ It is a ‘nice’ argument, but I am not sure that it is entirely true.

Certainly, Cezanne’s work poses a new kind of relationship between the observer and the observed: it is with Cezanne that we begin to be made aware that what I see depends upon where I am and when. He shows us landscape in a state of change and becoming, from the point-of view of an observer who is himself no longer assumed to be frozen and motionless in time and space. But I wonder whether this perceptual reading of Cezanne is not sometimes greatly over-done. Perhaps the real sense in which Cezanne was ‘The Father of Modern Painting’—and certainly the sense in which writers like Bell responded and over-responded to him — was that for the first time since prior to the Renaissance, Cezanne mingled a subjective with an ob­jective conception of space, but of course he did so playfully and in an explorative rather than a dogmatically decreed fashion. Bell, it is worth noting here, constantly emphasises in his book, Art, that what he takes to be the ‘religious’ com­ponent of Christianity can be separated out from its dogma: ‘religion’was, for him, the perception of this mingling of inner and outer. Thus, too, Greenberg writes of Cezanne, ‘What he found in the end was, however, not so much a new as a more comprehensive principle; and it lay not in Nature, as he thought, but in the essence of art itself, in art’s “ab­stractness”.’35 I consider that what Greenberg calls here its ‘abstractness’ is its capacity to be expressive of psychological experience. What we get from Cezanne, I would suggest, is exactly that sensation which Milner was looking for, that ‘some kind of relation to objects in which one was much more mixed up with them’ than classical, focused systems of perspective allowed.

Interestingly, it was the abstract painter Robert Natkin, of whom I will have more to say next time, who first led me to perceive this aspect of Cezanne when he pointed out how, in many of Cezanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, some­thing very peculiar goes on between the foreground and the background of the picture. At moments a branch on a tree in the front seems to be depicted only feet away from others; but soon after, it seems to touch the slopes of a mountain which is ‘in reality’ twenty miles or so away. This sort of playful toying with his perception of the external world, which involves both the acceptance and also the denial of distance and separation, seems to me to have a lot more to do with the re-introduction of certain kinds of affects into painting than with Cezanne’s perceptual responses alone.

This is confirmed, I think, when one considers the theme of naked figures in a landscape, with which Cezanne was always fascinated. Towards the end of his life the way in which he handled this subject changed; he became less interested in the eroticism of appearance. Although each of the figures in his groups retained its autonomy, Cezanne sought ways of rep­resenting them in which they were simultaneously indissoluble from the ground, water, sky and trees which surrounded them. Women Bathing was painted within four years of his death: although the whiteness of the canvas surface plays its part, the painting is anything but loose or unfinished.

Cezanne made it in his studio; if he relied on petites sen­sations they were in the form of memories, rather than of things immediately seen. Anyway, he learned as much from looking at Poussin as at Provence. Like Poussin, Cezanne offers an attempt at a total view of man-in-nature, but it is a very different kind of view from that of the 17th century master. Cezanne refuses focused perspective and breaks up and re-orders his picture space in a radically new way. His memories have been realised, through an elaborate structuring of coloured planes, into a vision of a new kind of relationship between human beings and the natural world which they inhabit. Poussin’s totalisation was one of eternal stasis. Cezanne’s (although, as I shall argue, it involves a retrieval of affects belonging to an early phase of life) is essentially a promise, characterised by becoming. It revives the emotions of his individual past, to speak of a possible transformed future.

Paul Cezanne, Grandes Baigneuses, 1899-1906.

And now, I hope, you will be beginning to see the point I am getting at. Although the modern movement failed, for reasons we have already explored, to realise a new ‘world-view’ through painting, in the work of Cezanne himself and of at least some of his successors —e.g. Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, Klee, and later De Kooning—it did re-introduce to painting an aspect which had been absent from it, or at least heavily muted, during the era of the dominance of professional Fine Artists. These early modernist painters certainly acknow­ledged the external otherness, the separateness and ‘out- thereness’ of the outside world, but having acknowledged it, they sought to transfigure and transform it, to deny, or otherwise to interrupt it, as a means of expressing subjective feelings too. Their new forms emerge as neither an indulgence nor an escape from the world, but rather as an extension into an occluded area of experience.

Now I think that it was only when painters attempted to do this that Bell experienced his ‘aesthetic emotion’, those strange indefinable yearnings on which he places such great im­portance. But the point is that this was actually a new thing for those who made visual images to explore and to attempt to do. Bell made the mistake of identifying this as the essence of ‘art’, universalising it, and projecting it back through history, so that any work which did not show this quality could be dismissed as not really worth looking at. (Bell wrote off not just the ‘world­view’ painters of the Renaissance, of 17th century Holland and of 19th century England, but also, of course, those who were trying to elaborate new world-views through painting in the 20th century—the Futurists and Vorticists, for example.)

This leads us to an important point. Stokes’ taste, for most of his life, was for work in the ‘carving mode’, for art in which the depressive position had been worked through, for the Quattro­cento and the High Renaissance. Bell’s taste, on the contrary, was for the modified ‘modelling mode’ (though of course the terms would have been quite foreign to him) for the Christian Primitives and the Post-Impressionists, for an art which as it were, pushed back even further emotionally from the ‘depressive position’ towards the prior ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position. (Actually, this polarisation is not fair to either of them. As I said last time, unlike many Kleinian aestheticians, Stokes was prepared to recognise the importance of feelings of mergence and fusion in aesthetic experience. In later life, he became ever more sympathetic to the modelling modes. Whereas Bell, of course, modified his vituperative dismissal of Renaissance ‘world-view’ painting.)

Bell disguised this. He insisted that he was talking about an autonomous, irreducible aesthetic experience, when in fact he was responding to the capacity of a certain type of visual image to evoke and arouse a certain type of relatively inaccessible—not everyone, he stressed, was capable of aesthetic sensibility— human emotion which he and (I better admit it) I, too, find intensely pleasurable. The nature of that exquisite aesthetic emotion is, I think, rendered all but manifest in that passage about the raptures that can be experienced upon the cold white peaks of art. Bell found in the modern movement, and enjoyed there, a capacity of painting to revive something of the spatial sensations and accompanying ‘good’ emotions which the infant feels at his mother’s breast. By this, however, I mean much, much more than that Bell liked art because he found it to be a symbol of the ‘good’ breast in the Kleinian sense. Let me ex­plain.

Bell’s Art is full of indications of resistance: he is peculiarly keen on dismissing any attempt to penetrate or reduce aesthetic emotion. He also engaged, as one might expect, in polemic against psychoanalysis. For example, in a communication called ‘Dr. Freud on Art’, Bell tells how he once begged a roomful of psychoanalysts,

'. . .to believe that the emotion provoked in me by St. Paul’s Cathedral has nothing to do with my notion of having a good time. I have said that it was comparable rather with the emotion provoked in a mathematician by the perfect and perfectly economical solution of a problem, than with that provoked in me by the prospect of going to Monte Carlo in particularly favourable circumstances. But they knew all about St. Paul’s Cathedral and all about quadratic equations and all about me apparently. So I told them that if Cezanne was for ever painting apples, that had nothing to do with an insatiable appetite for those handsome but to me unpalatable, fruit. At the word “apples” however, my psychologists broke into titters. ’

Yes, the word was ‘titters. ’

‘Apparently, they knew all about apples, too. And they knew that Cezanne painted them for precisely the same reason that poker-players desire to be dealt a pair of aces.'"’

It is not clear whether Bell was aware of the transparency of the symbolisation he recorded here. In any event, he goes on to say that the real reason Cezanne used apples was because ‘they are comparatively durable’ (unlike flowers) and can be depended upon ‘to behave themselves’ (unlike people). If this story is correctly reported, it is hard to say who was the more stupid: the tittering analysts who uncritically interpreted the figurative elements in Cezanne’s painting as being straight­forward breast symbols; or Bell himself. What we need to ask of psychoanalysis is not a capacity to unmask subject matter or manifest figurative symbols in painting, but rather whether it can help us to understand those subjective spatial represen­tations which begin to appear with the rise of Modernism, and with Cezanne. I think that psychoanalysis does have much to contribute here, or, to be more exact, I think there is much to be learned from a particular tendency within psychoanalysis, the British object relations school, to which Milner, for example, belongs. But before I can clarify this, I have to produce another fragment from my bag of pieces, and that is a short chunk of psychoanalytic history and theory.

Some of you may have noticed the direction in which we are moving through this series of seminars. In one sense, this corresponds simply enough to the chronological development of psychoanalytic theory. We begin with Freud; we moved on to Klein; and now we are about to find ourselves standing in the clear, bright light of British ‘object relations’ thought. But this trajectory also corresponds to an inverse chronology of human development. My first paper, with Moses as its focus, revolved around aspects of the infant-father relationship and its survivals in adult life. In my second paper, we were involved with the mother, albeit as an ‘internal object’, and the nature of the reparative processes which could be lavished upon that object when it was felt that it had been damaged or destroyed through the subject’s own hate and aggression. In these last two sessions, we are concerned with the earliest infant-mother relationships, but we are focusing on the nature of the infant’s experience before he (or she) has become fully aware of himself (or herself) as a being separated from the mother or the world.

Moses by Michelangelo

I want, now, to return to the British School, and to sketch out aspects of the way in which theory developed there after the arrival of Melanie Klein. You will recall that Freud himself conceived of the infant as auto-erotic and narcissistic. In Freud’s view, the baby was motivated by the desire to secure instinctual pleasure by evading tension. Freud postulated three phases of libidinal development—oral, anal, and phallic—prior to the Oedipal conflict and the emergence of so-called ‘genital sexuality’ involving the desire for objects outside the self. Freud supposed that the infant was only interested in the mother insofar as she served the purposes of the child’s auto-erotism, by gratifying instinctual desires such as that for food. As a matter of fact, Freud had only the dimmest conception of the nature of the infant’s relations to the mother, which he did not discuss until as late as 1926. Indeed, Freud often writes as if the relationship with the father was more important. (The reasons for Freud’s blindness in this respect were at least in part defensive; he never satisfactorily analysed his relationship with his own mother, a fact which led to distorted inflections in his theoretical formulations. There were also cultural factors: given the relative status of fathers in the 19th century, European, middle-class homes, Freud was often unable to see beyond the authority of Moses. As we saw, he was indifferent to the Venus.)

Venus De Milo

Klein’s theories, evidently, were in this respect a real advance on Freud’s. Klein gave a centrality to the infant’s early relationship with the mother, to the degree that, as Brierley put it, Freud’s more orthodox followers found it ‘difficult to reconcile Melanie Klein’s assumption that the infant very soon begins to love its mother, in the sense of being concerned for her, with Freud’s conception that in the earliest months the infant is concerned with its environment only in relation to its own wishes.’37 Nonetheless, despite Klein’s formal assurances to the contrary, it remains true that in her system the course and character of this relationship is determined not so much by the quality of the mothering which the child receives as by the way in which the child plays out its innate, instinctual ambivalence. As we have seen, Klein was concerned with what she took to be the working out of an instinctual opposition between love and hate, which was not greatly affected by the nature of the environment. In general, Klein emphasised, indeed over­emphasised., orality, feeding, etc. As Guntrip puts it, ‘Mrs Klein states that “object-relations exist from the beginning of life”. . . but this seems to be something of an irrelevance; it does not matter much whether they do or not if they are merely incidental to the basic problems. ’38

A decisive step in psychoanalysis, however, was the replace­ment of dual instinct theory, whether of the Freudian or Kleinian variety, by a full object relations theory, i.e. by a theory in which the subject’s need to relate to objects plays a central part. Psychoanalysis arrived at this focus in Britain long before it did so elsewhere. (Only during the 1960s did some American analysts also become involved in this area of work.) The way in which this came about involved a number of disparate, and often seemingly incompatible strands and elements. Flere, I can only sketch a few of the more significant.

Some came from the serious critiques of psychoanalysis which were being elaborated outside the movement itself. For example, in the 1930s, analysts were often involved in theoretical jousting with members of the Tavistock Clinic. (Glover has written that within the British Psychoanalytic Society, ‘suggestions that a closer contact might be made even with more eclectic medico-psychological clinics, such as the Tavistock Clinic, were frowned on.’)39 Nonetheless, at the Tavistock, J. A. Fladfield, who was far from totally rejecting analytic findings, argued against Freud’s auto-erotic conception of infancy that the fundamental need of children was for protective love. In the early 1930s, Ian Suttie was one of Hadfield’s assistants. Suttie died at the age of 46, in 1935, but the following year his critique of Freud’s psychology, The Origins of Love and Hate, was published.

Suttie provides a systematic account of man as a social animal, whose object-seeking behaviour is discernible from birth. Suttie abandons Freud’s concept of Narcissism arguing that ‘the elements or isolated percepts from which the ‘‘mother idea” is finally integrated are loved (cathected) from the beginning.’ Thus Suttie found it possible to speak of the infant’s love for an external object, the mother, from the earliest moments of life. This was not sentimentalisation of the infant-mother relationship; he identified its biological basis clearly:

‘I thus regard love as social rather than sexual in its biological function, as derived from the self-preservative instincts not the genital appetite, and as seeking any state of responsiveness with others as its goal. Sociability I consider as a need for love rather than as aim-inhibited sexuality, while culture-interest is derived from love as a supplementary mode of companionship (to love) and not as a cryptic form of sexual gratification.’41 Suttie was not approved of by the psychoanalytic establish­ment in his life-time. Today, however, many of the criticisms he made of Freud—including his observations of the latter’s ‘patriarchal and antifeminist bias’—are very widely accepted, even within the psychoanalytic movement itself. Indeed, by the 1940s, hostility between the Tavistock and the Institute of Psychoanalysis was diminishing. For example, John Bowlby was analysed by Joan Riviere, one of Klein’s foremost followers; Klein herself was one of his supervisors when he was a trainee analyst. In 1946, Bowlby joined the Tavistock, without relin­quishing his psychoanalytic associations. Bowlby was further strongly influenced by the work of ethologists, especially Tinbergen and Lorenz. Bowlby acknowledges a debt to Suttie, but in his own work he elaborated a. thorough-going critique of Freudian instinct theory: ‘in the place of psychical energy and its discharge, the central concepts are those of behavioural systems and their control, of information, negative feedback, and a behavioural form of homeostasis.’42 Bowlby strongly opposed the idea that the infant’s relationship to the mother was based on primary need gratification, such as the wish for food. Bowlby emphasised the need for ‘a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship’ with the mother ‘in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment’. He held that the ‘young child’s hunger for his mother’s love and presence was as great as his hunger for food.’4' Although retaining psychoanalysis as his frame of reference, Bowlby drew on a mass of empirical data from other disciplines. The fact that he stands at the inter­section between psychoanalysis, behavioural studies, ethology, biology, and contemporary communications theory should have rendered his work of enormous significance to all of us on the left who are looking for a rigorously materialist account of the early infant-mother relationship. Instead, socialists have tended to revile his work without attending to it but that is another story.

Other influences were also inflecting the unique course which psychoanalytic theory was taking in Britain. You may remem­ber that in my last seminar, I referred to Sandor Ferenczi, a close colleague of Freud’s until his latter days, and Klein’s first analyst. Ferenczi was the leader of the psychoanalytic com­munity in Budapest, until his death in 1933. Guntrip has ac­curately described the differences between Ferenczi and Freud, differences which were to have tragic consequences for the former:

‘Ferenczi recognised earlier than any other analyst the im­portance of the primary mother-child relationship. Freud’s theory and practice was notoriously paternalistic, Ferenczi’s maternal- istic. His concept of "primary object love” prepared the way for the later work of Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, Balint, Winnicott, and all others who to-day recognize that object-relations start at the beginning in the infant’s needs for the mother. Ferenczi held that this primary object-love for the mother was passive, and in that form underlay all later development.’44 Many of those gathered round Ferenczi developed his approach. Hermann, for example, pointed towards such components in the infant’s relation to the mother as clinging and clasping, which could not be accommodated within the traditional Freudian perspective. Alice and Michael Balint began to develop a more radical critique of Freud’s theory of narcissism, but Hermann’s observations enabled them to progress beyond Ferenczi’s essentially passive conception of the infant’s relation to the mother, to a fuller characterisation of this ‘archaic’, primary object-relation. In the Balints’ view, the infant was ‘born relating’, even if its mode of loving was egotistic.45 Early object relations possessed autonomy from erotogenic activities. The Balints came to live and work in Britain, where their ideas had a considerable influence'among some Kleinians.

But, within Kleinian circles, parallel critiques and extensions of classical theory had already sprung up independently. Among the most significant was that put forward by W. R. D. Fairbairn, an analyst who, in the middle and late 1930s, was strongly under the influence of Klein. However, between 1940 and 1944, Fairbairn published a series of controversial papers— including, ‘A Revised Psychopathology of the Psychoses and Psychoneuroses’ of 194 1 46—in which he essentially revised psychoanalytic theory ‘in terms of the priority of human relations over instincts as the causal factor in development, both normal and abnormal’. Fairbairn described libido as not pleasure-seeking, but object-seeking; the drive to good object relationships is, itself, the primary libidinal need. In the words of Guntrip, his most devoted disciple:

‘From the moment of birth, Fairbairn regards the mother- infant relationship as potentially fully personal on both sides, in however primitive and undeveloped a way this is as yet felt by the baby. It is the breakdown of genuinely personal relations between the mother and the infant that is the basic cause of trouble. ’47 Fairbairn, like Klein before him, was something of a systems builder: I do not think that there are many analysts today who make use of all his bizarre terms and constructs. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that Fairbairn’s work—together with the influences coming from Budapest, and the ‘Tavistock’ critiques of psychoanalysis—paved the way for a great deal of original work in the post-Kleinian tradition on the nature of the infant- mother relationship. D. W. Winnicott, Marjorie Brierley, Marion Milner, Harry Guntrip, John Padel, Masud Khan, and Charles Rycroft were among those who contributed sub­stantially to the development of object-relations theory. Evidently, I am talking about a heterogeneous tradition, one which was characterised by internal contradictions, polemics, and controversies—nonetheless, in my view this tradition represents the most constructive development within psycho­analysis, and that which, incidentally, has the most to tell us about the nature of creativity, visual experience and their enjoyment.

In our next seminar, we will be examining the work of D. W. Winnicott in detail, in relation to certain types of abstract art. Here, I merely wish to point out that it is in the work of Winnicott and his colleagues that we find a focusing upon a transient phase of development which is between that of the ‘subjectivity’ of the earliest moment, in which even the mother’s breast is assumed to be an extension of the self, and the more ‘objective’ perceptions of later childhood. As Winnicott himself put it:

‘I am proposing that there is a stage in the development of human beings that comes before objectivity and perceptibility. At the theoretical beginning a baby can be said to live in a subjective or conceptual world. The change from the primary state to one in which objective perception is possible is not only a matter of inherent or inherited growth process; it needs in ad­dition an environmental minimum. It belongs to the whole vast theme of the individual travelling from dependence towards independence.’48

I will have more to say about this phase next time; meanwhile, I would just point out that it is characterised by tentatively ambivalent feelings about mergence and separation, about being lost in the near, of establishing and denying boundaries about what is inside and what is outside, and concerning the whereabouts of limits and a containing skin, so that the infant, while beginning to recognise the autonomy of objects, nonethe­less feels ‘mixed up in them’ in a way in which the child or adult does not.

Now all this work has been done since that moment when the psychoanalysts ‘tittered’ at Bell for saying that ‘if Cezanne was for ever painting apples, that had nothing to do with an in­satiable appetite for those handsome but to me unpalatable fruit.’ To say that for Cezanne (or Bell) the apple was a symbol of the breast tells us rather less than nothing: to say, however, that the kind of space which Cezanne constructs, with its ambivalences between figure and environment, foreground and background, and between concepts and perceptions, is in some way related to the way in which the infant relates himself to the breast, the mother and the world is to say a great deal. It is in the light of this later analytical work that we can best begin to arrive at a materialist anlaysis of what happens in the out­standing paintings of the modern movement. Through this work, I can give some theoretical spine to my deeply held feeling that there are moments in the now threatened modern movement which are not just examples of kenosis and epilogue, but genuine extensions of the capacity of painted images, and spatial organisations, to speak of certain aspects of human experience in ways which simply could not be reproduced in other media, where space cannot be imaginatively and af­fectively constituted in the same way.

Winnicott himself was very much aware of correspondences between his findings and the work of many writers and artists; unfortunately, however, few of those involved in theoretical aesthetics, or critical work, have attended to his texts. Indeed one has to confront the fact that although British ‘object relations’ theory is well known among clinicians, therapists and educationalists, it has had very little impact upon culture beyond those specific disciplines. Perry Anderson, editor of New Left Review, commented on this in his historic 1968 text, ‘Components of the National Culture’.4'’ Although he acknowledged that the British School of psychoanalysis was ‘one of the most flourishing’ in the world, he pointed out that its impact on British culture in general has been virtually nil. Psychoanalysis ‘has been sealed off as a technical enclave: an esoteric and specialized pursuit unrelated to any of the central concerns of mainstream “humanistic” culture.’50 Anderson relates this to his ‘global’ analysis of British culture, to the failure of the British bourgeoisie to elaborate a world-view, to the resultant ‘absent centre’ of British culture, and its resistance to alien ‘impingements’. His analysis is one with which, by and large, I am in substantial agreement. But why has the British achievement in psychoanalysis been so widely ignored on the left which opposes itself to that ‘mainstream’ whose lacunae Anderson describes? I have not, after all, noticed much discus­sion of Klein, Winnicott, Rycroft, etc. in the pages of New Left Review.

I cannot attempt a complete answer to this question here, but I would like to throw out two indications. Firstly, I am con­vinced that what Suttie called ‘a taboo on tenderness’ operates among many intellectuals, a taboo which is characterised by a radical distrust of those areas of experience which, by their very nature, cannot be fully verbalised. (I have in mind here, for example, the tendency of certain Althusserian writers on art to seek to replace the experience of the work with a complete, they would say ‘scientific’, verbal account of it.) Winnicott wrote that ‘the individual gets to external reality through the omni­potent fantasies elaborated in the effort to get away from inner reality.’51 There are those on the left who never stop elaborating such omnipotent fantasies in the attempt to obliterate the encroachments of a subjectivity which they deny. This is one reason why so many who have any interest in post-Freudian psychoanalysis scuttle across the channel to the structural- linguistic models through which Lacan endeavours to describe the infant-mother relationship. In effect, the very forms in which Lacan casts his work, with all its pseudo-algebraic pretensions, are a denial of the affective qualities of precisely that which they purport to describe, whereas Winnicott’s ‘metaphoric’ mode does not allow one any such escape into the irrational ‘rationality’ of a closed system.

There is another, related reason which is perhaps more ex­cusable: in many of these psychoanalysts there is a trace, and sometimes more than a trace, of philosophical idealism. What they discovered about the early infant-mother relationship sometimes led them, for example, to direct or indirect apologetics for religion. (This was true of Brierley, Guntrip, and Suttie.) But the point is that these writers and researchers were uncovering the material, biological, roots of such phenomena as religious and aesthetic experience: by this, I mean, they were exposing their rootedness in a certain definite, developmental phase. There are times in which, lacking a historical materialist perspective, some of these writers tended to conflate the specific social, cultural religious and artistic forms within which such experiences and emotions were structured and accommodated with those experiences and emotions themselves. (This was never true of Winnicott, or of Rycroft who has, for example, drawn attention to the way in which certain theological con­cepts were, prior to developments in object relations theory, the most adequate accounts of certain kinds of experience, for which non-theological explanations are now possible.) How­ever, in developing an ideological critique of those social and cultural forms, the Marxist left has, in my view, sadly neglected the major advances made by the British psycho­analytic school into what it is that is structured through such forms. This is one reason why, as yet, there is no adequate Marxist analysis of religion, music, or abstract painting.

In this respect, the Marxist left may be said to resemble Freud himself. We have already had occasion to note how Freud dreaded any potential contamination between psychoanalysis and ‘mysticism’. But again, it is important to ask whether in his opposition to certain definite cultural forms, such as religion, and his pathological indifference to others, such as music, and non-representational art, Freud was manifesting not just his commitment to ‘science’ and rationality, but also his denial of significant areas of his own experience.

For example, in his discussion of religion, Freud talked about a mystical state which he described as a feeling of being at one with the universe, which he correlated with feelings of dependency and being overwhelmed. Freud described this feeling as ‘oceanic’—a term he got from a friend—but confided that he had never, himself, experienced anything like it. Freud explained this feeling as a regression to the early infantile state when the child’s ego is not differentiated from the surrounding external world. Anton Ehrenzweig has observed that Freud is thus claiming that the feeling of union is no mere illusion, but the correct description of a memory of an infantile state otherwise inaccessible.52 In telling us that he never experienced such emotions Freud is indicating an area of his personality which would appear to be subject to defensive denial: he is pointing to a failure in his historic self-analysis. The oceanic feeling of union does not only manifest itself in mystical or religious forms: it seems to be an important element in certain types of auditory and visual aesthetic experience, too— experiences to which, as we know, Freud was notoriously in­sensitive. On all such experiences and areas of human life, Freud has almost nothing of interest to say: his silence, I am sure, may be correlated with his indifference to and denial of the real nature of the infant-mother relationship, as described in the work done by the British object relations school over the last quarter of a century.

Freud, you will remember, admired the Moses of Michelangelo, but had nothing to say about those ‘unfinished’ or ‘incomplete’ works—now almost universally more widely admired—in which the figure seems to be struggling to free itself from (or is it to submerge itself back into) the matter out of which it has been wrought. Evidently, this was partly culturally as well as psychologically determined: in the 19th century, Michelangelo’s late drawings were widely regarded as merely the products of a senile old man who had lost his touch; today, there are many who would acclaim these figures with multiple, ebbing outlines as among the finest which the artist did.  My point is that these drawings speak of significant areas of experience which, in the past, tended to be either locked within the mystifications of religion, or denied altogether.

Perhaps I can demonstrate this by referring to a writer whose ‘taste’ and whose psychoanalytic theories can both meaning­fully be described as being somewhere between Freud’s and my own, E. H. Gombrich. Gombrich, you will remember, can certainly appreciate the art of Post-Impressionism; he has, howev.er, never enjoyed abstract painting: In his essay, ‘Psycho- Analysis and the History of Art’,53 Gombrich draws heavily upon Michelangelo, Crucifixion. The ideas of Edward Glover, and especially on the latter’s study, ‘The Significance of the Mouth in Psycho-Analysis’.54 This was written before Glover was deeply influenced by Melanie Klein. (Later, you may remember, he polemicised strongly against her: when her ideas obtained partial acceptance within the British Society, Glover, who had been among its most influential members, resigned and joined the Japanese Society instead.) Gombrich here suggests a wholly oral ontogenesis of aesthetic taste, describing ‘oral gratification as a genetic model for aesthetic pleasure’. Gombrich proposes two polarities in taste, the ‘soft’ and the ‘crunchy’, which, through Glover’s ideas, he correlates with the ‘passive’ and the ‘active’, and with ‘sucking’ and ‘biting’ oral modes respectively. Gombrich implies that the ‘soft’ is more primitive and infantile; while the crunchy corresponds with sophisticated, civilised taste.

To make his point, Gombrich takes an atrocious academic painting of the Three Graces by Bonnencontre, and, as he puts it, tries to ‘improve the sloppy mush by adding a few crunchy breadcrumbs’. He does this by photographing the picture through wobbly glass. ‘You will agree,’ he writes, ‘that it looks a little more respectable’. And, indeed, he is right. It does. Gombrich explains this by saying, ‘We have to become a little more active in reconstituting the image, and we are less disgusted.’'6 He repeats the experiment by taking another photograph through the same glass at a greater distance, so that the figures are even more shadowy, and their outlines blurred and dissolved. He comments, ‘By now, I think, it deserves the epithet “interesting”. Our own effort to reintegrate what has been wrenched apart makes us project a certain vigour into the image which makes it quite crunchy. ’

Gombrich goes on to say:

‘. . . this artificial blurring repeats in a rather surprising way the course that painting actually took when the wave of revolt from the Bouguereau phase spread through the art world. ’57 He comments on the blurring achieved by Impressionism which ‘demands the well-known trained response—you are expected to step back and see the dabs and patches fall into place’; and Cezanne, ‘with whom activity is stimulated to even greater efforts, as we are called upon to repeat the artist’s strivings to reconcile the demands of representation with obedience to an overriding pattern.’58 Interestingly, all Gombrich’s examples— the Bonnenconue, Impressionist, and Cezanne’s—here are of the female nude. His conclusion is that whereas ‘taste may be accessible to psychological analysis, art is possibly not’.

Now evidently there is much that is true in Gombrich’s account, but what is wrong with it is his underlying assumption that the infantile relationship to the mother is instinctual in character, that is, realised exclusively through the mouth and the search for oral satisfactions and reducible to a matter of taste in a limited, oral sense. I doubt whether the reason why the blurred Bonnencontre is more ‘interesting’ now is simply, or even at all, due to a maturer preference for a later oral phase, for biting over sucking, for crunchy over soft. There are hints that Gombrich, too, realises this because the way he develops the notions of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ with reference to the pleasure to be derived from the attempt to ‘reintegrate what has been wrenched apart’ suggests the kind of Kleinian notion of the restoration of internal objects which we discussed at the end of our last talk. (The differences between the Bonnencontre original, and the ‘wobbly glass’ versions can be compared with those between the Hiram Powers sculpture and the Venus de Milo.) But we, ourselves, are now ready to go beyond even such Kleinian accounts. I would say that the reason the distorted Bonnencontre is more ‘interesting’ has to do with its capacity to begin (however thinly and vaguely) to evoke that critical phase, to which Winnicott referred, between experience as wholly subjective, and the achievement of objectivity and per­ceptibility, when the child is relating to another whose otherness is at once recognised and denied; when the existence of the boundaries (outlines) or limiting membranes of the self and of its objects are at once perceived and imaginatively ruptured. An explanation of this order allows us to see the developments in Modernism, to which Gombrich refers, as much more than a change of taste, or the addition of a few breadcrumbs to mush. We can begin to take into account the affective expressiveness of pictorial spatial organisations them­selves. In comparison, Gombrich is merely engaging in a slightly more sophisticated variant of that psychoanalytic ‘tittering’ in front of Cezanne’s apples than that which so understandably irritated Bell.

Indeed, I hope that you will now be able to see that we are ready to leave the Kleinian aesthetics which, up until now, have served us so well. Adrian Stokes, you will remember, found elements belonging not only to the ‘depressive position’, but also to the prior ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position in both artistic creativity and aesthetic experience. For Stokes, the sense of ‘fusion’ was combined, though in differing proportions, with the sense of ‘object-otherness’. This led to criticism from more orthodox Kleinians, who felt that, by associating aesthetics and creativity with the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position, and its mechanisms, Stokes was characterising them as regressive. But Winnicott rejects the notion of a ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position, with its overtones of primary insanity, and disjuncture. Indeed, in the work of many of those involved in the British ‘object relations’ tradition—as Anton Ehrenzweig put it—‘the concept of the primary process as the archaic, wholly irrational function of the deep unconscious’ underwent a ‘drastic revision’.5'' Marion Milner once wrote that this revision ‘has been partly stimulated by the problems raised by the nature of art’,60 not least, of course, by much of the art of the modern movement.

We do not have time to go into all the implications of these revisions of psychoanalytic thinking on the nature of the primary process here. Suffice to say that Freud’s view of them as something menacing in later life, to be defeated by ‘science’ and the Reality Principle, or Klein’s view of them as an analog of madness have been increasingly eclipsed. To cite one specific example, Ehrenzweig drew attention to a distinction between ‘the narrow focus’ of ordinary attention, and the ‘diffused, wide stare’ which had its origins in the infantile gaze. This has considerable importance in our understanding of the difference between, say, perspective painting and abstract expressionism. Rycroft has done more work demolishing the view that the primary and secondary processes are mutually antagonistic, and that the primary processes are maladaptive. He has pointed out how the attitude of psychoanalysis towards these processes derives from a paradox:

‘Since psycho-analysis aims at being a scientific psychology, psycho-analytical observation and theorizing is involved in the paradoxical activity of using secondary process thinking to ob­serve, analyse, and conceptualise precisely that form of mental activity, the primary processes, which scientific thinking has always been at pains to exclude.’61 Rycroft, however, emphasises the importance of primary process thinking in many imaginative, creative, and aesthetic en­deavours. One might say, therefore, that the re-appropriation of these modes within the modernist tradition was not simply a regressive evasion of the world.

In her theoretical paper on art, Milner says:

. .the unconscious mind, by the very fact of its not clinging to the distinction between self and other, seer and seen, can do things that the conscious logical mind cannot do. By being more sensitive to the sameness rather than the differences between things, by being passionately concerned with finding “the familiar in the unfamiliar” (which, by the way, Wordsworth says is the whole of the poet’s business), it does just what Maritain says it does; it brings back blood to the spirit, passion to intuition.’62 But Milner is not suggesting that the primary processes belong in adult life to a separate category, of no use in understanding the real, as opposed to the imagined or imaginary world. In­deed, she says that ‘it was just this wide focus of attention’, as described by Ehrenzweig, which made the world ‘seem most intensely real and significant’ for her. Thus, we might say, those spatial organisations constructed by the early modernists are not merely enrichments of nostalgic fantasy life, but also potentially of our relationship to the world itself. (This seems to me the real secret of Cezanne.)

At one point, while she was trying to overcome her inability to paint, Milner found herself thinking about a statement of Juan Gris, who once defined painting as being ‘the expression of certain relationships between the painter and the outside world. ’ ‘I felt,’ writes Milner, ‘a need to change the word “ex­pression” of certain relationships into experiencing certain relationships; this was because of the fact that in those drawings which had been at all satisfying there had been this experiencing of a dialogue relationship between thought and the bit of the external world represented by the marks made on the paper. Thus the phrase “expression of’ suggested too much that the feeling to be expressed was there beforehand, rather than an experience developing as one made the drawing. And this re-wording of the definition pointed to a fact that psychoanalysis and the content of the drawings had forced me to face: the fact that the relationship of oneself to the external world is basically and originally a relationship of one person to another, even though it does eventually become differentiated into relations to living beings and relations to things, inanimate nature. In other words, in the beginning one’s mother is, literally, the whole world. Of course, the idea of the first relationship to the outside world being felt as a relationship to persons was one I had frequently met with in discussions of childhood and savage animism. But the possibility that the adult painter could be basically, even though un­consciously, concerned with an animistically conceived world, was something I had hardly dared let myself face.

Looked at in these terms the problem of the relation between the painter and his world then became basically a problem of one’s own need and the needs of the “other”, a problem of reciprocity between “you” and “me”; with “you” and “me” meaning originally mother and child. ’63 And now that I have exposed all the fragments of my statue—at least all of those which I have to hand—it only remains for me to attempt to fit them into place. I am suggesting that there is something significant in common between Milner’s difficulties with perspective and outline in her attempts to learn to draw; the shift in my taste from Ingres’ linearly cloistered figures to the paintings of Bonnard, Rothko and Natkin; the kind of space which begins to manifest itself in paintings with the eruption of the modern movement—say in Cezanne’s trees touching and not touching those distant mountains; and poor, dim-witted Mr. Bell’s exquisite raptures on his cold white peaks of art.

I am suggesting that what these phenomena have in common is a relatedness to a significant area of experience, that per­taining to a critical phase in the infant-mother relationship; I do not conceive of that relationship as ‘a matter of taste’, or instinctual orality, so much as a determinative moment in the self’s discovery of, and exploration of its relationship to, its world. The nature of the ‘primary processes’ in this early phase is no longer necessarily opaque to us: ‘object-relations’ theory, as it developed in the post-Kleinian tradition in Britain, permits us intellectual and affective understanding of this infant-mother relationship. It also causes a revaluing of the ‘primary processes’, and of the part which they play in the realisation of the full potentialities of the relationship of the self to others and its world. To speak crudely, in the medieval era, the ‘primary processes’ constituted the lived relation of self to the world (e.g. in religious cosmology). But, particularly with the 19th century emphasis upon ‘Science’, rationality, and inevitable progress, these areas of experience tended to be excluded from the dominant culture, or locked into mystified enclaves—such as religion.

Not even classical psychoanalysis succeeded in penetrating this terrain. In part, this was the result of the deficiencies of Freud’s self-analysis, his inability to reach back towards the affects pertaining to this determinative phase in the infant- mother relationship, and his consequent misconstruing of the nature of the primary processes. But the world-view of that culture within which Freud was enmeshed reinforced his prejudices and defences, his ambiguous belief in the value of ‘science’ over and above that of the imaginative faculties. However, 1914-1918 saw the final shattering of that world­view. Those areas of experience which had been denigrated, distorted, eclipsed or excluded flooded back—sometimes in their most archaic and mystifying forms. For example, in the later 19th century Liberal Protestantism in Germany, from Ritschl to Harnack, had effectively purged Christianity of its religious content, through a theology of immanence in which Jesus was nought but a particularly well-behaved bourgeois. The First World War shattered this ‘progressive’, middle-class faith, and gave birth to a ‘mystical’ revival, exemplified in Otto’s The Idea of the Holy of 1917, and a ‘Crisis Theology’ (soon to be known as ‘Neo-Orthodoxy’) which re-asserted the transcendence, and unutterable otherness of God. At this time, too, a species of cosmic idealism flooded back into physics as the Newtonian conception of the universe seemed to collapse.

In art, as we have seen, the validity of the focused system of perspective was shattered. But the Modernist enterprise does not seem to me to have been just an escape, or a retreat into idealism and ‘subjectivity’ (although, of course, there were elements within it that could be so characterised). It was almost as if the painter had to go back to experiences at the breast (and before) in order to find again, in a new way, his relationship to others and the world. This, I think, was what happened in the best elements of Modernism—and it was what Bell responded to, though he structured his response in terms of ‘aesthetic emotion’ and ‘significant form’.

Perhaps I can here elaborate an analogy of a kind which I would suspect if it was put forward by anyone except myself! Michael Balint describes a certain type of pathology as a manifestation of what he calls ‘basic fault’. In these instances the patient’s whole mode of being in the world, of relating to it, and to others is faulty and false; he maintains this can only be overcome if the patient is allowed to regress to a state of dependence on the analyst, in which he can experience a ‘new beginning’. (This corresponds to a distinction Winnicott makes between ‘true’ and ‘false’ self.) In a certain sense, 1914-1918 exposed the ‘basic fault’ of European culture: the kenosis of modernism (at least in certain of its aspects) may be compared with the individual patient’s necessary regression towards a position from which a ‘new beginning’ (in this instance, presumably, a new realism) was possible. Although he does not draw this comparison, Balint himself implies something similar in his 1952 paper, ‘Notes on the Dissolution of Object- Representation in Modern Art’. Balint refers to the disap­pearance of ‘the sovereign, sharply defined and delineated object’ from both physics and art; but he ventures the view:

‘The present narcissistic disappointment and frightened withdrawal, degrading the dignity of the object into that of a mere stimulus and laying the main emphasis on the sincere and faithful representation of the artist’s subjective internal mental processes, will very probably give way gradually to a concern for creating whole and hearty objects. (This is meant in a purely descriptive sense and no value judgement is either implied or intended with it.)64 Balint goes on to ‘the unavoidable integration of the discoveries of “modern art” with the demand of “mature love” for the object.’65 But this is already to look forward to the subject of our final seminar, that of the ‘promise’ inherent within certain of the most emptied-out examples of full abstraction.

MODERN ART: Letter To Fuller

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

SEEING BERGER: LETTER TO FULLER

Mike Dibb, the director of John Berger’s film, ‘Ways of Seeing’ takes issue with Peter Fuller on his attack in NEW SOCIETY on Berger.

Mike Dibb directing Peter Fuller and David Hockney

Dear Peter,

Having been out of the country for several weeks, it was strange and sad to come back and read your assault (New Society, 29 January) on Ways of Seeing and John Berger’s bitterly ironic riposte. As the producer and director of Ways of Seeing among other films with Berger, as well as several films in collaboration with you, I want to tell you why I dissociate myself from your argument.

Clearly the bitter breakdown of your once close rela­tionship with Berger has further distorted your reading of Ways of Seeing. If you feel that we were disingenuous in our references to Clark and Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, it is as nothing compared with the disingenuous­ness with which you treat the detailed text of both the televi­sion series and subsequent book.

To suggest, as you do, that Ways of Seeing, with its diffe­rent and trenchant critiques of, among other things, the materialist obsessions of European culture, of the objecti­fication of women, of the values of advertising, can now be seen as a Trojan horse of Thatcherism, is ludicrous. We never said that ‘advertising was the modern version of art.’

What we did try to suggest was that many of the pictorial codes of European painting now find a regular if more de­graded place within advertising, with colour photography even more than oil painting providing a means for rendering the physical world ever more tactile and desirable.

We admitted that the essays touched only on certain aspects of each subject, that our principal aim was to start a process of questioning, that the survey of European oil paint­ing was very brief and therefore very crude. We emphasised that there were important distinctions to be made between the experience of seeing the original painting and its repro­duction, and between great works and the average ones, and so on and so on - all of which you slide over in your quest to get Berger as once you had used Berger to get Clark.

John Berger and Tilda Swinton

Reading your article made me go back to your first review of the series back in 1972, written for the radical weekly, Seven Days. It was also the first time we met. EJnder the heading ‘Berger’s anti-Clark lecture’ you celebrated the series at the expense of the ‘rubbish’ epitomised by Civiliza­tion, concluding with praise for the programme on women ‘which crashes through as many cultural myths in half an hour as Clark managed to fabricate and reinforce in the whole of his interminable series’.

Maybe today you want to vilify Berger as once you vilified Clark. But don’t you think it’s time you grew out of this need to have heroes and villains, to mix love and hate?

I noted R.B. Kitaj’s warning letter to you in Modern Painters: ‘I think the best art writing is about what the writer truly loves ... Personal hatreds will leave a stain, not the distinctive mark I hope you will leave ... be partisan of course, but there is no useful place for malevolence in art where there are precious few eternal truths.’ What I have always liked in the work we have done together is the fact that it has drawn only on your positive insights and analysis. We have never found space for abuse.

So in retrospect I rather regret that Ways of Seeing made any direct reference to Clark at all. There were only two references, but for those brief moments it personalised the argument leading to the possibility of the kind of crude oversimplifications of which I think you were guilty in 1972 and still are today (though in reverse).

Ways of Seeing was not conceived and mounted as a pole­mical riposte to Kenneth Clark. But because it appeared in the backwash of Civilization it was, I think, experienced and enjoyed as its antidote. As the director of the series, my main interest was in conceiving a form in which all the assumptions and conventions surrounding films about painting could be taken apart and re-examined. The first film was an attempt to give the dense text of Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a playful and dramatic form. The theme of the last film on advertising emerged only during the making of the series.

The thinking behind the two essays on women and the European oil painting had existed in other forms well before Civilization was broadcast. Indeed your attack stimulated me to dig out the very first drafts of the scripts (in so many ways different from the finished films). Interestingly, there were no references to Clark whatsoever or to Mr and Mrs Andrews. I might even have been partly responsible for encouraging John to address this painting in the programme; certainly I will plead guilty (though I feel no guilt) to pinning the ‘Trespassers Keep Out’ sign on the tree behind them. (One viewer even wrote in that he had never noticed the sign before!)

And when you say that predictably Ways of Seeing has not given rise to any alternative art appreciation, I would point immediately to, among much else, important new work sub­sequently done on the representation of women, and on the analysis and decoding of advertisements.

Ways of Seeing, despite its sometimes overassertive simpli­fications, unlocked a whole spray of ideas to be argued over and refined by others. And frankly I cannot believe that art teachers and their students could seriously be undermined by it. It is not a sacrosanct book, just one to be used, together with much else.

And here I would like to tell you a little story. During my recent trip to Mexico I spent a short time in Tijuana, the fast growing border city just a few miles from the USA. It’s an amazing place, a surrealist and bizarre cornucopia where weekly waves of American tourists descend on and devour the kitsch end of Mexican popular culture. While I was there I went to an exciting exhibition. There was one young painter whose work I particularly liked. His subject matter was, among other things, the relationship between Mexico and the United States and he used every means at his disposal to express it: sensuous colours, collage, erotic shapes, an old gramophone, photographs, references to popular art, feath­ers transformed into fighter planes, and so on and on. It was full of wit and intelligence, political awareness and huge love of his medium - even when talking to me in a bar he doodled continuously.

John Berger

I asked him about influences and he replied immediately, Ways of Seeing. It was a moment to reflect on when that same series is being burdened with spawning the reactionary post­ures of Gilbert and George. But it becomes clear to me that by blaming Berger for Gilbert and George, you can conve­niently, in one hurtful and surprising paradox, appear to kill two birds with one stone. But I’m afraid I’m not convinced. Writing in a spirit of revenge may feel sweet to you, but it sours your argument and saddens me.

You see, like you, I value the films on which we have collaborated, but, what may seem odd to you, find no contra­dictions between our most recent film Naturally Creative and Ways of Seeing. Each used a different means, for a different end, at a different historical moment.

And just for a moment consider the range of John Berger’s own writing about art. His essay, ‘The white bird’, could have been a text for Naturally Creative. And a few years after Ways of Seeing he wrote one of his best and most moving essays connecting the act of drawing with the death of his father. It inspired me to embark on what became the two hour film, Seeing through Drawing. In that film (minus Ber­ger), I tried to demystify and open up the significance of drawing, but using techniques completely different from Ways of Seeing. The two projects were for me com­plementary, the one polemical, the other reflective and dis­cursive.

In filming with you and in films with others, I always try to connect areas of thought often kept separate by the institu­tionalised divisions of academic discourse, taking art away from the specialised preserve of the art historian, and ideas out of the confines of the university seminar, seeing where they touch psychoanalysis, politics, history, science and peo­ple’s everyday experience of living and working.

The richness of the films is a product of the richness of the synthesis which film allows. This in turn depends on our ability to use images mechanically reproduced, detached from their original context. As we said in Ways of Seeing: ‘The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what pur­pose. This touches upon questions of copyright for reproduc­tion, the ownership of art presses and publishers, the total policy of public art galleries and museums.’ Let me quote once more: ‘We are not saying original works of art are now useless. Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is. Even a reproduction hung on a wall is not comparable in this respect for in the original the silence and stillness permeates the actual material, the pain, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate ges­tures. This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one’s act of looking at it. In this special sense all paintings are contemporary. Hence the immediacy of their testimony. Their historical moment is literally there before our eyes.’

Peter Fuller

I don’t believe Ways of Seeing argues against looking at original works of art, any more than the vivid reproductions in Modern Painters pre-empt the need or desire of your readers to see the exhibitions on which many of the articles are based. But don't let’s have any illusions, either about the extent to which reproduction, and photography, in general, has changed our relationship to painting, or indeed about how the form, style and price of your new quarterly journal of the fine arts will mean it reaches one kind of audience and not another.

But enough is enough. Please heed Kitaj’s advice.

(New Society 22.4.88)

MODERN ART: Spencer's Lost Paradise

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

Spencer's Lost Paradise

by Peter Fuller, 1980

Snt. Francis and The Birds, Stanley Spencer, 1935

As a child, I was sometimes taken to see the chapel Stanley Spencer covered with murals of the first world war at Burghclere in Berkshire. Spencer was admired within the Nonconformist milieu, within which I was brought up, as the last considerable religious artist. He impressed me deeply: I was fascinated by The resurrection of the soldiers on the east wall; there was something compellingly mundane about the way they rose from the ground amid mud and horses and handed in their white crosses to Christ.

Visiting his exhibition at the Royal Academy, I realized how deeply he is etched on my memory. This was not just the result of childhood impressionability. Although Spencer produced some atrocious works, this exhibition confirms that he was, at his best, a good, even a great, painter. But art teachers rarely recommend their students to look at him; art historians do not know what to say about him; and museum curators have no idea where to hang him. For a long time, his magnificent The Resurrection, Cookham was almost invisible in the darkness of a Tate stairway.

How are we to explain the Spencer phenomenon? He was born in Cookham in 1891, the seventh of eight children of the village music teacher. The family was intense, closed, talented and religiously fraught—father was church, mother chapel. Stanley and his younger brother, Gilbert (later also a painter), were educated by two elder sisters in a schoolroom behind the house. In 1907, Stanley attended art school in Maidenhead, where he drew from classical casts. In 1908, he went to the Slade where he was taught by Henry Tonks, who believed that the only basis of artistic expression was anatomical drawing.

His fellow-students nicknamed him ‘Cookham’ because he travelled up and down from the Berkshire village every day by train. Spencer’s early religious paintings, like The Nativity of 1912, and Zacharias and Elizabeth of 1914, are saturated with elements drawn from Cookham. They indicate how carefully he had been looking at early Renaissance painters, and they are compositionally impressive. But they also have the ring of expressive authenticity about them.

Speaking of these pictures, Spencer himself said in the 1940s that the religion which informed them was ‘utterly believed in.’ ‘Somehow religion was something to do with me, and I was to do with religion. It came into my vision quite naturally like the sky and rain.’ Religion was bound up with his continuing experience of his birthplacce, too. He once wrote: ‘I could see the richness that underlines the bible in Cookham in the hedges, in the yew trees.’

When Piero Della Francesca painted his Nativity (now in the National Gallery), he did so against the background of the Italian countryside. Through his compositional skills, he brought together his personal imagination, and his experience of the world as seen, and unified the two within a shared religious mythology. Few twentieth century painters have ever felt themselves to be in such a fortunate position. Until 1914, however, Spencer was.

The idyll was soon shattered. In old age, Spencer looked back on his early paintings. ‘Those pictures,’ he said, ‘have something that I have lost. When I left the Slade (in 1912), and went back to Cookham, I entered a kind of earthly paradise. Everything seemed fresh and to belong to the morning. My

Stanley Spencer, The Nativity, 1912, London University College ideas were beginning to unfold in fine order, when along comes the war and smashes everything.’ (Spencer enlisted with the Royal Army Medical Corps and served with field ambulances in Macedonia.) ‘When I came home, the divine sequence had gone. I just opened a shutter in my side and out rushed my pictures anyhow. Nothing was ever the same again.’

The first world war split Spencer’s imaginative life. None­theless, at first, this experience served only to enrich his work. Demobilized, he was commissioned to produce an official war painting. Travoys, of 1919, shows a dressing station during a battle in Macedonia. It is among the outstanding British paintings of our century.

Spencer saw the figures on stretchers ‘with the same veneration and awe as so many crucified Christs.’ Thus he found ‘a sense of peace in the middle of confusion,’ but one which is neither sentimental nor idealizing. The contrast between the picture’s calculated compositional serenity, and the searing tragedy it depicts evokes the sentiments of some of the finest Renaissance crucifixions.

Spencer produced other major works in the 1920s. But his greatest achievement of this, or any period was the Burghclere memorial chapel, which was commissioned to commemorate a dead officer and which he executed between 1927 and 1932. John Rothestein did not exaggerate when he contrasted it favourably with Matisse’s more famous chapel at Vence.

Nonetheless, there is a sudden falling off of Spencer’s creative powers after the completion of the chapel. In the beginning, the ‘earthly paradise’ of Cookham had, like all utopias, been elaborated out of transfigured elements of infantile, emotional experience, represented through religious pictorial conventions. Spencer tried to comprehend even the ‘negative utopia’ of war in these terms.

Significantly, he never engaged in ‘horrors of war’ painting. Burghclere shows ordinary soldiers doing everything but fighting, and rising from the dead rather than dying. The attempt to see war in terms of his ‘earthly paradise’ gave rise to his finest pictures. But the two would not truly fit, and he never successfully revived the idyll. Religion could no longer authentically mediate between his inner and outer worlds.

In 1932, after more than ten years’ absence, he moved back to Cookham. He painted many landscapes of the village, but there is about these works a deadening, sharp-focused literalism: Cookham is now clearly seen, but not felt. How different this glazed vision seems from when he looked lovingly on the same landscape for the elements of his early religious paintings. But Spencer was also seeking a mythology to fill the vacuum of his collapsed religious world-view. He thought he had found it in bodily relations between human beings.

You find hints of this in his continuing obsession with the resurrection, which began much earlier. Spencer never saw this as the coming of the cataclysmic spiritual Kingdom of God on earth, but rather as the collapse of the spiritual into the mundane. There is something resolutely common-or-garden about all those well-dressed village folk, popping out of their graves.

In the 1930s his view of religion became increasingly sexual. ‘The erotic side I am so drawn to really belongs to the very essence of religion,’ he once wrote. In 1935, he painted Love among the nations, in which utopia now becomes a kind of

Stanley Spencer, Travoys arrivingata dressing station, 1919, Imperial War Museum, London mutual masturbatory grappling between persons of all colours, races and creeds. ‘During the war,’ he commented concerning this picture, ‘when I contemplated the horror of my life, and the lives of those with me, I felt the only way to end the ghastly experience would be if everyone suddenly decided to indulge in every degree and form of sexual, carnal love, bestiality, anything you like to call it. These are the joyful inheritances of mankind.’

Spencer’s attempt to translate religious experience into human terms sounds promising. In fact, it proved a pictorial disaster. Love among the nations is hideous. Sunflower and dog worship (in which sexual activity is extended to contact with the animal and vegetable worlds) and Adoration of the old men (in which a group of infatuated male geriatrics wait to be felt- up by village girls) are even more grotesque. Few of his scenes celebratory of sexual encounters and conjugal life are much better. So what went wrong?

The answer is partly pictorial. Many pioneers of the modern movement discovered that profane illumination could be expressed through a certain kind of aesthetic experience, dependent upon the emotional symbolism of form itself—the handling of paint substances, colours and shapes in ways evocative of significant affective states. You find this in Cezanne, post-impressionism, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and some recent abstract painting. You can see something similar in pre-Renaissance art, and, significantly, in very early Spencer, too. His picture, John Donne arriving in heaven, was not out of place in Fry’s 1912 post-impressionist show.

But Spencer despised such techniques, when they were not linked to specifically religious imagery. Pictorially, he came to insist exclusively on anatomical expression. He could not even take impressionism, complaining of its ‘utter lack of spiritual grace.’

Spencer’s failure was as much to do with his personal as his aesthetic limitations. The reduction of religious experience into secular terms cannot be done through instinctual, sexual love alone. The life of adult human beings embraces a gamut of emotions, of which the explicitly sexual forms just a part. Spencer’s vision of transformed human relations becomes a travesty. In the midst of Love among the nations he appears, clothed, while two naked Negresses fondle him. Thus was the ‘earthly paradise’ reduced.

He himself was incapable of full relationships. He married Hilda Carline when he was thirty-three. In 1935, he began a series of perverse nudes of Patricia Preece, sometimes in­cluding a self-portrait. These are redolent with oppressive sexual tension, but without trace of feeling in touch, composi­tion or gesture. Hilda was divorced from Spencer in 1937, and he promptly married Preece. He invited his first wife to attend his honeymoon with his second, whereupon the latter (who was already established in an enduring lesbian relationship) accused him of adultery with the former, and declined to live with him.

He made repeated overtures to Hilda to remarry him; but she refused. He wrote her endless letters—some over 100 pages long—which were not inhibited by her death in 1950. Thus though Spencer celebrated good human relations as the realized essence of religion, he knew little about them. Even his affirmation of the sexual was born of frustration rather than fulfilment—and, in the paintings, this shows.

Perhaps not surprisingly, he often tried to revive his religious ‘world-view.’ Sometimes, in The Christ in the wildnerness series of 1939, or Southampton’s Resurrection, of 1947, he almost succeeded. But the repulsive, comic-book character of such works as The crucifixion of 1958 indicate only the desperateness with which he sought to invest the old mythology with meaning and feeling again.

The psychiatrist, Anthony Storr, has recently suggested that there is a special link between utopianism and sexual perversion. Both involve transfiguring the world according to one’s fantasies and wishes. When Spencer’s ‘earthly paradise’ collapsed, he failed to find a secular equivalent for it. Had he been a socialist, or even someone more sympathetic to modernist art, would he have fared any better? We cannot say. As it was, he lapsed into a chaos of perverse fantasy.

1980

MODERN ART: Edward Hopper: The Loneliness Thing

MODERN ART intertwines a life-long battle between four mavericks of the art world, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty, and the preciousness of life. Based on the writings of Peter Fuller, adapted by his son.

Before the shut down MODERN ART had just won Best Screenplay (3rd Place) at Hollywood Reel Film Festival and had been accepted as Official Selection in competition or Finalist placement in Beverly Hills Film Festival, Manhattan Film Festival, Big Apple Screenplay Competition, Firenze FilmCorti International Festival (Italy), Film Arte Festival (Madrid), Drama Inc Screenplay Competition, and Twister Alley Film Festival. All of which have been postponed by at least a couple months to protect public health and safety. But the good news is they will be back on soon and in the meantime you can read selected essays by Peter Fuller here on my blog during down time! In consideration of social isolation it may be a good time to revisit Peter Fuller’s essay Edward Hopper: The Loneliness Thing.

EDWARD HOPPER: THE LONELINESS THINGs

By Peter Fuller, 1981

Edward Hopper, a large man as taciturn as the figures in many of his paintings, used to grumble that those who talked about his paintings overdid ‘the loneliness thing.’ Nonethe­less, his best pictures seem to depict the experience of isolation: Hopper’s people are lost within themselves even when they are in the presence of others.

Hopper did not like being called ‘an American scene painter’ either: and there it is easier to go along with him. His famous pictures of a man standing by a row of petrol pumps outside a rural filling station, or of shop facades in Seventh Avenue, Manhattan, on a Sunday morning are as concerned with a certain ‘structure of feeling’ as with topography. But that ‘structure of feeling’ is ‘the loneliness thing.’

You feel it in Hopper’s masterpieces, like Nighthawks, with its four jaded figures in the illuminated interior of an all-night cafe, and in many of the pictures of office workers, travellers, hotel guests and theatre people. You can hardly avoid it, either, in the compelling studies of anonymous women glimpsed dressing, or undressing, in the cold but intimate spaces of brilliantly lit bedrooms. It even pervades the pictures of isolated buildings by railroads or the later images of empty rooms in which no men or women appear at all. These too seem somehow dominated by the absence of the figure.

It would, in fact, be hard to say anything convincing about Hopper without stressing ‘the loneliness thing.’ His paintings are so conspicuously about the vacuity, sadness, futility, emptiness and, yes, experience of alienation on the fringes of ‘the American dream.’ But how does this relate to the qualities of his work and to his stature as an artist?

According to many contemporary American critics, Hopper has been crippled by his preoccupations. For example, a standard text on American art, declares that ‘pictorially’ Hopper was as ‘limited, average, and undistinguished as the humiliated landscape, the dilapidated and gloomily picturesque architecture and the drab urban scenes’ that he made the ‘stock-in-trade’ of his subject matter.

Hopper is an embarrassment to American partisans of modernism and avantgardism. Their art history books and the lay-out of their modern art museums are designed to prove that all that is of value in recent art has been created by handing down the torch of stylistic innovation first ignited by Cezanne. They assume this was borne aloft in a triumphant, historicist progression through the early European modernist move­ments and on, into the achievements of American abstract expressionism and its successors. But it was just this develop­ment Hopper refused. He objected to the ‘papery qualities’ of Cezanne, and was not significantly affected by anything that happened later. And yet Hopper clearly could not be dismissed as some hill-billy regionalist or dumb ‘primitive’.

When Henry Geldzahler organized his massive 1970 exhibi­tion of American art since 1940 at the Metropolitan Museum, Hopper was the only outsider at the modernist garden party. But he was hardly a welcome guest. Not one of the copious critical essays in the catalogue so much as mentioned his name.

More recently, however, even the art institutions have begun to acknowledge that modernism is in crisis. What once looked like Hopper’s weaknesses are now acclaimed as his strengths. He is praised as the painter of ‘modern life,’ par excellence. Alternatively, he is interpreted as a great, neutral ‘realist’ who refused style altogether, and simply transcribed, exactly, the appearance of contemporary reality.

But these estimates of Hopper won’t stand up either. There are many bad paintings about ‘modern life.’ Hopper himself painted some of them: he is, in fact, a very uneven artist. Not more than fifteen of his pictures are wholly convincing, and there are works in this exhibition so second-rate that it is hard to believe they were made by the man who produced, say, Nighthawks. But those Hoppers which approach the condi­tion of masterpieces are certainly not the ones in which he most faithfully transcribes appearances. The working drawings included in this exhibition demonstrate how carefully his best paintings were constituted-, all sorts of disparate observed elements are used to construct a single picture. The artist’s role is anything but ‘neutral.’ The case of Edward Hopper appears more complex than either the modernists or their opponents allow.

Hopper was taught by Robert Henri, a turn-of-the-century American artist with a deep admiration for Velasquez, Hals, Goya, Daumier and the pre-impressionist pictures of Manet and Degas. Henri wanted an art saturated in ‘modern life’: but he tried to realize this through physiognomy—the expressions of his subjects. He was a versatile portraitist of men and women in every condition. Henri opposed aestheticism and revived the concerns of earlier nineteenth century American painters, like the great Thomas Eakins, who had tried to root their art in the scientific study of the body. Hopper thought Eakins greater than Manet. Under Henri, Hopper learned to draw the figure; the transformations of its expressions and poses were the first expressive language he mastered.

But in 1906 Hopper went to Paris and encountered impressionism. All he had learned led him to resist the dissolution of concrete forms into hazes of light. Nonetheless, in his painting he began to rely not just on the body (and the world) as objects of perception, but also upon elements drawn from the processes of perception themselves. In particular, transformations of luminosity and of depicted space joined

Edward Hopper, Automat, 1926, Des Moines Art Centre, Iowa those of the figure as part of the material upon which he drew to make his pictures.

After 1910, Hopper never crossed the Atlantic again. But it took him a long time to integrate what he had learned during his American apprenticeship with the discoveries of his visits to Paris. For a time, he stopped painting and found work as an illustrator. But he complained that he never felt satisfied drawing people ‘grimacing and posturing.’ He longed to ‘paint sunlight on the side of a house.’ Of course, he did not just wish to record it: Hopper was contemptuous of painting which tried to short-circuit imagination. ‘Great art,’ he once wrote, ‘is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.’

In the 1920s, when he was in his forties, Hopper finally found a way of working in which the expressive potentialities of the figure, perceived space, and light were combined together under the directing force of the imagination to create convincing pictures. Through these painterly means he could, when he wished, say something about those ‘structures of feeling’ characteristic of ‘modern life.’

Take Automat of 1926. A woman is seated at a circular table near the door of the automat. The chair in front of her is empty. Beneath the dome of her hat, her eyes are downcast. She has just taken a sip of coffee. Perhaps she is thinking about someone who is not there. Behind her, on the sill, is a bowl of fruit. The round lights of the interior, reflected in the window, run out into the night and are swallowed up by it: she is framed by a great pane of emptiness and silence. She is alone.

Why is this such an effective picture? In part, it is because of the handling of the figure itself. She is comprised of very simple forms: yet everything about her—eyes, lips, hands and legs—is expressive of those emotions Hopper wishes to communicate. But the play of lights and colours, particularly the contrast between the uncomfortable luminosity of the cafe and the undispersable darkness of the night outside, serve the same purpose. These elements, however, acquire their expressive strength within the compositional structure of the picture.

This is not, of course, a transcription of a given scene, or anything like it. The forceful geometry of the painting has been built up through Hopper’s self-conscious choices and simplifi­cations—for example, in the way he plays off the circular forms of the woman’s hat, coffee cup, table, fruit bowl and lights against the rectangular shapes of this corner of the room. Above all, Hopper has carefully framed the woman against that potentially engulfing plane of blackness. This is intended to tell us more about her emotional state than about his empirical observations.

The content of this painting is thus certainly ‘the loneliness thing.’ But it is not this, on its own, which makes it effective. James Joyce once said, ‘Sentimentality is unearned emotion.’ It is easy to imagine a sentimental picture on the theme Hopper depicts here. But the emotion in Automat has been earned by the way in which the artist brings it to cohere in all aspects of his expressive practice (including those to do with figure, light and structure) and further unifies all these elements into a convincing compositional whole.

And this is why I think both the modernists (with their insistence that only new styles can be of value in painting) and their opponents (with their vague appeals to ‘modern life,’ or the need faithfully to record appearances) are both missing the point about Hopper’s best work. Indeed, Hopper reminds me strongly of Mark Rothko, who was perhaps the best of America’s ‘abstract expressionist’ painters. Stylistically, of course, they have nothing in common. Yet the area of experience which Rothko expressed, through his chosen pictorial conventions, was peculiarly close to Hopper’s.

Rothko, at first a figure painter, turned to wholly abstract works of glowing colour fields through which he chronicled his struggle against depression, alienation and despair. Eventually, a billowing black cloud of negative space began to appear ever more frequently in his work: visually, it looked not unlike the purplish, subsuming plane'm Automat. Finally, it engulfed not just his pictures, but Rothko himself.

Hopper’s work seems to follow a similar, though less dramatically extreme, development. As he grew older, Hopper seemed to become less and less comfortable with the presence of figures in his paintings. Sometimes, his later works seem cluttered, as if he was throwing in as many forms as he could to cover that nothingness glimpsed in Automat. In other works, the figures are so badly drawn and proportioned that one feels Hopper would have been happier leaving them out altogether. Indeed, the most successful of his later interiors are those of the walls of empty rooms. In these, the proximities to Rothko’s concerns are self-evident. It is as if Hopper no longer wished the figures of others, in the world, to impinge upon that expressive space which he was trying to construct in his pictures.

To some, this comparison between Hopper and Rothko may sound forced, or fanciful. But Hopper himself once said, ‘To me, form, colour and design are merely means to an end, the tools I work with, and they do not interest me greatly for their own sake. I am interested primarily in the vast field of experience and sensation.’ Similarly Rothko, protesting against those who called his works ‘abstracts,’ wrote, ‘It is not [my paintings’] intention either to create or to emphasize a formal colour-space arrangement. They depart from natural rep­resentation only to intensify the expression of the subject implied in the title—not to dilute or efface it.’

The painterly means Hopper and Rothko used may have been very different: but the areas of experience and sensation which they each so effectively expressed were, in fact, very similar.

1981