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
The arts across the world are under attack right now, the telling comments by the likes of Rishi Sunak that artists should ‘re-train’, clearly show the administration’s priorities when it comes to supporting the arts at this time. I know that my father would have had a great deal to say about this. So you can read selected essays by Peter Fuller here on my blog during lockdown! I will be posting regularly.
John Berger was my father’s most influential mentor as an art critic. Berger has been internationally recognized as one of the few leading art critics in Europe throughout the 20th Century and a significant figure in the story of Modern Art. I had the opportunity to speak with him on several occasions and he had a profound affect on me too. I was taken back by the both the depth of his compassion and at the same time the strength of his integrity. When I was 13 after his speech at The Peter Fuller Memorial Lecture he hugged me with tears in his eyes and told me if there was anything I needed from him I should call him. Fifteen years later I did and he gave me his blessing to move forward with the Peter Fuller Project. In 2017 I traveled back to London to digitize and read the letters between John Berger and my father at the TATE archive. The letters were some of the most touching and beautiful correspondences I have ever read.
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT!
by Peter Fuller, 1988
In 1970, I was an obscure and penurious critic writing for art magazines and the underground press; John Berger (whom I had never met) chanced upon an article I had written attacking the machinations of the art market under the pseudonym ‘Percy Ingrams’ in the Trotskyist paper, Red Mole. Berger sent this to Paul Barker, then editor of New Society, with a note suggesting that he should seek out Percy and get him to write something. My first piece for this magazine, ‘The £sd of Art’, appeared under my own bye-line on 9th July 1970.
Over the years that followed, Paul Barker gave me as much space as I wanted to work out my changing aesthetic ideas in public; he encouraged me to write about anything that interested me from a new interpretation of the Venus de Milo, to conceptual art, Sir Joshua Reynolds, or the origins of creativity in our species. This was a generous and risky thing to do - and I will always be grateful for it. Then, there were very few non-specialist British journals which made the space for serious articles of any length about the visual arts. Today there are fewer; and tomorrow there will be none.*
From my point of view, all this makes it sad and ironic that the last few months of New Society’s life should have been marked by a contretemps between Berger and myself, arising out of the article I wrote about Ways of Seeing last January. Much has been said here, and elsewhere, about my motives in publishing this. I therefore wish to close my contribution to New Society by explaining how my ideas about art have changed over the last two decades, and why I feel a radically different approach is now necessary.
Inevitably, in my early years as a critic, I was deeply influenced by Berger whom I met soon after the appearance of that first New Society article. The following month he sent me a letter in which he outlined what he saw as three elements comprising a ‘viable critical stance’. First and foremost was the assault on the art market and ‘the turning of works of art into commodities’; the exposure of this process, he told me, ‘takes us far into the economic and ideological workings of capitalism’. He wrote that whenever there was a chance of such revelation, ‘the critic should take it: without necessarily having to assess the creative value of the works in question.’ The second arose from ‘the use by a certain number of artists to pose and investigate a whole series of new social and philosophical schemes, kinetics, etc. The critic should take an interest in such work and ‘enter the questions posed’ in the understanding that the ‘answers ... must lie outside the works’ and that they were ‘more important than any “quality” of the works-in-themselves’. Many such questions, he wrote, ‘were about art in the hope of transcending art’. Thirdly, he recommended a sociological critique of the use of the ‘“professional” life of artists as a life-style of maximum freedom’.
For ten years, Berger was a constant source of support and encouragement. He had, of course, left England to live in a village in the Haute Savoie, but he wrote to me regularly, commenting on my articles in detail. ‘I liked your piece on Oldenburg - except for the last paragraph ...‘ ‘I thought the T.L.S. piece was excellent ... And Hamilton of course is all nostalgia ...‘ We visited each other frequently and I developed a sense almost of complicity with him, which was both flattering and exciting for a young and inexperienced critic. In 1975, he wrote ‘Within the art world we are alone’.
The following year he sent me a drawing of two men driving a stake into the ground with alternate blows of their hammers. ‘If we hammer away like this, we may dent something.’
I looked back over my blows of the hammer before I wrote this piece. In that very first New Society article, my ‘line’ was an all-out attack on the art market and the improbable assertion that the most interesting work in the future world, in any event, be unsaleable. ‘The art experience’, I wrote, ‘has come to lie in the interaction between the object and the viewer, far more than in any “value” inherent in the object itself.’ The article was spiced with asides on art with purely aesthetic goals, and noises of encouragement to a ‘new generation of artists’ who were starting ‘to create a new, articulate, genuinely revolutionary art detached from object slavery’. It is nothing like as eloquent as Berger; but it has all the hall-marks of the work of a devoted disciple.
This was not a role in which I felt comfortable for very long. For one thing, I was becoming increasingly worried about the direction ‘we’ were taking; for another, Paul Barker, the most perceptive editor for whom I have ever written, used to take me aside and hint that the purpose of criticism was to develop a vision and a voice of one’s own.
Gradually, I came to realise that ‘we’ were not at all alone; on the contrary, the critical stance which Berger had presented as being so radical that only he and I were pursuing it was in fact part and parcel of a new orthodoxy. For example, in 1972, there was a major exhibition of ‘The New Art’ at the Hayward Gallery; it consisted of words, processed information, conceptual pieces, etc., by artists including Gilbert and George, posing exactly the sorts of ‘questions’ Berger had told me the critic ought to enter. The show was introduced by Anne Seymour who praised these artists’ ‘eschewal of aesthetic mumbo-jumbo’, and argued that the artist could now ‘work in the areas in which he is interested - philosophy, photography, landscape, etc. - without being tied to a host of aesthetic discomforts which he personally does not appreciate’.
I found I was bored to tears by this sort of thing. I derived from it none of the pleasure and excitement which was what had attracted me to painting and sculpture in the first place; nor did it provide, by way of compensation, any more intellectual stimulation than could be wrung out of a children’s book or an amusement arcade. But, for much of the 1970s, there was hardly an artist under thirty who did not believe that this was the way in which he or she ought to be working.
What worried me was that I came to see the ‘justification’ for fashionable anti-art in the ‘viable critical stance’ Berger had outlined towards the art world and, more significantly, in his influential book and television programmes, Ways of Seeing. For, despite all that he and Mike Dibb have recently written, the undeniable fact remains that Ways of Seeing was designed to encourage the view that an interest in the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of art is somehow bogus, and that oil painting is the ‘bourgeois’ art form par excellence and is somehow inherently corrupted by its ‘special relationship’ with capitalism.
It is true that Berger wrote essays elsewhere which had little to do with his general theory as put forward in Ways of Seeing. When he produced those marvellous studies of Grtinewald, Poussin, Vermeer, Courbet, Millais, Monet or Bonnard his writing was always reflective and evaluative; he never wasted time reminding his readers that these artists had, first and foremost, produced ‘portable capital assets’, and, as far as I can remember, he himself had nothing to say about the need for the art of such great painters to ‘transcend’ itself and to be absorbed into other anti-aesthetic forms of life and work. The problem - as I came to see it - was that, of all Berger’s books, Ways of Seeing had an overwhelming influence year in, year out, on generation after generation of art students. It still does ... And they have been encouraged to despise aesthetic experience; to ignore tradition; to abandon painting and sculpture; and to believe that there is nothing to be learned from a museum that they cannot as easily pick-up from a colour supplement.
Sometime during the 1970s, I began to feel that I wanted a theory of art which was derived from - rather than at odds with - my own deepest responses to works of art. Inevitably, I found myself drawn back to the traditional concern of aesthetics i.e. the quest of ‘the beautiful’, and to ideas about imagination, talent, genius, tradition - and the particular formal possibilities of the various arts. I came to realise that, although I was interested in paintings as social documents, that had little to do with the roots of my responses to them. What excited my passion, or on occasions my hate, was the success, or failure, of a painting as art. To use an analogy from another sphere of life, if I love someone, I certainly want to know everything I can about them; but such knowledge can never ‘explain’ my love.
In trying to make sense of my own responses to pictures, I found myself drawn ever further away from the narrow economic and sociological preoccupations that pervade Ways of Seeing-, I began to read traditional aesthetics, to study psychoanalytic and even biological ideas about imagination and illusion, and to become much more knowledgeable than I had been about the materials and techniques the painter and the sculptor use and their peculiar expressive possibilities. Inevitably, I found myself drawn into the aesthetically conservative and yet profoundly radical universe of Ruskin; and, it was through reading him that I rediscovered Kenneth Clark, and came to realise that there were many more ‘viable critical stances’ than I had previously imagined.
In 1980 I published Art and Psychoanalysis exploring some of these new ideas; I also wrote the paper Seeing Berger. Berger wrote to me immediately, expressing his agreement. ‘I have read the essay and I think it very good. Its arguments are just and clear, and they correct what is false in Ways of Seeing, as well as going beyond it. I never considered Ways of Seeing an important work. It was a partial, polemical reply - as you say. But I was worried that your essay might miss this process, and so become too textually attached to a test that was not important enough. My worries were quite unnecessary because you situate the questions you discuss marvellously. Reading you, we are back in the world.’ He ended with a characteristic image: ‘Strange how we work - and walk - the two of us. Sometimes it seems to me that we are each a single leg of some other being who is striding out’.
But then, equally suddenly, it was all over; it was as if either I had to be Berger’s other leg, or his deadly enemy. In public, he said nothing about my criticisms of Ways of Seeing, but, the following year, I expressed some disagreement about his reading of Picasso in New Society, drawing on the theories I had been putting forward in Seeing Berger. He wrote an angry letter to the magazine, which was published, accusing me of ‘parricidal intentions’. This was the only comment he has ever made about any of my writings in print, until the bitter tirade of his Confession published on 12 February 1988.
Inevitably, our personal relationship withered to nothing; throughout the 1980s, there had been many occasions on which - to put it mildly - I have found his conduct less than comradely. No doubt he has often felt the same. But, Mike Dibb notwithstanding, I cannot accept that I have come to hold my present views about Ways of Seeing because of the breakdown of my personal relationship with John Berger; if anything, it is the other way around. My relationship with Berger broke down because I came to disagree with the theory of art he had proposed in Ways of Seeing.
Today, I find myself unrepentant concerning my assertion that, give or take a few differences of political rhetoric, the policy towards the arts implied in Ways of Seeing is uncomfortably close to those programmes implemented by the present Government. The Director of the National Gallery recently compared Thatcher’s policy towards the museums with the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century. All this is perhaps not so surprising as it appears. Marxists and monetarists after all have at least one thing in common: they both believe that ethics and aesthetics are, or ought to be, determined by economic forces, ‘in the last instance’.
The ideas that John Berger put forward in Ways of Seeing have become the ruling ideas in the art world today. I do not question what he says when he claims that, elsewhere and on other occasions, he has put forward other views of art. ‘The transcendental face of art’, he wrote in a 1985 essay, ‘is always a form of prayer’. But the students who are given Ways of Seeing to read year in, year out, never get to hear of such remarkable qualifications. And they go on to read books like State of the Art by Sandy Nairne, Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain, which pays hommage to Ways of Seeing and then proceeds to argue that there is no such thing as aesthetic quality in art and that more or less everything in art is as good or as bad as everything else.
This week 22-28 May 1988 has been declared ‘British Art Week’. The television is full of the stuff. Any one who watches will become aware of just how widely the sorts of ideas put forward in Ways of Seeing are accepted by young artists and not so young arts administrators today. You won’t hear many voices - except, dare I say it, my own - raised on the television discussions in favour of ‘connoisseurship’ or ‘spirituality’ in art. The rhetoric of yesterday’s ‘radicalism’ is nowhere so cosily ensconced as in today’s art establishment.
Ways of Seeing was not, of course, the cause of all this; but it has done nothing to help resist the onslaught of the institutional philistines. Today, by and large, they are still calling the agenda for the discussion about art. In order to counteract this depressing orthodoxy, I started Modem Painters. If, as Berger’s ironic Confession implies, he now shares my views about this orthodoxy, then perhaps he would care to write for us. After all, with the death of New Society, where else are serious articles in defence of the aesthetic dimension going to appear? He might begin by explaining what, if not those put forward in Ways of Seeing, he does feel to be the ‘important’ ideas for the creation and understanding of art. Do they, perhaps, have something to do with its ‘transcendental face’ after all?
1988