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
LEE GRANDJEAN & GLYNN WILLIAMS
by Peter Fuller, 1981
Laurence Fuller standing by Glynn William’s sculpture of Peter Fuller’s gravestone
It was fortunate that at the time of the Whitechapel Gallery’s important survey of British sculpture in the twentieth century Lee Grandjean and Glynn Williams were exhibiting at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park at Bretton Hall, Wakefield. I believe the formal garden outside Bretton Hall housed two of the most promising sculptures seen in Britain for twenty years.
These are Grandjean’s Woman and Children: Flame, 1981 and Williams’s Squatting, Holding, Looking, 1981. They are intensely unfashionable: they are carved, rather than ‘constructed’, and they have been made out of elm and hard, white Ancaster stone respectively. Moreover they make unequivocal use of one of sculpture’s most ‘traditional’ images: a mother and her children. Though they are certainly flawed pieces, I am confident that they point towards the emergence of sculpture from the stultifying decadence of the last quarter of a century.
Many of those concerned about British sculpture have been watching what has been going on in and around Wimbledon School of Art (where Glynn Williams heads the sculpture department) for some time. In recent years, the ‘Wimbledon sculptors’ have elaborated through their sculptures a thoroughgoing critique of the reductionist tendencies in recent Modernism. They rejected the historicist assumption that sculpture could only develop by the progressive renunciation of everything specifically sculptural.
These Wimbledon sculptors raised again the issue of imagination in sculpture by accepting, as Grandjean has recently put it, ‘that the freedom, the hope of sculpture is that it can order a new reality through the transformation of material’. They also demonstrated the continuing expressive potentialities of traditional techniques (especially carving) and materials (like wood and stone). Consistently, they pointed to the necessarily limited ‘language’ of sculpture, given by a tradition established in the earliest human civilizations, and reminded us that sculpture is a practice whose ‘problematic’ has not changed fundamentally since the Sumerian times.
In a cultural climate seemingly addicted to transience and changes of style, this was salutary. Yet there has often been something ambiguous in the work coming out of Wimbledon. For all their yearning for true expression, the sculptures themselves have sometimes looked like the stirring of roots and limbs in some primordial sludge. But whatever its faults, this new exhibition has clarity: it concerns itself frontally with the question of explicit subject matter, and the necessary relation of all good sculpture to the human body.
Of course, there has been plenty of sound and fury in British sculpture in recent years; but, by and large, it has signified nothing. Elsewhere (see New Society, September 24 1981) I have argued that, since the early 1960s, the sculptural tradition has been betrayed by those who ought to have been tending it. Henry Moore was right when he said, in 1962, ‘We’re getting to a state in which everything is allowed and everybody is about as good as everybody else. When anything and everything is allowed both artists and public are going to get bored’. Moore added, ‘Someone will have to take up the challenge of what has been done before. You’ve got to be ready to break the rules but not to throw them all over unthinkingly’. He explained that great art comes from great human beings who are never satisfied ‘with change that’s made for change’s sake’.
Since Anthony Caro’s change of style at the beginning of the 1960s, we have seen enough of unthinking rejection of sculpture’s fundamental elements. But Grandjean and Williams are at last facing up to ‘the challenge of what has been done before’, just as Moore himself did when, in the 1920s, he steeped himself in the ‘primitive’ sculpture in the British Museum.
Why has it taken so long for anyone else to respond to that challenge? In part, it is because in all that passed for sculpture—from Caro’s Twenty-Four Hours to the antics of his pupils, Gilbert, George & Co.—Moore’s sculptural standards were simply lost sight of. With the passage of a few more years, the tragi-comedy of British ‘sculpture’ since the early 1960s will be quietly forgotten. A great many St Martin’s- inspired ‘constructions’ in industrial steel are already under wraps awaiting the Last Judgement.
But why did we have to go through this sorry episode? I have tried to give some of the reasons elsewhere. (See especially my article, ‘Where Was the Art of the Seventies?’ in Beyond the Crisis in Art, 1980.) However, there is one factor to which I have hitherto given insufficient attention: the achievement of Henry Moore himself.
Mother & Child, Henry Moore
Through his best sculptures, Moore has made a major contribution to Western culture. His achievement was the greater in that it was realized in times hardly propitious for good sculpture. Such quality does not always serve as an inspiration to others. As a young sculptor, Moore saw Michelangelo’s work for the first time in Italy. ‘I saw he had such ability’, Moore explained later, ‘that beside him any sculptor must feel as a miler would knowing someone had once run a three-minute mile’. But at least Moore could console himself with the thought that Michelangelo had worked four centuries ago.
What happened in the early 1960s was, in one sense at least, the indignant revolt of the Lilliputians. Between 1951 and 1953, Moore employed as an assistant a figurative sculptor of moderate ability: Anthony Caro. Anyone who has studied, say, Caro’s Woman Waking Up of 1956, now in the Arts Council Collection, will realize something of Caro’s predicament in the 1950s. Caro was already in his thirties, but he had not even begun to achieve Moore’s expressive mastery over the human figure. The shadow of Moore must have stretched endlessly in front. But instead of stuggling on, Caro decided (in the words of Michael Fried, one of his many American protagonists) to make sculptures which rejected ‘almost everything that Moore’s stand for’.
What did Moore stand for? He was a sculptor of such range and ability that it is possible to say that he stood for sculpture itself. ‘Rodin’, Moore has said, ‘of course knew what sculpture is: he once said that sculpture is the science of the bump and the hollow’. The twin roots of this art form are carving and modelling: to use Adrian Stoke’s terminology, I believe that Moore is a fine carver ‘in the modelling mode’.
Glynn Williams
Few men have had a better grasp on the formal aspect of sculpture than Moore. Certainly, no one living today can touch him for what he calls ‘complete cylindrical realization’ or ‘full spatial richness’ which, at the formal level, remains the greatest expressive potentiality of good sculpture. And yet Moore was far too big an artist ever to be content with displays of skill, or formal ingenuity, for their own sake. Purely abstract sculpture, he explained in 1960, seemed to him an activity that would be better fulfilled in some other art. For Moore, the human figure was always at the root of his sculptural transformation; when he extended beyond it, it was into the rich world of natural forms, such as bones, shells, pebbles.
He saw this ‘humanist-organicist’ dimension as being a necessary component of good sculpture. He once said that a ‘synthetic culture’ (i.e. one that cut itself off from such ‘natural’ roots) was, at best, ‘false and impermanent’. That is why he emphasized drawing from life and from nature as necessary activities for sculptors. And in all this he showed himself to be in full continuity with, as Matthew Arnold might have said, the best that has been thought and done in sculpture.
But for Moore all this—the mastery of sculptural techniques, the manipulation of forms in space, the attendance to the wealth of natural forms—was only the means to an end. ‘I do not think’, he once said, ‘any real or deeply moving art can be purely for art’s sake’. The bringing of a work to its final conclusion, for Moore, necessarily ‘involves one’s whole psychological make-up and whatever one can draw upon and make use of from the sum total of one’s human and form experience’.
Henry Moore, Mother & Child
I do not want to project Moore beyond criticism. I believe there was truth in John Berger’s once notorious essay of the late 1950s on Moore in which he pointed out that in some of his work there was a tendency for the artist’s imagination to disappear, and the material to take over. But I think Moore himself recognized this. Throughout the 1950s (perhaps perceiving what was likely to happen within the sculptural tradition) Moore stressed that in the past he had overexaggerated the argument from ‘truth to materials’. ‘Rigid adherence to the doctrine’, he said, ‘results in the domination of the sculpture by the material. The sculptor ought to be the master of his material. Only, not a cruel master’. Nonetheless, a question mark must still hang over Moore’s later works, which can show a slackness in carving, and repetitiveness of imagination, that would have been inconceivable in the prewar years. At times, too, Moore has tended towards overproduction. And he has also been tempted towards a more than occasional over inflation of scale.
Although some of Moore’s sculptures descend towards the condition of objects, his work as a whole offers a vision of enduring aspects of human experience. But, precisely because he is no woolly idealist, Moore fully realized that he had to hold fast to those elements of experience which, relatively speaking, remain constant. Hence his emphasis upon the human figure in its natural landscape. ‘For me’, Moore said in 1962, ‘sculpture is based on and remains close to the human figure ... If it were only a matter of making a pleasurable relationship between forms, sculpture would lose, for me, its fundamental importance. It would become too easy’.
I have written often enough about Caro’s ‘false’ revolution in sculpture, about his rejection of carving, modelling, mass, volume, imagination, natural form, ‘tactile values’ and, indeed, ‘image’ of any kind, in short, of everything that characterizes sculpture as an art form and makes it worthwhile. But as Moore himself said in 1961 (just a year after his former assistant’s dramatic change of style), ‘a second-rater can’t turn himself into a first rater by changing his medium or his style. He’d still have the same sensitivity, the same vision of form, the same human quality, and those are things that make him good or bad, first-rate or second-rate’.
All that came after, was taking what Moore himself called the ‘easy’ option: the arrangement of ‘pleasant shapes and colours in a pleasing combination’. And yet, and yet ... As I have argued before, Caro must be acclaimed as the King among the Pygmies. His work is transparently superior to that of his legion of followers. Why is this? Fried said that Caro’s sculptures rejected almost everything that Moore’s stand for. That diminutive residue of Moore in Caro’s work is, I believe, responsible for such sculptural qualities as it has. In the ‘Abstract’ section of the first part of the Whitechapel’s British sculpture show, there was a tiny sculpture by Moore (who was, unfortunately, not particularly well represented in the exhibition) from the Tate Gallery. This work hovers on the threshold of full abstraction: it consists of a number of disparate yet related elements which nonetheless evoke the sense of a single reclining figure. It is a slight though not unattractive piece in which the image does seem to be tantalizingly close to disappearing into the material altogether. Look carefully at this little work and then consider again, say, Caro’s much vaunted Pompadour of 1963. Of course, the materials, techniques and style have changed completely. Pompadour has none of Moore’s sense of tactile quality, or of full ‘cylindrical’ realization. It appears to flaunt the ‘synthetic culture’ of 1960s. And yet the comparison renders Caro’s secret self-evident: there is something about Pompadour which we cannot dismiss as being ‘false and impermanent’; and that something had already been realized by Moore. It is the capacity to take the human body, abstract it, and split it up into bits, in sculpture, without losing it altogether, so that the finished work has a sense of aesthetic unity deriving from this relationship to the whole body.
Anthony Caro, Pompadour, 1963, Kroller-Muller Musem, Otterlo
Caro has described how Clement Greenberg helped him find his new stylistic clothes. (Greenberg, incidentally, showed a regrettable lapse of taste in his blindness to Moore’s greatness.) But such content as Caro’s new work had derived from something which he isolated in Moore’s work, flattened out, and wrote large.
Unfortunately Caro neglected to advise his students to study Moore. Many thus failed to notice the origins of Caro’s residual sculptural qualities, and assumed they had something
156
SCULPTORS
to do with the drastic, reductive ‘innovations’ of style which he had initiated. Many younger sculptors reproduced the trappings of Caro’s style. They thus produced sculptures which were nothing more than exercises in style, inferior, by far, to Caro’s. Others assumed that they could ‘progress’ in sculpture by treating Caro as he himself had treated Moore: i.e. by throwing out the little that was truly sculptural that he had retained in his work. Hence all the foolishness and anti-art activities so prevalent among Caro’s students at St Martin’s (and elsewhere) in the late 1960s and 1970s.
The result of all this was a period of unparalleled decadence in British sculpture. If Caro had had the humility to recognize Moore’s greatness, he could have done much more to ensure the continuity of the sculptural tradition. Instead, we reached an absurd situation in which, though Moore’s reputation was forever growing, it actually became necessary to defend him in art schools. But the poor quality of all that has been produced by those who rejected what Moore stood for speaks for itself. And this, I believe, is the significance of what has been going on in and around Wimbledon School of Art.
I am not suggesting that Lee Grandjean and Glynn Williams are necessarily of the calibre of Moore. That is not the point. But Grandjean and Williams have seen that there can be no evasion of what Moore stood for if good sculpture is to survive.
Henry Moore, Four-piece Composition (Reclining Figure), 1934, Tate Gallery, London
In his catalogue statement, Grandjean said that an important part in what gives a work of art enduring value concerns the nature of its relationship to elements of experience which do not change, or rather which change at such a slow rate that they may effectively be regarded as constants. Of all the arts, sculpture relies most heavily upon such elements. Its roots are to be found in the physical and tactile qualities of materials, the effects of gravity, the world of natural form, and the enduring skills and representations of the human body itself.
It cannot, of course, just be a question of a return to traditional techniques, materials and imagery. The quality of sculptural imagination is also involved: Grandjean rightly affirmed the full tradition of sculpture; he spoke of the continuing need for ‘the most rigorous formal criticism’. But he also affirmed, ‘the challenge of something to say, to tell. Of sculpture facing the world instead of itself’. In short, he affirmed what Moore stood for Grandjean showed three recent works: two are reclining figures, and the third, and most achieved, Woman and Children: Flame 1981, is an upright based upon the forms of a mother with two children. (Moore’s recurrent themes, one recalls, were the reclining figure and mother-and-child.) But Grandjean demonstrates that recuperation of the fully sculptural does not necessarily mean retrogression. Though a mother-child study, Flame, evokes a mood closer to the Laocoon than to Moore’s serene Northampton Madonna. But at the formal level, too, Grandjean is original: the way in which he has made his works is fully his own; indeed, it implies a critical dialogue with Moore. At first glance his reclining figures appear to be ‘constructed’ in wood. In fact they have been carved from a single trunk of elm. Grandjean seems to be retaining something of the ‘look’ of construction because he wants to make use of ‘part-to-part’ relationships in articulating his figures while enjoying all the advantages of full carving. In short, he wants to create living spaces within the figures without resorting to the device of punching a hole from one side to the other. For all that, these remain tentative beginnings: I believe that the contradiction between the ‘construction’ he has come from and the full carving he is practising will have to be more fully resolved in the future. Grandjean also needs to eschew a certain ‘symbolical’ vagueness in his forms; before one can work through and beyond the particularities of figure sculpture, one needs to have mastered them entirely. This is only possible through continuous study of the body and of natural form.
Williams, too, shares Grandjean’s interest in part-to-part relationships within the figure. (Again, this seems to be the positive legacy of his erstwhile, and otherwise wasteful, involvement in the sculptural betrayal of the last twenty years.) Yet, formally, Williams’s solution is more convincing. He at least had the advantage of a ‘traditional’ training in sculpture.
(As early as the 1940s, Moore spoke of the value of ‘an academic grounding’ as the basis for later achievement in sculpture.) Williams is also a virtuoso carver who can make the working of stone seem seductively easy. But he has drawn upon Gothic and African traditions (without in any way imitating them) so that he can ‘structure’ his figures in a way which has not previously been seen in British figurative work. It is interesting to contrast his sculpture, Lifting, Carrying, Protecting of 1981, of a man shouldering his son with Moore’s massive Mother and Child of 1925, shown in his first one-man show, but now in Manchester City Art Gallery. In Williams’s work, each part is allowed an independent life, but because all the parts are closely related, the whole has sculptural unity. Williams’s weakness is currently the inverse of Grandjean’s. His mastery of the rudiments of the figure is such that he can convincingly handle it sculpturally, rather than anatomically. Yet, at the moment, his images are little more than vividly expressive of human activities. They do not fully engage our emotions.
Interestingly, Williams regrets the passing of ‘given Subject Matter’ which was so well-known and well-worked that ‘to make fresh sculpture the only thing left to use was the activity inside the image’. And this, indeed, is a central problem for sculptors working outside the framework of a religious iconography, which connects them immediately with shared, affective and symbolic beliefs. Such subject matter as the mother and child, however, endures. The problem is to evade ambiguous ‘Surrealism’ (or the indulgence of private fantasy) on the one hand; and a pedestrian academic commitment to given appearances on the other. Moore, however, demonstrated that there was a third route: good sculpture could offer us a transformed vision of ourselves in our world, and in nature. Grandjean and Williams have not yet fully succeeded; but the great promise implicit in their exhibition was that (even if on a more modest scale) this may be done again, done differently, and yet done well.
1981