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
HAYWARD ANNUAL 1980
by Peter Fuller, 1980
I begin to feel like Diderot. The Annuals of 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980. For these are certainly the salons of our time. The first thing to be said about the 1980 Hayward Annual where John Hoyland was the selector, is how good it was to have an exhibition of painting (with a few sculptures thrown in). I am a critic of painting, drawing and sculpture. When I went into the Hayward, I responded, at once to the look, feel and smell of the show. (I even enjoyed the rich aroma of fresh oils streaming out of Michael Bennett’s Blue Lagoon.) Minimal, conceptual, theoretical art, and their derivatives have not made the slightest aesthetic contribution. Hoyland conceded nothing to the junk art that traces descent from Duchamp. In this sense, his selection was a relief and a pleasure. He deserves to be congratulated.
But as soon as this has been said, the questions crowd in. What sort of paintings did Hoyland choose? How good are they? How are we to assess his contribution aesthetically and culturally? Hoyland ‘situated’ his selection with an ‘introductory section’ which included work by painters from Matthew Smith to John Walker. But this section made sense. In general, Hoyland picked from those painters who emerged in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s—pre-‘Situation’ artists who were unaffected by the invasion of American Late Modernist anaesthetics. In many cases, they were represented by recent works, so the section as a whole amounted to the visual argument that there is a significant, neglected, British tradition which has been continuously producing genuinely expressive work over several decades.
I share this view and acknowledge that my earlier texts on British art gave insufficient weight to it. (See my self-criticisms in ‘The Arts Council Collection’, (p. 162). But I inflect my assessment of the achievements of this tradition differently from Hoyland. The striking fact, for me, about the paintings in the introductory section was not just that the best of them were so much better than anything that followed, but that they were so conservatively conceived. The artists belonging to this redeeming strand in British art tended to be respecters of traditional skills, like touch, composition, and—here’s the rub—drawing. The majority of them were even concerned with the painter’s traditional categories: i.e. figures (Smith, Auerbach, Hilton) and still lives (Scott). In fact, only one such category was entirely absent from Hoyland’s choice—history painting. Nonetheless, it is possible to say that, in some sense, landscape was the key for all these artists. Of course, that is evidently true of Lanyon and Hitchens. How lovely the former’s Untitled (Autumn), of 1964, looked in this context! But when Scott floats his still life shapes across cool blue expanses, or ochre fields; or when Hilton draws figures which ebb and flow without definite boundaries, like tidal rivers, one feels the strong affinities of their art, too, not just with ‘objects’ in the world, but with a notion of external environment, or place. Of course, none of these painters was intent upon verisimilitude of appearance or perceived space. Rather, they made use of perceptions and affective imaginings, which, through the material skills of painting itself, they sought to weld into new worlds, or aesthetic wholes. These can be ‘explained’ neither in terms of their connections with ‘inner’ nor ‘outer’ reality, nor yet in those of painterly forms alone, but only through the way in which all these elements are fused together. Successful examples, chosen by Hoyland, included Hitchens’ fine Folded Stream of the early 1940s, and Walker’s impressive Daintree I of 1980. (Walker’s painting gets better all the time: he is probably the best of the younger, British ‘non- figurative’ painters.)
Now Hoyland certainly selected some intriguing and beautiful works from this tradition, but his choice, both in terms of the sorts of works he picked from those he did include, and the painters whom he left out altogether, tended to imply that the radical or progressive aspect of their work was their abandonment of traditional skills, practices and genres. Thus Hoyland chose not to represent the late painting of Bomberg which is greater than anything achieved by Lanyon or Hitchens. But Bomberg remained doggedly committed to a sense of place, to the meeting point of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, to seeking the ‘spirit in the mass’. Hoyland also selected from Hilton works which most closely approached ‘pure abstraction’, which had moved furthest from figure and landscape. Similarly, he picked Auerbach (who is indeed a good painter) but not Kossoff, who is better still. But Kossoff is one of the few living British artists in relation to whose work the category of history painting can meaningfully be raised. Unlike Hoyland, I do not think it was the fact that any of the artists in this tradition moved away from traditional skills and genres which made their work powerful and good; that strength rather derived from the way in which they transformed their materials, both physical and conventional (i.e. as given by the tradition of painting).
John Hoyland
This may seem like hair-splitting; but the importance of this difference of emphasis is made manifest when one moves on to the main section of the 1980 Annual. Here, it seems, Hoyland pointed not just to a continuity with the past, but to the emergence of a new tradition, differing from the older one in the radicalness of its abstraction. Certainly, the distinction was not just one of age, since several of the painters in the main section are older than some of those in the introductory section. Now I think that many of the ‘main section’ artists are indeed trying to produce genuinely expressive, ‘non-figurative’ works. Moreover, I believe that, as artists like Rothko and Natkin have demonstrated, this can still be done. I would go further. Many (but not all) of those whom Hoyland chose were not like, say, so many of the abstractionists exhibited in ‘Style in the Seventies’, preoccupied with the ideology of art, that is with ‘style’ or ‘look’ for its own sake. They were clearly seeking a genuine expressiveness, which they failed to find. But why?
Let us look, for a moment, at the works in the main section for which there was something positive to be said. Among those which impressed me most was Albert Irvin’s Boadicea, with its consummate sense of colour and scale, and its vibrant expanses of red hanging above and behind a bar of green. Comparisons between music and painting are rarely just: but I feel that Irvin (at his best) expresses emotion through shape and colour in a way comparable with music. Nonetheless, he achieves his effects through an almost classical knowledge of painterly composition. (I do not understand, however, how a painter capable of Boadicea could have let pictures as bad as Severus and Orlando out of his studio.) Gillian Ayres has become a much more consistent painter than Irvin: I like her work better every time that I see it. Everything about her recent canvases, from their densely packed over-painterliness, to the surface touches of gilded tinting, suggests an attempt to quash the transience of life with an over-full hedonism, to turn even mere ‘images’, into the evasive, and affectively sensitive, flesh, for ever. I relish her opulent materiality, and appreciate the despair, the horror vacui, of which it is born. Again, I was intrigued (though not convinced) by Terry Setch’s hard, crowded, anaesthetic surfaces: these were resilient and un- conceding, almost to the point of ugliness. And yet they redeemed themselves in a way I cannot explain, this side of a critical threshold. But Irvin is fifty-six; Ayres fifty; Setch forty- four; what they have achieved (though limited) is rooted in traditional painterly pursuits. (I would not mind wagering that, at some point, all three were good draughtsmen, or women.) Above all, they know intuitively that to be significant and successful, a painting cannot be just ‘marks on the canvas’, but, through the materiality of its forms, must constitute a symbol, if not of perceived reality, then of our affective life.
But most of the rest of the main section was thin indeed. It saddens me that I can only re-affirm an earlier judgement on Geoff Rigden. He is an infantilist, someone who daubs and squelches gobbets of colour in the hope that they will evoke some emotion in others. It is necessary to remind such ‘artists’ that even Jackson Pollock was a technical master, and a great draughtsman, who lost neither his touch nor his control in his lavender mists. Similarly, I could see nothing at all worth looking at in those squeeged expanses of dredged colour, allowing for no illusion of space, shovelled up by Fred Pollock. One might have thought that a redeeming aspect of enfeebled painting of this low calibre would have been its sense of colour: but neither Rigden, Pollock, Fielding, James, Tonkin, nor Whishaw seem to have any natural or acquired sense of nuance in this respect. Yet it is hard to see what else could be claimed for their art, certainly not drawing: of the younger artists, only Mali Morris showed the slightest aptitude in this direction, and in her case it is more a question of competent design than of true draughtswomanship.
There were, of course, some works that were better than others. Clyde Hopkins is a painter of promise, his Untitled (A.F) of 1980 had something of that sense of the sublime which I have tried to analyse elsewhere. It reminded me of how good abstract painting of this kind can be, even though itself it fell short. But I felt Hopkins had made some attempt to work through and express his emotions, not just to allude to them. But, as Untitled/Sturm of 1979 indicates, he is a careless painter. The canvas size contradicts the scale of his imagery, over and over again: his painting falls apart at the periphery, so that the necessary sense of aesthetic wholeness eludes him. Jeffrey Dellow has certainly come on a bit since I saw his work last year at Stockwell: but then he had plenty of room for improvement. And I cannot get over a sense of rhetoric and inauthenticity, of over-weening careerist ambitions, based on the slenderest of material and imaginative skills, which pervades not only his large canvases but those of so many even worse painters in the exhibition.
Why was there such a marked generational gap in this exhibition? Well, in a recent interview, Hoyland himself kept on and on saying that you can only produce a really good painting when you are old. ‘We’re not expecting to find absolutes in all these paintings. You only find that in a few great artists at the end of their life. You’re not going to find it in a thirty-two-year-old . . . To get everything happening and coming at once, it seems only to happen with older artists, with much older artists . . .’ and so on, and so forth. Hoyland’s explanation may comfort him as he himself leaves middle-age behind, having never fully realized his indubitable potential as a painter, but it is not good enough. ‘A thirty-two-year-old’: the choice of age could not have been more unfortunate, since Seurat (who surely came nearer to producing ‘absolutes’ than most) was precisely thirty-two when he died. Hoyland must also have reflected on the fact that Auerbach, included in his exhibition, produced many truly major works long before he was thirty. I believe that we must look for explanations which are more profound than age alone. And they are not hard to come by.
Many of the younger artists failed because they were contaminated by post-situation’ ideology: that is by the belief that expressiveness can only be achieved through renunciation and reductionism. They err because they have been taught to eschew imagination, drawing, illusion, and the use of any expressive elements derived from perception. The earlier tradition in Britain, represented in the ‘introductory section’ never made these mistakes, (although Heron, of course, was among those who later betrayed it in a peculiarly British way).
Robert Natkin, Anticipation Of Night
Nor, for that matter, did painters like Rothko or Natkin in America, both of whose art is rooted in physiognomy. This could not be said however of the younger painters chosen by Hoyland. One of the sillier pronouncements recently from the Stockwell Depot (with which many of them are associated) was Gouk’s observation that ‘drawing is . . . the bane of British painting’. In so far as British painting has had strengths, drawing has been prominent among them. Bomberg was right: there is no good painting without drawing. The trouble is that Rigden, Fred Pollock, and Co. espouse a child-like notion of expression (as a natural activity), and cling to it as a model for adult art activity. But one reason why Hoyland himself (who, be it said, was modest enough not to find it necessary to exhibit any work of his own) is so much better than his South London proteges is that his expression is rooted in classical skills; one reason why he has never achieved as much as he might have done as a painter is that he was, in the prime of his development (but after he had learned to draw) seduced by the anaesthetic short-cuts seemingly offered by American mannerist abstraction.
Flowers, David Bomberg
I am not however referring to a merely ‘technical’ matter, one which could be put right by a few evening classes in drawing (though these would not go amiss). I believe that although these artists are in pursuit of ‘the aesthetic dimension’, they misunderstand what it is. In the catalogue, Timothy Hilton announces of Stockwell-style painting ‘This is aestheticism’. And Hoyland, too, implies something similar when, in the interview referred to earlier, he says that he does not think that figurative painting is ‘what painting is about’.
In such talk, aesthetics are reduced to the fashionable, institutional style of the moment: and yet it is in the nature of the realized aesthetic dimension that it is always at odds with the visual ideology of its time. Like Hilton, I would say that I, too, am committed to ‘aestheticism’ but my view of what this means is at once more generous and more radical than his. I believe that those old categories, the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘sublime’, as the two contrasting but related modes of the aesthetic, are still of great relevance to painting. (I have elaborated this at some length in the last chapter of my book, Art and Psychoanalysis.) I see good abstract painting as being an extreme manifestation of the ‘sublime’ mode, and I value it greatly. It is very much to my ‘taste’. But, having said this, I must add that one or other end of the aesthetic continuum tends to be in or out of fashion, as a result of the vicissitudes of style, culture and history. When an aesthetic mode is ‘in fashion’ it tends to be banalized and reduced into mannerisms. Think of all those white marble sculptures of Venus, shown in nineteenth century salons, whose makers sincerely believed they had produced works of transcendent ‘beauty’.
But the ‘aesthetic dimension’ cannot be validated by an appeal exclusively to either of its modes, nor yet by an appeal to style. The roots of aesthetics, I am convinced, lie in ‘relative constants’ of our experience, or rather in the way in which the artist expresses those constants through his original handling of the physical and conventional materials of his medium, and brings them into a new and convincing whole. (In this sense, of course, the painters in Hoyland’s introductory section were fully engaged in the aesthetic quest.) I think that works of great aesthetic strength could still be painted in either the ‘beautiful’ or the ‘sublime’ mode. But the sublime is now an institutional fashion, as the 1980 Hayward Annual confirms. Its essential characteristics (which are in fact rooted in ‘relative constants’ of human being) have been ascribed to a process of formal reductionism, which is assumed to have about it an inevitable historicist motion. (This is what I mean by post ‘Situation’ anaesthetics.)
All this makes it harder than ever (though it is not impossible) to make successful works in this mode. Many of the painters at the Hayward, however, were like those nineteenth century Venus-makers. They think they are producing ‘pure sublime’, whereas in fact they are slaves of fashion, mannerism and ideology. Hoyland himself has spoken of a lack of ‘whole-heartedness’ in much of this painting. To truly achieve the aesthetic dimension, these painters will have to dig deeper into their own bodily and affective experience, and to replenish their expressive skills in the richness of the older tradition.
1980