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.
OVERWEENING TREACHERY, AND SUCHLIKE
by Peter Fuller, 1988
A few weeks ago I launched a new quarterly journal of the Fine Arts, Modern Painters. After twenty years of writing for other people’s magazines, I felt there was space for a different sort of contemporary art journal, one which celebrated the critical imagination; stood up for aesthetic values and had a particular focus on British art. I was determined that Modern Painters would question the conduct of the modern art establishment and speak out against undeserved reputations inflated by institutional or commercial interests. Modern Painters has sold nearly 10,000 copies.
Its success, however, has not been welcomed by the journals of the left. New Society, Time Out and The New Statesman have all published stories about Modern Painters which are not only hostile and inaccurate, but, in the latter two cases, downright malicious. Indeed, a columnist for the New Statesman, Francis Wheen, actually went so far as to accuse me of having betrayed all my ideals and at least one of my friends, John Berger; and according to Wheen and the gist of an article by Sarah Kent, art critic of Time Out, the new magazine demonstrates that I have allowed myself to be clasped to the bosom of the New Right. The evidence Wheen published was as conclusive and unanswerable as that which, in another context, was offered against John Stalker; Wheen pointed out that I arrived at the Tate Gallery for the celebrations heralding the opening of the Bomberg exhibition in a chauffeur-driven limousine - my father-in-law’s, actually. Sarah Kent’s evidence is even more damning. I must be a Thatcherite’ because I have declared my belief in aesthetic values and I have set myself against those things which she, personally, so greatly admires.
But what are those things? Herein, I think, lies a tale from which more can be salvaged than my reputation. Take the case of Julian Schnabel. I have long maintained that Schnabel is a buffoon who possesses neither touch, skill, imagination nor sense of tradition. For the first issue of Modern Painters, I commissioned an article from Robert Hughes which argued - more eloquently than I was capable of doing - along similar lines: Schnabel’s ‘cack-handedness’, Hughes claimed, was ‘not feigned, but real’; he had never learned to draw because his development had been smothered by his ‘impregnable self-esteem’.
Julian Schnabel
Now it so happens that not long ago, Ms Kent informed the readers of Time Out that Julian Schnabel was ‘probably the most important painter since Picasso’. As will become clear in a moment, I am not among those who believe that it is at all easy to correlate aesthetic preferences with political positions; but the fact is that it is merely perverse for Kent, Wheelan and Co to try to characterise all those of us who oppose artists like Schnabel as belonging to the ‘New Right’.
After all, Schnabel was the Yuppies’ choice, par excellence, and it is hardly a secret in the art world that Schnabel’s reputation in Europe was largely fabricated by the man without whom the English New Right might never have risen from their tubular-steel arm-chairs: Charles Saatchi himself. En passant, it is worth noting that Mr Saatchi’s views about Modern Painters are almost identical with Ms Kent’s. He delivered himself of them to me for a full half-hour when, a while ago, we met by chance in the basement of a London gallery. I gathered that Mr Saatchi did not like my suggestion that his collection should be ‘transformed or eradicated’. I believe Saatchi has been a catastrophe for art in Britain. I am not saying this because of Saatchi’s wealth, nor even because of the politics with which he has chosen to associate himself (which I don’t like either), but rather because, as far as art is concerned, Saatchi has no taste or discrimination - one reason why he prefers to buy works of art by the baker’s dozen.
Perhaps I should have expected all this, for the article in Modem Painters, which definitively demolishes the reputation of Gilbert and George is by none other than Roger Scruton, whom everyone on the left loves to hate, whatever he says - even when he is opposing the country’s most prominent Thatcherite ‘artists’. The interest and irony of this juxtaposition were entirely lost upon the bigoted brains of many critics, but Roger Scruton’s courageous text merely confirms what has long seemed self-evident to me: that there is no easy or necessary continuity between a person’s economic, political and aesthetic beliefs. There have been many commentators, and not a few practitioners, who have wanted to argue that the modern movement (and more recently, postmodernism) ought to be acknowledged as being somehow the honorary house-style of the left; but in order to maintain this position, a considerable distortion of history had to take place. One had, for example, to ignore the fact that most of the great early modernist poets, for example, Eliot, Pound and Yeats, were men of the right, or worse. Modernism also provided the house-style not only for the ideologically OK avant-garde in the USSR, but also for Mussolini’s Rome and for the Rockefeller Centre in New York and the Hilton Hotel chain.
There is, I think, little to be concluded from this except that you can’t deduce someone’s politics from their taste, any more than you can deduce their taste from their politics. Although I despise those who are forever rehearsing their political ‘positions’, these, for what they are worth, are some of mine: I think that the expansion of the market creates more social problems than it solves. I prefer concepts of co-operation to those of competition; far from being a right- wing radical, I dislike the policies of the present government because it seems to me that it wishes to conserve almost nothing I would like to see conserved, for example, the Welfare State, which, I think, should provide health, educational and cultural facilities for all. I am convinced that contemporary means of production are polluting and destroying the environment, perhaps irrevocably; I am convinced that both morality and national security are better served by the shedding of nuclear weapons than by their accumulation. I despise the shallowness, imperial ambitions and commercialism of‘The American Way’. And I don’t like restraints on the freedom of the Press, apartheid, corporal or capital punishment. I am well aware that these views hardly make me ‘a man of the barricades’, but they are not usually those associated with the New Right either.
I also know, and respect, a great many intellectuals like Roger Scruton - a good friend of mine - who disagree with me on some or all of these issues. If I have changed at all, politically, since the heady days of the 1960s, it is in an ever-widening eclecticism, and a growing contempt for those who are convinced that their own political opinions and intuitions are something more than that. We ought not to try to escape the obligation which social life places upon us to make political and economic choices. So I still support the Labour Party, although admittedly without much enthusiasm; for the other options, I have none at all. Equally, however, since this is an area of human life in which the only certainty is doubt and uncertainty, I subscribe to the pious platitude that we should learn to attend to those with very different views from our own.
One of the great errors of the 1960s was the spread of the belief that the intellectual was, or ought to be, engage, in a party political sense; worse still, that, by reason of being an intellectual, he or she stood in some special ‘vanguard’ relationship to truth. Fortunately, in the absence of God, we have little choice but to leave ultimate decisions to the democratic processes themselves; but I have no respect for those bigots of the left or the right who claim to know ‘the only role European intellectuals can now adopt’; or who fail to understand that their own views are, as it were, but a part of a wider argument, and that even those who disagree with them may have some grasp upon aspects of truth.
Only fools and fanatics really believe that a man’s or woman’s political beliefs are most the interesting or significant aspects of their character. An individual’s ethical, spiritual and aesthetic beliefs are, self-evidently, of greater consequence and interest than his or her declarations of political preference at least up to a point. The point is over-stepped when the latter are of such a kind as grossly to distort the former. For those who like labels, pigeon-holes and bibliographies, i.e. for academics, all this is perhaps another way of saying that, intellectually, I owe more to Ruskin than to Marx. Indeed, I agree with Maurice Cowling when he writes, ‘Marxism is not so much untrue as, for certain purposes and in limited respects, true and unimportant’.
It is perhaps because I think this way that I see no great difficulty in making common cause on aesthetic issues with those with whom I may well disagree about politics and economics. (Despite - or more likely as a result of - growing up intellectually in a New Left milieu, I no longer believe that any c,ie, not even Perry Anderson, will ever arrive at a Correct Political Understanding of all the problems in the world. Indeed, I now think that such a project is just absurd; unsurprisingly, Anderson has ended up, it seems to me, being intelligently wrong about almost everything.)
For example, I do not think one has to be a monarchist - although like D.W. Winnicott, I am - to support Prince Charles’s attack on modern architecture; indeed, as I have discovered since publishing the full text of the speech in Modern Painters, support for the Prince’s initiative involves a range of political bed-fellows running from Professor Scru- ton to the architectural correspondent of the New Statesman and beyond on either side. Equally, the fact that I published Grey Gowrie’s outstanding study of Lucian Freud’s paintings does not mean that I will necessarily vote for Mrs Thatcher at the next election, nor that I have been converted to free market economies.
I see nothing odd or inexplicable about this. Politics certainly matter; but, given certain minimum conditions, they are not the only things that matter, nor do they necessarily matter more than anything else. Men and women with similar social goals often opt to pursue them through very different political means. This should hardly surprise us. Nobody, after all, would even raise an eyebrow if they discovered articles about John Ruskin and William Morris in the same art magazine today. We think of Ruskin and Morris as having similar ideas (whether we agree with them or not). Morris always spoke with profound respect about his debt to Ruskin; yet, in political terms, Ruskin was a High Tory, who was sceptical about democracy itself, whereas William Morris was a Marxist and a revolutionary socialist. I admire them both - although I recognise that, his politics notwithstanding, Ruskin was by far the greater and deeper thinker.
I have no doubt that some with different tastes and ethical beliefs from mine will squawk and squeal and try to make out that, despite what I have been arguing, the real differences between us are political. They will claim, as they have done so many times before, that I am slipping and sliding down the path that leads to the mire of right-wing reaction, whereas they are uncompromised men, or women, of the Left, marching along on the side of Progress, Light and the Socialist Future ... entirely forgetting, of course, that their own anaesthetic preferences involve climbing into avant-garde or post-modern beds with partners who are less than ideologically perfect, e.g. such philistines of the far right as the Saatchis, environmental thugs like Palumbo, or wallies like Gilbert and George. For it is not only aesthetic traditionalists like myself and Roger Scruton who enter into politically improbable alliances.
The fact is that, when it comes to art, among my modernist and post-modernist opponents, taste is a more powerful pull than political affiliation - just as they (rightly) point out that it is for me.
And this brings me to my last point: the case of John Berger. I have never, Francis Wheen notwithstanding, ‘denounced’ Berger as a Thatcherite. What I did argue in a recent article in New Society was that Berger’s Ways of Seeing in many ways anticipated the anti-aesthetic policies of Margaret Thatcher’s Governments - despite their political differences. I remain convinced that this is so. For Ways of Seeing is hostile to the very idea of aesthetic value; it sets out to oppose any notion of spirituality in art, of art as a channel of grace. Ways of Seeing attacks the right of museums to exist, arguing that they should ‘logically’ be replaced by children’s pin-boards of reproductions; Ways of Seeing appears to prefer photography to painting and presents ‘publicity’ or advertising, as the inevitable extension of the Western tradition of oil painting.
Of course, I did not ‘betray’ John Berger: what did happen I explain at some length in Theoria, my book published by Chatto and Windus, 1988, in which I describe how I grew out of his ideas. Briefly, as a young man, I was deeply impressed by Berger’s theories. But, unlike Berger, who departed these shores to live out his pastoral idyll elsewhere, I had every opportunity to observe what was actually happening to art and aesthetic life in Mrs Thatcher’s England. No one could accuse Mrs T. of clinging on to the values espoused in Kenneth Clark’s Civilization; but, give or take a few differences of political rhetoric, Ways of Seeing could easily have provided her Ministers with everything they felt they needed to know about art. For while Berger was milking his peasants in the Haute Savoie, Mrs Thatcher’s Government was shutting down Fine Art courses and her officials were arguing that the visual arts should serve material and industrial processes, rather than spiritual and aesthetic needs. The great museums were increasingly squeezed for resources and we witnessed the fostering of a philistine ‘culture’ in which figures like Saatchi dominated not only advertising but what was left of the Fine Arts as well.
I soon came to doubt whether the ideas contained in Ways of Seeing were quite so wonderful as I had once believed - and I found that many artists and teachers of art, up and down the country, agreed with me.*
While this tragic ‘modernisation’ (i.e. destruction) of Fine Art education was taking place in this country, Berger continued to do nicely from the reprinting of Ways of Seeing, but he said not a word about the Government’s anti-art policies. And so, quite frankly, I changed my mind. Berger never forgave me for this. Suffice to say, it was he, and not I who conclusively brought our friendship to an end.
But perhaps this was inevitable; for I had come to the view that, more than any other single book, Ways of Seeing helped to foster the unholy, anti-aesthetic alliance forged by some intellectuals of the radical left with others of the radical right.
Ways of Seeing, for example, is cited as an inspiration at the beginning of Sandy Nairne’s book The State of the Art, which celebrates the collapse of all aesthetic values into the quagmire of Saatchi-style post-modernism. The point is really this: there is no way in which the defence of the aesthetic dimension of life can be definitively rooted in a particular political stance; and yet many of us, myself included, believe that the social defence of this dimension matters as much as, if not more than, many of the political differences which understandably divide us. Ways of Seeing began as a diatribe against Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, with its affirmation of humane spiritual values and a continuing European tradition. But I have come to believe that Berger’s book is really a dated and dangerous tract which provides the justification for philistinism of whatever political colour. Clark offers at least a better starting point for the aesthetics of those of us who are socialist - as he himself was, and I remain - or, indeed, for those who are not.
{Art Monthly 116)