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
I believe this article is very important to us today, what the world is facing, where will the arts be placed on man’s hierarchy of needs when it comes to budget cuts? Those most in danger of facing the affects of these changes will be the next generation. Art is Education is worth fighting for now more than ever.
Art in Education
by Peter Fuller, 1983
When I was about eleven years old, at Prep School, I was taught art by a middle-aged lady who sat a boy at the front of the class and told the rest of us to draw him. I found it difficult to get the proportions of the figure remotely right, and I had no knack for catching a likeness. Things were little better when she arranged a bowl of apples in place of the boy. I was also rather messy and I tended to smudge the charcoal. I think it was just assumed I had no natural talent for art.
At the age of fourteen, I went to a minor public school where the art master had been a fighter pilot during the Second World War. He talked to me about my paintings in a way no one had ever done before; I produced torrential outpourings of work.
Certainly, he encouraged self-expression - but not self- indulgence; he insisted on continuous, critical self-assessment. From him, I learned for the first time that there was such a thing as a ‘visual language’. He also related the work I produced both to what I could see in nature, and to the greatest art of the modern movement and the past. For him, the production of art involved sentiment, reason, knowledge, skill and judgment.
Sometimes he tried to teach me to get over my difficulties with proportions. I remember labouring over some exercises with lighted eggshells. But I never did learn to draw ‘properly’, nor did I attempt any kind of exam in art. Nonetheless, I owe this teacher an enormous amount. Not only did he help to make life tolerable in an abysmal environment; many of my aesthetic interests and enthusiasms can be traced back to him.
Looking back, it seems almost incredible he was able to achieve as much as he did. He worked in a tiny, cramped nineteenth- century art room, on the far side of the Quad. He had no assistants, nor much understanding from other members of staff. Once he recommended my paintings to the Headmaster for a ‘Distinction’; the only time I ever saw the Head in the art room was when he came across to inspect my work. Presumably he was offended by the fact that I still could not get those proportions right, nor catch a likeness. I was probably still pretty messy, too. Anyway, the ‘Distinction’ was duly refused and the art master (not to mention myself) humiliated once again. It was at that time I"first developed my beliefs that good art bears witness to a reality other and better than the existing one . . .
But how should you teach an eleven- to sixteen-year-old art? Art is about values and skills - but which values and skills are open questions. They are, however, questions which Her Majesty’s Inspectors of art education have to put to themselves every day. hmi have recently produced an intriguing report describing art teaching in fourteen secondary schools ranging from Fred Longworth High School, a mixed comprehensive in Wigan, to Marlborough College, a leading public school in Wiltshire. (Department of Education and Science, Art in Secondary Education 11-16, HMSO.)
The methods of teaching in these establishments vary enormously. In Wigan, ‘art and design’ is part of a faculty of ‘creative studies’: there is an emphasis on craftsmanship, and imaginative use of a wide range of materials and processes (especially in fabrics and textiles). There are no formal lessons, as such; and teaching is geared heavily to individual needs.
At Marlborough, however, the art department is proud of a long tradition of learning and scholarship; emphasis is on acute perception, understanding of pictorial language, and the ability to appreciate the great masterpieces of the past. ‘Constant talk about art’, and the exercise of evaluative judgment, are encouraged. Fred Longworth High School and Marlborough College have one thing in common: they both offer examples of what H M1 regard as ‘successful art teaching’.
But what is ‘successful art teaching’ in a secondary school? To answer this question, we have to go back in history a bit. In the nineteenth century, images of children may have been sentimentalised, but images by children were virtually ignored. Child art was seen simply as the activity of those who had not yet adequately learned an adult skill; the only noteworthy art by children was thought to be precociously competent work by prodigies like the young Landseer, or Millais. In so far as it existed at all, ‘art education’ was synonymous with the earliest possible acquisition of academic skills.
At the end of the nineteenth century, all this began to change. Within the Fine Art tradition, the academic consensus was increasingly eroded. All kinds of new ways of making art began to be regarded as being expressively valid. Child art, like ‘primitive’ and tribal art, was no longer seen as crude and incompetent but rather began to be appreciated for its own sake as something sensitive and expressive.
One positive effect of this was that during the twentieth century understanding of the aesthetic activities of children steadily rose; indeed, something called ‘The Child Art Movement’ began to emerge. This influenced a range of educational and psychological practices. For example, Rhoda Kellogg’s detailed studies established that early artistic development in young children - granted only a facilitating environment - followed certain innate and largely culture-free patterns. Thus it was increasingly recognised that though talents varied, creative, imaginative and aesthetic work was effectively a ‘universal’, biologically given, human potentiality.
Paradoxically, however, the spread of advanced technologies and mechanical production meant that the opportunities for such work in adult life were constantly diminished. In this situation, ‘Art’ became increasingly segregated from other forms of social production: in much abstraction, emphasis shifted towards immediate appeals to the senses, or other forms of subjective, ‘culture-free’, self-expression. In effect, child art became one of the norms for the aesthetic production of adults. Another was a sort of mimicking of the anaesthetic means of modern production, in Pop Art, Video Art, Conceptual Art, etc. Indeed, in the 1960s, many art schools seemed to be offering students a choice between education in what was an essentially infantile aesthetic (slurpy abstraction, unrestrained ‘self-expression’) or the anaesthesia of Pop imagery, and mechanical processes, like photography, silk- screening and so on.
These developments placed a peculiar strain on the teaching of art at secondary school level. Studies of other cultures show that, from the age of about eight onwards, innate, biologically given patterns of aesthetic development are insufficient; the individual needs to encounter a living artistic tradition. The sameness of much psychotic and ‘insane’ art is legendary. Originality, health and growth in aesthetic life appear to depend on something more than talent; they also require contact with a living tradition, rooted in a society’s shared symbolic order - a tradition which provides meaningful iconography and patterns, and specific techniques with which to work and develop them. Indeed, far from being opposed to tradition and convention, individual aesthetic development cannot progress beyond the infantile without them.
If we lived in an aesthetically healthy society, it would be the job of art teachers in secondary schools to introduce their pupils to the values and skills of the living artistic tradition. But where no such tradition exists, what are they to do? And what can ‘successful art teaching’ mean?
Because there are no easy answers to these questions, secondary school art education is in confusion. For example, the boy-and- bowl-of-apples approach to which I was subjected at preparatory school is really based on the assumption that the academic tradition is still the only culturally valid one. But, paradoxically, this method of teaching no longer prepares those pupils who can master it for the sort of ‘professional’ life in the arts that opened up to a Landseer or a Millais. Rather, such skills lead towards proficiency in the sub-culture of amateur and leisure painting, where the seated figure and still-life-with-flowers are still stocks- in-trade.
Many post-war art school teachers have seen it as their first duty to break down any such quasi-academic skills a student might previously have acquired when at school; they seek to restore the pristine infantilism of the pre-secondary school years as a prerequisite for any kind of contemporary professionalism in the arts.
I certainly would not wish to defend the use of the old academic methods of art teaching in schools; but this teaching of a defunct aesthetic tradition seems less dangerous than a contemporary tendency to replace any attempt at aesthetic education with dexterity in anaesthetic processes, in the handling of machines, cameras, calculators and so on. This is often done under the guise of ‘broadening the syllabus’, that is, reducing the time spent on drawing, painting, sculpture, pottery. If this kind of ‘art education’ spreads, it will complete the de-aestheticisation of our culture within a generation.
Fortunately, however, hmi themselves are advocating neither of these alternatives. Somehow, I think they would have approved of my public school art master; in their report, they stress that the purpose of art education at secondary school level ought not to be to train professional (or indeed amateur) artists. ‘What marks the particular contribution of art and design to the secondary curriculum’, they write, ‘is that it emphasises the skills and understandings rooted in the senses of sight and touch, as well as in feeling and intellect.’
They say that the chief concern of successful art and design teaching is to provide pupils with tools - ‘practical, sensory and intellectual tools’ - by means of which they can become more of a person and make more sense of their experience. These include manual and practical skills; skills of acute perception and of effective discourse; knowledge of cultural and historical inheritance; ‘above all, they include a growth of artistic and aesthetic sensibilities and the personal values attached to them.’
These values and sensibilities, of course, will be at odds with those of the culture at large. But hmi stress that they can be pursued through a great variety of activities. In effect they imply that a good secondary school art department will make its own tradition, by relating art work produced to the social life of the school, on a local level.
Perhaps this is the best we can hope for in a divided society, glossed with a homogenised and cynical ‘mass culture’. Unlike hmi, however, I believe there are powerful arguments favouring the relative unification of secondary school art education. There is, of course, something arbitrary in the insistence that aesthetic sensibilities and values should be pursued in certain ways rather than others; but all healthy and extensive aesthetic traditions involve the acceptance of certain techniques and conventions, and the rejection of others. The imposition of such limitations would not so much stunt aesthetic growth as make it more possible than before.
What those limitations should be, however, could only be decided in the context of a review of art educational practices from nursery to art school levels. We need a continuum of aesthetic teaching, rather than a series of often oppositional systems at different stages of development. (In that continuum, secondary school art teaching would play a peculiarly important role, in extending aesthetic work beyond the ‘natural’ and purely subjective.) Such a revised system of art education could represent the best chance we have of nurturing a living, widely accepted, alternative tradition to the General Anaesthesia of mechanical ‘mass culture’.
1983