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
Plus Ca Change
by Peter Fuller, 1982
Times change. And so do values: at least in the international ‘art world’. Let’s go back ten years to ‘The New Art’ at the Hayward Gallery in 1972. Remember? Art Language, Victor Burgin, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert and George, John Stezaker and the rest of them, all ticker-taping down from the walls and ceilings. Words, numbers, diagrams, photo-texts, and flickering electronic equipment. The Hayward bristled with surveillance, documentation and research. A visit to ‘The New Art’ exhibition was rather like getting your fingerprints taken at a large police station, or applying for a visa, in person, at the American Embassy.
Not a smear or whiff of paint in sight, of course. Not even a daub of it on the sole of a trendy shoe. ‘We’ knew so much better than that. As Donald Karshan wrote introducing a major exhibition of conceptual art in New York, ‘We begin to understand that painting and sculpture are simply unreal in the coming age of computers and instant travel.’ Quite so! Those were the days when Tate officials were openly explaining that art had become a sub-cultural game for a specific in-group, and the gallery was avidly acquiring twigs, blankets, maps, bricks and videotapes of effete young men getting drunk on Gordon’s Gin and Arts Council grants: almost anything, in fact, so long as it wasn’t actually painted.
Victor Burgin, a ubiquitous Bouguereau and salon semioticist of those far-off days, called painting ‘the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud’. And Anne Seymour, herself then on the Tate staff, introduced the catalogue to ‘The New Art’ with jibes at all those silly-billies who thought ‘reality’ could be summed up in a picture of ‘a nude lady of uncertain age sitting on a kitchen chair’. Art, she said, could just as well be ‘a Balinese “monkey dance”, a piano tuner, running seven miles a day for seven days, or seeing your feet at eye level’. Through conceptual-ism, and so forth, the artist was free to work in ‘philosophy, photography, landscape, etc.’ - anything, in fact, that took his fancy, so long as he didn’t sully his hands with that nasty, foul-smelling, pigmented stuff which certain consenting cultural renegades squeezed out of little tubes in private. All this Miss Seymour thought quite wonderful: the artist was no longer ‘tied to a host of aesthetic discomforts which he personally does not appreciate’. (In those days, you didn’t even have to watch your ‘he’s’ and ‘she’s’.)
William Coldstream, Seated Nude 1972
All that is terribly old hat now. Ms Seymour has long since left the Tate, and is now firmly installed at Anthony D’Offay’s in Dering Street, from where she is delivering little homilies about the unique existential and metaphysical value of painting. ‘Painting’, she writes in a recent introduction to the work of an Italian called Chia, ‘is an attempt to make a physical thing which both questions and affirms its existence. The metaphysical problem in painting is to paint something as normal as possible, but to perceive it in a special way, which shows it as it is, and imbues it with a sense of the existential complications that reality involves.’ Aesthetic discomforts, it would seem, are back in fashion. Nor, I am sure, would it be fair to suggest that Seymour’s conversion had anything to do with the fact that, with artists like William Coldstream on his books, Mr D’Offay knew a good deal about what was still to be gained from pictures of nude ladies of uncertain age seated on kitchen chairs. As Helena Kontova, editor of Flash Art, who makes it her business to know about such things, has written, there is a ‘great wave of painting’, which is flowing simply everywhere, even ‘into areas that, until very recently, were considered improbable and even totally antagonistic’.
Markus Lupertz, Dithyrambs & Centaurs
I first picked up whiffs of the tidal slick that was heading in our direction from certain puzzling exhibitions at the Lisson and Whitechapel Galleries. The Nicholases Serota and Logsdail had once run establishments so clinical that you could have carried out a surgical operation on the floors: and then, quite suddenly, it began to look as if surgical operations had been carried out there. Slurpily lugubrious Lupertzs and suchlike, squelching their entrails at you from every side. But I only became aware of the scale of what was afoot when I saw ‘The New Spirit in Painting’ exhibition at the Royal Academy, early in 1981. The object of this show, or so the organisers said, was to demonstrate that ‘Great Painting’ was still being made today: every one of the 150 large pictures had been made within the previous decade.
In the catalogue, Hugh Casson, pra, who should have known better, likened ‘The New Spirit’ to Roger Fry’s famous exhibitions at the Grafton Gallery at the beginning of the century. These introduced Post-Impressionist painting to Britain and changed the course of taste, and subsequent history of art, in this country. The paintings of Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, however, met with resistance here; but the ‘New Spirit’ was immediately endorsed not just by the Royal Academy but by every modern art museum in the Western world. It is worth reminding ourselves of exactly what was on offer in that show.
Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait, 1977
First, there were works by the Grand Old Men of classical modernism, and assorted neo-legendary dinosaurs who had hung on into the 1970s but who ‘belonged’ to earlier decades: Bacon, Balthus, De Kooning, Helion, Matta, Picasso. Then there were pictures by a number of ‘eccentrics’ (mostly British) who, though well-established, had not previously held more than fringe positions in The Story of Modern Art: Auerbach, Freud, Kitaj, Hockney, Hodgkin. Next came a string of artists (mostly American) who exemplified the old reductionist spirit of Late Modernism, with its coda of mechanical and automatic painting: Brice Marden, Warhol and Frank Stella, now born again with all the glitter and tinsel of a new expressionism. Finally, came the ‘new blood’; the names that in a couple of years have risen from obscurity to become the common currency of the ‘art scene’. From Germany: Baselitz, Fetting, Hodicke, Kiefer, Koberling, Liipertz, Penck and Polke; from Italy: Calzolari, Chia and Paladino; and from America: Schnabel. And they, and their absent colleagues, like Clemente, Salome and Salle, are what it is all about.
Lucian Freud, Self Portrait
When I went to Sydney, last spring, I realised that this ‘great wave of painting’ had even swept through the outback: the Biennale was littered with gaudy pictures, the size of cricket- pitches, reeking of wet linseed oil, by all the masters and mistresses of the New Expressionism. New Imagism, Nuovi Nuovi, La Transavantguardia, Bad Painting, etc.: it conies under a score or more of different names. There is even an indigenous antipodean version - with stars like Davida Allen, whose epic smudges (bearing titles like Eschatological Dog) are to be seen in every Australian provincial art museum. But it isn’t just Australia. At all the art fairs, Kunst hassles and state-backed culture binges, ‘The New Spirit’ is being peddled for all it is worth which, despite worldwide recession, remains quite a bit. Busy little art bureaucrats are jetting around the capitals of the world assisting in their usual tight-lipped way in the birth of a new style; new critics are popping up prepared to mouth a new art rhetoric and endorse a new repertoire of ‘approved’ artists.
All this may make you begin to feel a twinge or two of sympathy for the conceptualists, performance people, political and theoretical artists who constituted Un Certain Art Anglais and got all the exposure in the paintless ’seventies. Don’t worry. Old avant-gardists never die: they just clamber on to whatever new wave is going. Many of today’s new tendency painters were yesterday’s mixed media pranksters. Bruce McLean is an obvious example. But even Ms Mary Kelly is now playing with pigmented shit, rather than the real thing. Who knows - perhaps Burgin is mixing coloured muds. Nor is ‘the great tide of paint’ necessarily opposed to all the proliferating anti-aesthetic practices of the 1970s. Rather, it splatters them. As Helena Kontova puts it, ‘media such as performance, installation and photography’ are being ‘contaminated’, or ‘taken over by anilines, colour and painting’. She argues that ‘in the space of just a few years or a few months’, artists who had succeeded in frustrating their manual skill and creative abilities by adopting a ‘moral severity’ that often impoverished their work have now ‘abandoned the technicalities of installation and the mental and physical stress of performance’. (As if Leonardo, Poussin, Van Gogh, Bonnard and Rothko had always been taking some sort of mindless, amoral, easy option!)
Georg Baselitz, Schlafzimmer (Bedroom), 1975
If I had any money to spare, I would buy shares in Rowney and Winsor and Newton - and probably put a bit into Crown and Berger, too. But one question is rarely asked in all this manic splatter: Is any of it any good? Take Baselitz, a German, and, by all accounts, one of the best of the new tendency painters. His work is inept: expressionistic, though not expressionist, he has made a mannerism and a great deal of money by prostituting an indigenous German tradition. Baselitz’s painting lacks even an echo of authentic experience, let alone achieved technical skill, or ‘working-through’ of expressively original forms. Inflated in scale and price, overweening, ugly, bombastic, vapid, loose, and awash with the sentimentality of borrowed angst, Baselitz paints a sort of seamless Misery Me Gift-Wrap. He suffers from some stultifying occlusion of the imagination, lacks touch and sensitivity as a draughtsman, and possesses none but the most degraded ‘studio’ colour sense. He gives the impression he has neither looked at the world, nor into himself. Indeed, his works are so drab and lacking in any painterly competence that, despite their enormous size, one would scarcely notice them unless they were hung upside down - which many of them are. And yet this sort of drivel is being bought, arse over eyes, by collectors, dealers and museums throughout the Western world. It was not just painting which was deserted by the ‘art scene’ in the 1970s, but also, it would seem, the ability to see and evaluate it with any sensitivity.
Even so, Julian Schnabel, an American, whose one-man show runs at the Tate until September 5, is a painter so bad that he makes Baselitz look quite good. Firstly, his imagination is acned and adolescent: at best, it is John W. Hinckley Jnr stuff, sick, immature, sexually unsavoury, strung up on a few improbable, external, cultural hooks. Schnabel appears to have needed ‘New Tendency’ painting for much the same reasons that Sonny Liston needed prizefighting. But he seems ignorant of the most basic elements of his chosen art-form. Works like Starting to Sing: Florence Loeb (4), of 1981, indicate that he has not yet realised that working on a surface the size of a boxing ring will tend to expose, rather than to conceal, his inability to draw. Nor, of course, will heaping broken crockery into a bed of body-filler mounted on canvas disguise the fact that Schnabel has rather less touch than an incompetent washer-upper. As for his colour, pictures like The unexpected death of Blinky Palermo in the tropics have all the chromatic subtlety of ghost-train decor. I have gazed and gazed at those Schnabels I have come across, and I have been quite unable to find any qualities in them (except inordinate size) which are not also readily visible in the fantasy paintings of the average disturbed adolescent. It is now common knowledge that Schnabel was ‘manufactured’ in much the same way as Jasper Johns was ‘manufactured’ in 1958, as a way out of the vacuum created by an ailing Tenth Street Abstract Expressionism. (Even the cast has not changed entirely; the long arm of Leo Castelli was involved in both operations.) I have never been a great admirer of Johns: but at least he had some real qualities around which the hype could be built. Schnabel does not. But this naked emperor — ‘one of the most celebrated young artists working anywhere in the world today’ according to the Tate catalogue - dazzles the eyeless press which throngs around him. Thus in 1974, Richard Cork purchased art for the Arts Council collection under the rubric, ‘Beyond Painting and Sculpture’. He dismissed all but a handful of diehard conceptualists as ‘obsolescent practitioners of our own time’, and celebrated the deposition of ‘the hegemony of painted surfaces or sculptural presences’. As I have had occasion to remark before, there is a tide in the affairs of corks and they tend to bob wherever it leads, even if it means re-entering a sea of paint. Today, Cork perceives ‘a shimmering, opalescent beauty’ in Schnabel’s shattered tea-cup pictures which, he feels, have the ‘bitter-sweet ambiguity’ of ‘broken shells cast up on a sea-shore’. Cork has yet to realise that the oil on the beaches of the new romanticism is a sign not so much of hidden wealth as of poisonous pollution.
Julian Schnabel
Why is the new tendency painting so bad ? As it happens, there is much in the rhetoric which surrounds it that I find perfectly acceptable, even congenial. For example, the text in the catalogue of ‘The New Spirit in Painting’ affirmed ‘a new consciousness of the contemporary significance’ of this art form; it stressed the relationship between painting and ‘a certain subjective vision’ which included both ‘a search for self-realisation’ and awareness of ‘a wider historical stage’. It celebrated ‘joy in the senses’, and proclaimed: ‘This exhibition presents a position in art which conspicuously asserts traditional values, such as individual creativity, accountability, quality, which throw light on the condition of contemporary art, and, by association, on the society in which it is produced. Thus for all its apparent conservatism the art on show here is, in the true sense, progressive. Consciously or instinctively, then, painters are turning back to traditional concerns.’ I suspect Christos Joachimides may have experienced the joy of corroboration when he first read similar sentiments in my own work. But such ideas float like brightly coloured pollen through the new cultural climate.
One reason why so many new tendency painters lack that great quality to which they purportedly aspire is quite simple: with the exception of Chia, those who today are so avidly turning to paint appear to have next to no knowledge or mastery of painting. Paint itself is not a magical or fetishistic substance whose mere application endows special qualities. Paint demands profound transformation through imaginative and physical working: those who were formed as artists in the wasteland of Late Modernism tend to lack any apprenticeship in the practice and its traditions. But this is not simply a matter of individual failings. We can best understand the plight of the transavantgardist by considering two of the most insistent themes of new tendency criticism: its anti- historicism, and its avowed biologism.
New expressionist literature tends to harp on what one writer has called ‘the crisis in the avant-garde’s Darwinistic and evolutionary mentality’. Such emphases, of course, are not in themselves new. Elsewhere, I myself have tried to demonstrate how this mentality gave rise to the sterile reductions, in both art and criticism, of the 1960s and 1970s. Through his exhibition, ‘Towards Another Picture’, and its accompanying polemic, Andrew Brighton, too, cast doubt on the very concept of a self-evolving continuum of ‘mainstream’ styles, and demonstrated that such a historicist approach was worse than useless as an instrument for determining what was, and what was not, of value in art.
But, of course, when the ‘evolutionary mentality’ has been rejected, the central problem still remains: if stylistic evolution, or art history, does not confer aesthetic value, then what does? Exhibitions like ‘Prophecy and Vision’ indicate that God is in fashion once again. I have repeatedly argued, however, that there are significant elements in the production of good art which spring from relatively constant biological roots: these involve both enduring representations (of birth, reproduction, love, death, etc.) and the very nature of the material practices involved. And here too it would seem that I have something in common with new tendency criticism which, having abandoned the trajectory of evolving styles, tends to be sprinkled with vague appeals to human biological destiny, and to the biological and sensuous aspects of art-making itself.
Thus Nicholas Serota claims that Liipertz is reinterpreting ‘universals such as the creation and awakening of life, the interaction of natural forces, human emotions and ideologies and the experience of death’. (Ideologies universal? An original idea, anyway . . .) Seymour rhapsodises about the alleged ‘autobiography’ manifest in Chia’s work. And Achille Bonito Oliva (whose book La Transavanguardia Italiana is relentlessly plagiarised by all other operators in this field) litters his texts with references to ‘manuality’, ‘sensorial pleasure’, ‘the rhythm and pulsion of pure subjectivity’, and the ‘concentrating point of a biology of art’. He has even gone so far as to speak of art having its own ‘internal genetic code’ - though whether this is a literal or a metaphoric formulation remains unclear.
And yet if there are similarities, there are also sharp distinctions from the position I have been trying to articulate, and these, I believe, are vital to any understanding of the failure of this new tendency work. For I have always argued that if there is a continuity between human aesthetic experience and ‘natural’ (or biological) life, there is also a rupture: and this has much to do with man’s unique capacity for the elaboration of socially shared symbolic orders, for culture. Though culture itself is grounded in man’s highly specific psycho-biological nature, it is also the means through which human history transcends natural history. Indeed, the ‘biological’ elements in our aesthetic life require a ‘facilitating environment’, in the form of appropriate modes of work and materials, and a socially-given symbolic order such as that provided by a religion, before they can be fully realised. They require, in effect, an enabling and yet resistant tradition, and this is dependent upon the survival of propitious historical circumstances. But the waning of religious belief dismantled the socially shared symbolic order; and the rise of industrial production deaestheticised work itself. This led to the disappearance of any true style with deep tendrils in communal life.
Whatever else this may have been, it constituted a tremendous cultural loss. Donald Winnicott once pointed out that there could be no originality except on the basis of tradition. He thus unwittingly echoed John Ruskin, who wrote:
Originality in expression does not depend on invention of new words; nor originality in poetry on invention of new measures; nor, in painting, on invention of new colours, or new modes of using them. Originality depends on nothing of the kind. A man who has the gift, will take up any style that is going, the style of his day, and will work in that, and be great in that, and make everything that he does in it look as fresh as if every thought of it had just come down from heaven. I do not say that he will not take liberties with his materials, or with his rules: I do not say that strange changes will not sometimes be wrought by his efforts, or his fancies, in both. But those liberties will be like the liberties that a great speaker takes with the language, not a defiance of its rules for the sake of singularity; but inevitable, uncalculated, and brilliant consequences of an effort to express what the language, without such infraction, could not.
But what if culture became so warped it could sustain no widely- shared artistic language, nor give rise to a style that was any more deeply rooted than a passing fashion? What would happen to those men and women who had ‘the gift’ then? Ruskin knew this was the central problem facing architects and artists in the nineteenth century. As they thrashed around in an inevitable ‘Battle of the Styles’, he consistently advocated the continuance of a living Gothic tradition rooted in (Protestant) Christian belief. But he, too, saw that as secularisation shattered the shared symbolic order, and industrialisation squeezed the space for imaginative and creative work, aesthetic expression tended to be forced out of life: alternatively, it became reduced to the level of aesthesis — simple sensual, or biological, pleasure of which Ruskin tended to be contemptuous. Nonetheless, the space for a true aesthetic dimension - ‘theoria as opposed to “aesthesis” ’ - which, though rooted in the senses, reached up into moral (or symbolic) life could, Ruskin believed, be held open in the illusory world behind the picture plane. Thus, for him, The English school of landscape culminating in Turner is in reality nothing else than a healthy effort to fill the void which destruction of architecture has left.’
As long as Ruskin sustained belief, he thought that nature was the handiwork of God - and that Turner, through his scrupulous attention to that handiwork, had seen through the veil of appearances to the divine essence which lay behind them. But a religious view of nature became culturally increasingly untenable, and Modernism abandoned the search for a universal style which could affirm individual difference within collective spiritual unity. In architecture, the modern movement opted for functionalism; in art, after a period in which it was hoped that pure form itself could constitute a new symbolic order, it lapsed into that reductionist succession of fashions in which the aesthetic dimension was eventually betrayed altogether. In the sense that the transavant- garde has seen through this historicist evasion of the acute problem of the absence of a living style, its claim to be the first ‘post-modern’ movement seems tenable.
But Achille Bonito Oliva ‘solves’ this problem at the level of critical discourse (just as his chosen clan of artists do at the level of practice) by arguing that art need not enter into any moral or ‘theoretic’ dimension at all; however, unlike the pure formalist painters he does not defend aesthesis (or merely sensuous, retinal pleasure) so much as a miasma of competing and fragmented styles, a legion of broken symbolic orders which do not even seek to constitute a whole.
‘The myth of unity, a Unitarian vision backed up by an ideology which could explain any contradiction or antinomy, has been replaced’, he writes, ‘by a more healthy, open-minded position, ready to follow different directions. The myth of unity has been replaced by the possibility of fragmentation, of an experience characterised by movement and a personal approach.’ ‘Art’, according to Oliva, ‘is a continuous landslide of languages toppling over the artist.’ He goes on to say that it is no accident that the artist ‘permanently resides in his own reserve, where physical and mental layers of experience accumulate’. Thus, he argues, ‘we now find ourselves faced by artists who choose to hitch-hike down many roads.’ But is this a ‘healthy’ situation, or a lapsing of art into a mire of subjectivity, a mixture not so much of ‘biological’ as of animal function, and a sort of semiotic side-salad, a solipsistic chaos of signs and signals, signifying nothing? These artists are as unable to enter into social life through their work as a child who has been taught to speak through a hundred languages rather than one (or two). Or, as Bonito Oliva puts it, ‘Art cannot be the practice of reconciliation because it always produces difference. Difference means the assertion of the fragment, negation of every homologation (sic) . . .’, etc. He regards this as a virtue. But if art both denies the pursuit of aesthesis, and refuses any moral or ‘theoretic’ aspect, if it, in effect, renounces the practice of reconciliation, it becomes stripped of the aesthetic dimension, and reduces itself to the application, through merely manual gestures, of substances to bits and pieces of broken symbolic orders. Not even in illusion can it create an ‘other reality’ which challenges the existing one: in as far as it has a style, it is punk bricolage. Marcuse argued that when art abandons its transcendent autonomy it succumbs to that reality it seeks to grasp and indict. ‘While the abandonment of the aesthetic form’, he wrote, ‘may well provide the most immediate, most direct mirror of a society in which subjects and objects are shattered, atomised, robbed of their words and images, the rejection of the aesthetic sublimation turns such works into bits and pieces of the very society whose “antiart” they want to be.’ He went on to say that certain modernists held collage, the juxtaposition of media, the confusion of languages and the renunciation of any aesthetic mimesis to be adequate responses to given reality, which they saw as disjointed and fragmented, and which certainly militated against any aesthetic formation. But, he stressed, this idea that social reality itself was fragmented was wrong. ‘We are experiencing, not the destruction of every whole, every unit or unity, every meaning, but rather the rule and power of the whole, the superimposed administered unification . . . And in the intellectual culture of our society, it is the aesthetic form which, by virtue of its otherness, can stand up against this integration.’ It is precisely this possibility that the transavantgardists refuse.
Indeed, the ‘new expressionism’s’ inability to articulate, even within the illusory world of the picture, any coherent symbolic order indicates that it is much closer to the ‘Late Modernist’ problematic than its protagonists like to pretend. For the new tendencies make sense only in terms of reaction to the modernist art that went before. The pendulum has swung, certainly, but it has done so within that ever narrowing, and ever more restricting, funnel of modernist art history.
Julian Schnabel, Self Portrait
A ‘landslide of languages toppling over the artist’ is no compensation at all for the absence of a shared symbolic order, and an accompanying artistic language, or style. And it is precisely this great lacuna, common to the avantgarde and the transavantgarde alike, which eliminates the possibility of true aesthetic experience. To express nuance of feeling, language is necessary - and this is why, even in its ‘sensuality’, the new painting seems so coarse and vitiated. ‘It’s not expressionism, it is feelings that are important,’ writes Schnabel: and yet, of course, there is infinitely more subtlety of feeling in the way Vermeer modulates light across an illusory wall than in any of Schnabel’s wild outpourings.
In effect, an anally retentive conceptualism - stamped by meanness of mind, fear of feeling, obsession with control, systematization, over-ordering, dematerialisation, over-intellectualisation, etc. - has been replaced by its exact corollary, an anally expulsive expressionism, characterised by regressive splurging of sticky substances, lack of control, disorder, mindless splattering, compulsive inflation of scale, etc., etc. The proximity of the two phenomena will not surprise anyone with a modest degree of psychoanalytic knowledge. Elsewhere, I have tried to show how the anti-art of the 1960s and 1970s was reflective of the anaesthetic practices of contemporary culture, for example in its predilection for documentation, modular production, imaginative suppression, spectacle, etc. So, too, the new expressionism fails to offer any alternative to this anaesthetic reality, or the anti-art which it spawned. As Kontova herself puts it: ‘At the beginning of the ’seventies painting seemed to have been finally overridden, but with the arrival of postmodern, it made a trium-phant return to the art scene, displaying its great ability to assimilate the most diverse elements (such as some aspects of performance, installation or photography), to the point of formulating anti-painting, kitsch, neo-naif, neo-expressionism, and neo-baroque, to name but a few.’ Thus painting is prostituted: its capacity to offer ‘other realities within the existing one’, to participate in the cosmos of hope, is lost sight of entirely . . . Artists become like children who, instead of learning to play creatively, remain at the level of smearing the real, of smothering the nursery walls with their own excrement.
As for what painting can be: that is another story. But the roots of good painting remain in its traditions, its real skills, its accumulated knowledges, techniques and practices, for which the trans- avantgardists show only contempt, or ignorance. And, as for that absence of a shared symbolic order . . . Even if we have ceased to believe in God, nature can provide it for us: the answer lies not in the reproduction of appearances, but in an imaginative perception of natural form, in which its particularities are not denied, but grasped and transfigured. None of this, of course, precludes the somatic element, the part brought by the rhythms and activity of the artist’s own body - but it redeems it from infantilism. This is why the late Bomberg, Auerbach or Kossoff (so often invoked as old masters of the new expressionism) are infinitely more powerful and convincing than the fashionable upstarts of the trans- avantgarde. Their practice is one of reconciliation, in illusion, between the self and the social and physical worlds. They offer something the new expressionists cannot: a redemption through form.
1982