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
John Berger and Peter’s relationship was fascinating spanned decades and was built on the foundations of true art criticism lived out in an emotional and personal dynamic. Their correspondences remain the most passionate, compelling, engage and moving letters I have ever read. This essay Seeing Berger for obvious reasons signaled a change in their relationship as the son took aim at the father.
Seeing Berger: Against Internationalism
by Peter Fuller, 1988
No exhibition has angered me more than the 1988 Hayward Annual. No sooner have we shaken off the thraldom in which New York has held British art for three decades, than we are invited to subsume our cultural identity once again ... this time in European decadence and neo-dadaism. Behind this invitation, of course, lies the conventional art-world wisdom that British art is, in Frances Spalding’s words, ‘essentially provincial’, and that ‘provincialism’ is a vice which needs to be dispelled by something called ‘internationalism’. Here, however, I want to argue a contrary view. As John Ruskin once said, ‘All great art, in the great times of art, is provin- ciaT. If we cannot easily grasp this, it is perhaps because we do not live in a great time of art.
Art historians often stress the modernity of the generation of British artists who began to achieve maturity in the 1930s - Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, John Piper, David Bomberg and Graham Sutherland, among them. But, in retrospect, it is easy to see that this modernity was of a peculiar kind. Before allying themselves to ‘The Modern Movement’, these artists belonged, first and foremost, to an indigenous British tradition, which they sought to revive, honour, and extend. And a strength of this indigenous tradition was that, in many ways, it was profoundly conservationist; the achievement of these great artists was as much a product of their refusal of modernism, as of their acceptance of it. Edward Mullins is not often right; and yet he is certainly on to something when he says, ‘Generally speaking, British art has been conceived either in self-conscious relation to Modernism or in stalwart rejection of it, but always in the knowledge that whatever Modernism might be, it belonged elsewhere.’ One of the problems with today’s generation of artists is that they see themselves as belonging to The International Art World Inc. before they conceive of themselves as contributing to a uniquely British tradition, which has always involved resistance to modernity.
In 1833, Lord Lytton published a book called England and the English, in which he wrote, ‘We should seek the germ of beauty in the associations that belong to the peculiar people it is addressed to. Everything in art must be national ... Nothing is so essentially patriotic as the arts; they only permanently flourish amongst a people, when they spring from an indigenous soil’. Such sentiments, if expressed today, would produce only outrage, and protestations about the ‘universality’ of art. But one contemporary of Lytton’s, at least, seems to have lived his artistic life along the lines the good Lord suggested, to considerable effect. I am referring, of course to John Constable. In 1938, with his usual perspicacity, Kenneth Clark remarked that Constable was not just ‘the most English’ of our painters; he was also ‘the most universal’. Though Constable admired and sought to emulate the highest achievements of the European tradition, he refused to follow those who urged the pursuit of contemporary French and Italian models. Indeed, it might be said that he eschewed ‘internationalism’ in favour of an almost belligerent ‘provincialism’, in which he indulged his ‘overweening affection, for the banks of the Stour and the scenes of his childhood. And even Roger Fry, who was no friend of British painting, nor indeed of any aesthetic based on natural form, had to admit that Constable electrified Paris ‘with a new revelation of natural colour which held the key to the later developments of European art’. Nor, of course, was Constable just an isolated instance: Vermeer, Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, and Bonnard may not have been British, but they were all devoted to their provincial perspectives.
John Constable: Golding Constable’s Kitchen Garden
In that 1938 essay, Clark warned, ‘the temptation to use the picture-making formulas of continental schools is as strong today as it was in Constable’s youth’. He argued that any young painter who would resist it must have something of Constable’s courage and determination. ‘The attitude to nature implicit in his work,’ Clark wrote, ‘remains fundamentally true. We can no longer accept a doctrine of naive imitation, but we can, and must, accept nature as the material means through which pictorial emotion can be expressed.’ Clark was surely right, for if the British art of the 1930s manifests a weakness, it may be described as too great an obsession with ‘international’ forms and varieties of modernism. Moore was at his most feeble when he moved furthest from the English landscape, and closest to the anonymous stringed foibles of the modern world. Ben Nicholson was at his most vacuous when he was most removed from William Nicholson. But Clark almost certainly realised he was writing at the beginning of the great Neo-Romantic revival in British art, when, briefly, artists rediscovered the provincial vision, and produced work of a calibre which had not been seen in Britain for many decades. Indeed, it was only with the onset of war, the departure of many of the international ‘avant- gardists’, and what Grey Gowrie once called ‘England’s return to her own romantic tradition’, that the achievements of this talented generation reached their fullest expression. This replenishment of a national tradition helped to heal the rift between the artists and a wider public, too. For the rise of ‘Neo-Romanticism’ saw an upsurge of enthusiasm for a contemporary art, which sprang out of a common culture and a shared tradition. It was, of course, exactly this attitude to nature which the modern movement and ‘The International Style’ sought to deny.
Samuel Palmer: Pastoral with Horse Chestnut Tree.
The paradox which today’s ‘post-modernists’ - with the possible exception of Therese Oulton - do not understand is that if our artists really want to aspire to the ‘universality’ of a Constable (or of a Cezanne) they will have to become very much more blinkered and British in their outlook. They will have to develop a sense of belonging to a national tradition which is at least stronger than any sense of being part of an international avant-garde, trans-avant-garde, or post-avant- garde. A genuinely ‘universal’ art in the late 20th century can only begin with what Clark called a ‘profound intimacy’ with particular places, persons and traditions. It is more likely to spring out of visits to Kew Gardens, the Lake District, or Wales than from trips to Diisseldorf, SoHo, or the Sydney Biennale.
Take the case of Graham Sutherland. In 1960, that fastidious and most European-minded of connoisseurs, the late Douglas Cooper, wrote a monograph on Sutherland which is a tour deforce, and ought to be made compulsory reading for every art student. Cooper stressed that there were none whose ‘sensibility and inspiration’ were so ‘unmistakably and naturally English’ as Sutherland’s; and yet Cooper argued not only that Sutherland was ‘the most original English artist of the mid-20th century’, but also that he was ‘recognised in European artistic circles as the only significant English painter since Constable and Turner’. What is beyond doubt is that, in his formative years, Sutherland did not travel abroad, nor did he look out, or around, at what was happening in the European or American art scene. Rather he looked back to the work of Samuel Palmer. Later, in the 1930s, when Sutherland progressed from printing to painting, his vision was transformed by his experience of the brittle landscape of Pembrokeshire, where he found vivid natural and spiritual metaphors for a world sliding into the catastrophes of war. There are many who believe that Sutherland’s most ‘universal’ paintings are those which he produced in this most blinkered, British, and provincial phase of his development.
Graham Sutherland: Form over River
But in the 1950s, ‘Neo-Romanticism’ was squeezed on the one hand by the die-hards of the Royal Academy, and on the other by a shabby social realism, followed by Pop, and the succession of American styles. A watershed in Sutherland’s own development was undoubtedly the hostile reception accorded to his fine portrait of Winston Churchill, which was quickly followed by ‘avant-garde’ infatuation with American abstract expressionism. Sutherland’s interest in British cultural life understandably seemed to diminish. He began to imitate Picasso and Matisse, and he spent more and more time in France. Predictably, this ‘internationalism’ eroded his art, which, in the 1960s, seemed to flounder and lose direction. It was only after 1968, when he revisited Pembroke once again, and re-discovered the roots and sources of his inspiration, that he began to produce work which not only rivalled, but, in my view, came close to surpassing his finest achievements of the 1940s.
Of course, we have to be careful here. I am not suggesting that art is best served by ignorance or xenophobia. I am however arguing for an informed provincialism which looks for immediate meaning in local forms, and finds its larger sense through affiliation to a national tradition. Indeed this is the best stance - perhaps the only stance - from which ‘international’ influence can be successfully assimilated. One of the many tragedies of recent art education is that it has done nothing whatever to foster such a sensibility. How many students are encouraged to study Constable as an English painter - rather than as the ‘precursor’ of French Impressionism? In the literary departments of our universities, we rightly have no inhibitions about reaching English literature; and the same ought to be true of painting and sculpture. But in how many art schools is British art history taught as such? How many art students are encouraged to see themselves as the heirs of Moore, Piper, Sutherland, Nicholson and Hepworth, let alone of Reynolds, Constable or Turner? And yet we wonder why our national tradition appears so enervated.
There is no need to record again here the tragic effects which American influence had upon British art in the 1960s and 1970s. Now that the dust is thick upon almost everything that ‘Situation’ and the New Generation produced, everyone realises how little was gained through subservience to Manhattan’s and Washington’s fashions. Robyn Denny’s plastic Rothkos cannot be compared with the real thing; all that is worthwhile in Caro was derived not from David Smith, Clement Greenberg, or Kenneth Noland, but from Henry Moore. And yet the case of Patrick Heron remains salutary.
In the 1950s, Heron began to emerge as perhaps our finest colourist. At first, he fed eagerly from Bonnard, Matisse, and Braque; like Sickert and Steer before him, he readily assimilated those aspects of French painting which enabled him to develop and extend his very English vision. But, like Roger Fry’s and Nikolaus Pevsner’s, Heron’s criticism revealed a fatal tendency to denigrate the British visual tradition. He never really saw just how much many of the artists whom he admired - like Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, and Bryan Wynter - owed to English Neo-Romanticism. Predictably, in the 1950s, Heron became a tendentious ‘internationalist’, and began to identify increasingly with American painting. As is now well known, this stance tragically backfired. On the far side of the Atlantic, the Americans relentlessly plagiarized St. Ives painting; at home, the artists of ‘Situation’ and ‘The New Generation’, imitated those plagiarisms. What is perhaps less fully understood is the distorting effect all this had on Heron’s own work. In the 1970s, his ‘wobbly-edged’ pictures often seemed to want to prove a point to the Americans. But today Heron appears to have come to recognise that the significant sources of inspiration and nurture for his own art had always been close to home - in, say, the British decorative tradition, so vividly expressed in the finest Cresta Silks, or the beautiful gardens which surround his home at Eagle’s Nest, in Zennor, near St Ives, in Cornwall. This recognition, with its implicit repudiation of internationalism, comes at a time when Heron is painting more beautifully than ever in his distinguished career.
I believe that the British tradition has something specific to contribute to the ‘post-modern’ world. George Santayana says somewhere that of all modern peoples, it is the English who provide the best example of a people in harmony with their environment. This may not be true. What is true, however, is that, in Britain, cultural tradition, climate, and environment, alike, have conspired to emphasise the value of seeking an imaginative and spiritual reconciliation between man and nature. In the days when the ethic and aesthetic of ‘Modernism’ were rampant, this British contribution seemed like a ‘sentimental’ or ‘nostalgic’ refusal of modernity. Today, in the ‘post-modern’ era with all its ecological and ‘green’ emphases, this is no longer the case. By being true to their native traditions, British artists may be able to make a unique contribution to the new, emerging ‘structure of feeling’, which would appear to be essential for the survival of the world as a whole.
(Art Monthly 100)