MODERN ART: The Virtues Of Traditional Sensibility

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: The Virtues Of Traditional Sensibility

by Peter Fuller, 1987

It is often said that the principal obstacle to the advancement of art in Britain is to be found in the ‘provincial’ and insular disposition of the middle classes who, by this account, are held to be incapable of responding to new and original works of art. A contrast is sometimes drawn between the British, and the Germans and Americans, who are regarded as exem­plary in their enthusiasm for contemporary art; if only the British would develop similar ‘avante-garde’ tastes - or so the argument goes - then the problems of contemporary art, in this country, would be definitively resolved.

This view is commonly associated with the disbelief that British culture is of an essentially literary disposition, and is therefore necessarily opposed to that which is visual. Worse still, the British are held to be inherently conservative and therefore incapable of responding appropriately to moderni­ty, post-modernity, or any of the other delights of ‘progres­sive’ culture. Those charged with the stewardship of contem­porary art in this country are convinced that it is their public duty to ‘educate’, or, failing that, to bamboozle, this recalcit­rant, literary, anti-visual populace towards more ‘advanced’ forms of artistic pleasure. This, for example, is the raison d’etre of the ‘Turner Prize’, which is not now, and never has been, an award for the individual who has done the most for art in Britain in the previous twelve months, but is rather an attempt to cajole the British into attending to those forms of art, and anti-art, preferred by the ‘international’ art community.

The argument I wish to put forward here, however, is the reverse of this received wisdom. Over a century ago, John Ruskin observed that the British schools of painting were in danger of losing their national character in their endeavour to become ‘sentimentally German, dramatically Parisian, or decoratively Asiatic’. The locations from which the destruc­tive influences emanate may have shifted somewhat; but the problem has only become accentuated in the second half of our century. The majority of ordinary, middle-class people in Britain care about the arts, just as they care about the state of our national culture. And it is precisely because they care that they refuse the American, German, and Italian art which the official institutions are forever trying to foist upon them.

The distaste which so many in Britain feel for the outpour­ings of American, and latterly European, Late Modern and post-modern art is not a sign of philistinism, but rather of intuitive and informed resistance; this may constitute one of this nation’s greatest cultural strengths. Nor should it be seen simply as a negative phenomenon; for this resilience is not just designed to exclude. It is all protective of certain definite values - a positive aesthetic - whose roots lie deep in our unique national history. The institutions of contemporary art, in this country, should be nurturing this traditional sensi­bility, and not forever seeking to affront, to bully, or to insult it. Nor do I regard this as a nostalgic, or anachronistic posi­tion. For, as the world becomes daily more disillusioned with modernism, and post-modernity simply flounders, the insu­lar perspectives of the indigenous, British tradition acquire an increasingly universal aspect.

Those who believe that British culture is inherently ‘anti- visual’ are rarely inclined to ask when, or why, this supposed warp in our aesthetic sensibilities came about. Certainly, the more that we come to learn about Anglo-Saxon culture, the more we recognise that this was one of the great unsung ‘Golden Ages’ of European art. And even if Anglo-Saxon carving eventually declined from the glories of the Easby Cross, in the years before the Norman conquest, manuscript illumination achieved an unrivalled level. The Normans were constrained to borrow the Anglo-Saxon style to embroider, so to speak, their victory in the Bayeux Tapestry.

We should be sceptical concerning the aesthetic advances brought about by the Conquest. The latest research indicates the degree to which, if anything, the Conquest impeded the acceptance of the Romanesque style. The craftsmen and masons who made the great English Romanesque churches were Anglo-Saxons, drawing heavily upon indigenous tradi­tion. Certainly, England drew from European culture; but it also contributed substantially to it. As George Zarnecki has put it, ‘Not only were Romanesque buildings in England amongst the largest and most daring in Europe, but they were also amongst the most influential and led directly to­wards the development of Gothic.’ Gothic was the greatest of the European achievements in art: more than a style, it celebrated and affirmed a vision of the unity between the spiritual, human and natural worlds - a unity under God. Of the British contribution to the Gothic, there is surely no need to say more here. For, so strong were English architectural and craft traditions, that we developed unique and vigorous indigenous varieties of Gothic, which were immediately ex­pressive of the faith, customs, and cultural environment of these islands. If any warp, or hindrance, arose in the visual development of the English, it must have occurred some time after the building of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, and the chapel of Henry VII at Westminster Abbey.

But to grasp the truth of the argument that some such warp took place, one has only to stand in the magnificent Lady Chapel at Ely cathedral today. Of the thousands of early 14th century carvings which once adorned the Chapel, only one now survives under the centre canopy of the second window on the north side. The rest were pulverized in 1539, at the time of the Reformation. This was only the first of those waves of rude iconoclasm which were to beset English cul­ture. Towards the mid 17th century, William Dowsing and his gang strutted around Suffolk, demolishing as many ‘su­perstitious images’, and as much craftsmanship as they could lay their hands on. If we wish to understand how British culture could produce a Shakespeare, but not a Rembrandt, this is as close as we are likely to get.

And yet here we have to be careful: because the combined resources of the Reformation, Oliver Cromwell, and Wil­liam Dowsing did not destroy the desire of men and women to give expression to their highest sentiments in visual or aesthetic terms. It is perfectly true that, in Britain, there was no high flowering of ecclesiastical art in the 16th and 17th centuries, and therefore no later secular tradition of noble, symbolic figuration deriving from it. Nonetheless, these very inhibitions in the British tradition almost inevitably also had positive effects: for what is excluded from one channel tends to surge abundantly through any other that is open to it - and, in Britain, that meant landscape painting, and indeed the whole world of natural form.

Of course, other nations had their traditions of topog­raphic and also of idealised landscapes - on both of which the British were to draw. But only in this country did landscape painting come to be the vehicle for the noblest contemporary sentiments, and for the pursuit of the deepest spiritual truths. In the beginning, landscape served proprietorial and social interests: 17th century paintings of the great country houses, and the genre of sporting pictures, confirm this. But this quickly changed; nowhere does John Berger’s thesis that there was a ‘special relationship’ between oil-painting and capitalism seem thinner than in the case of British landscape. For the movement of tradition was consistently away from pedestrian, ‘interested’ depictions, towards a ‘Higher Land­scape’ of quite a different order. As Ruskin so vividly put it - and this was perhaps his greatest insight - ‘the English School of Landscape, culminating in Turner, is in reality nothing else than a healthy effort to fill the void which destruction of Gothic architecture has left.’ If the Lady Chapel at Ely had not been smashed, or Dowsing had never rampaged through Suffolk, we may never have had a Constable, or a Turner.

In this country, then, humble ‘landscape’ was almost com­pelled to become the vehicle for the conveyance of high sentiment in art. The Academy, and especially its first Presi­dent, Joshua Reynolds, resisted this, and endeavoured, be­latedly, to introduce ‘History Painting’, in the continental Grand Manner, i.e. he tried to make pictures of the human figure, especially the English upper classes, convey the high­est spiritual truths. As Reynolds lived at a time when kings, and the aristocracy, were conspicuously corrupt, an element of absurdity inevitably stamps even his greatest work. And the difficulties he encountered have ever since bedevilled the figurative painting which seeks to go beyond the depiction of mere appearances. Any attempt to idealise, say, the present Royal Family - or the working classes, let alone a specific working man - strikes us as sentimental, and hollow. Figure painting must content itself with appearances, or, at best, purely psychological insights. Alternatively, in the paintings of, say, a Francis Bacon, denigration and defamation replace idealisation.

John Constable, The White Horse

For a long time, it seemed as if something similar would inevitably happen in landscape painting, too. Landscape could only convey higher values (or so it seemed) so long as the painter believed in ‘Natural Theology’ - that is, that nature was God’s handiwork, and revealed his glory. For Ruskin, Turner was a great ‘realist’ because his vision was so finely attuned to the way in which ‘the simplest forms of nature are strangely animated by the sense of the Divine presence’. Modern criticism seizes upon Constable’s descrip­tion of himself as a ‘natural painter’, and fetishizes the sketches through which he recorded his momentary impress­ions of the passage of light, and changes in the weather. But Kenneth Clark was one of the first to question this 20th century ‘reading’ of Constable as a naturalist, ‘a man whose only aim was to reproduce in paint the effects of nature’. For Constable was a precursor of Impressionism only in the narrowest of technical senses; he approached nature in a spirit of humble truth solely because, in this way, he felt he could reveal spiritual truths about God’s world. In the deso­late vision of his later years a bleaker view emerges. In his last painting, The Cenotaph, he painted trees in Autumn for the first time. The touch, as Clark commented, is ‘dry and cold, though with a sort of uninhabited grandeur’. Const­able’s painting precurses not the vulgar hedonism of Im­pressionism, but the bleak desolate depictions of a nature from which God had departed.

Elsewhere, I have endeavoured to show how the break­down of natural theology in the 1850s had catastrophic effects on English landscape painting; the Pre-Raphaelite landscape aesthetic was a desperate struggle to come to terms with that break-down. What matters from the point of view of the argument presented here is the difference be­tween say, Holman Hunt’s paradisiac, iridescent idylls at the beginning of the decade, and the bleak depictions of a god­less wasteland that he, and others, began to produce as the implications of the discoveries in geology, and biology, weighted in upon them. Ruskin himself admitted to hearing the clink of the geologists’ hammers at the end of every bible sentence. If a stone was a stone was a stone was a stone, the English landscape tradition which had attempted to fill the void left by the destruction of Gothic architecture had, in­deed, culminated in Turner. In some desperation, Holman Hunt set off for the Holy Land itself; but there he found not God immanent within the material and natural world he had created, but rather the ominous, alien emptiness of the Dead Sea: he returned not with a celebration of incarnate God, but with a terrible image of The Scapegoat, which portrays the world as a god-forsaken wasteland. Hunt’s intractable and awkward picture heralds the draining away of the Sea of Faith, and the exposure of the naked shingles of the world. In 1858, William Dyce painted his great study, Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of 5th October 1858 which shows women and children hunting for fossils on the bleak beach while Donati’s comet, a symbol of impending doom, passes overhead. Fossils, of course, provided part of the growing proof that nature was not the handiwork of God. Before Dyce’s picture was finished, Charles Darwin had published The Origin of Species, and the old natural theology, and the natural aesthetic which depended upon it, seemed to lie in ruins.

Peter Fuller visiting John Berger in France

European Modernism is sometimes said to have begun with a French development from English Romanticism; in fact, Impressionism marked the abandonment of the attempt to find spiritual values in natural form. This is why it is nonsense to proclaim Constable as a ‘precursor’ of Impress­ionism; when Constable’s faith in natural theology (if not in God) wavered, he began to elaborate a terrible vision of a bleak and ominous natural world. The Impressionists averted their eyes from all this, as they averted them from the spiritual tragedy enacted upon Dover Beach, and in Pegwell Bay. Insofar as the French Impressionists were concerned merely with optical effects, and the physiology of sight - and this is less far than some historians make out - there is a vulgarity and shallowness in their preoccupations. We ought, perhaps to replace the idea that Constable was a ‘pioneer’ Impressionist, with the more accurate view that Impression­ism reduced his spiritual romanticism.

There is no need to retell the history of European Modern­ism here: much of it, of course,-especially Cezanne-was far more complex and conservative than its tendentious pro­tagonists believe. Nonetheless, it remains true, that the thrust of the Modernist movements was away from any attempt to perceive spiritual values in the world of nature. Impressionism led inevitably, as Ruskin had perceived it would, to the celebration of aesthetic effects and sensations, in and for their own sake. Blinkered and prejudiced as Hol­man Hunt’s perspective may have been, we should not forget the truth in his observation that ‘the threat to modern art, menacing nothing less than its extinction, lies in “Impress­ionism”’. Hunt’s objection was that such art was ‘soulless’, and destitute of any ‘spirit of vitality and poetry in nature’. As Kenneth Clark himself was to put it forty years later, French Impressionism touched ‘only the surface of our spir­its’, and ‘did not address itself to the imagination’. Despite Impressionism’s superficial celebration of sensuous effects of light, the movement heralded a retreat into the sense experi­ence of the human subject, and a flight from any imaginative or spiritual response to nature, which was to be such a characteristic of successive modernist movements. By the beginning of the 20th century, mechanical production was replacing growth as the ‘model’ for the artist’s creativity.

But, before the second world war, at least, these Mod­ernist credos never quite took hold in England. An older tradition, with its idea that nature could be seen, and de­picted, as the true ‘locus’ of human values, had persisted as an undercurrent throughout late 19th century painting. (I would point, for example, to John Everett Millais’s extraor­dinary picture, Chill November, of 1870, where the poignant ‘negative’ image of nature, implicit in the late Constable, in Hunt, and in Dyce, is further developed.) The great achieve­ment of the most visionary British artists of the 20th century was to build upon this national aesthetic, and to take it further, by endowing it with modern forms, which none-the-less had little to do with the preoccupations of 20th century European Modernism.

Paul Nash, March Landscape

This process can be clearly seen in the great paintings of the first world war, especially those of Paul Nash. The En­glish Romantic tradition was paradoxically revitalised through the emergence of the terrible reality of a ‘natural’ landscape - that of the Western Front - closer to hell than to the Garden of Eden. Indeed, Nash wrote about the god­forsaken vista of death in terms immediately comparable to those Hunt had used on the shores of the Dead Sea. Both bring to mind John Ruskin’s terrible vision of a failure of nature, of ‘blanched Sun, - blighted grass, and blinded man’ - somehow brought about by the blasphemous and bellicose actions of man himself. Paul Nash admitted the world was a ‘darkling plane’, evacuated by God, where the ignorant armies clashed by night, but he tried to find a way through and beyond spiritual nihilism - to wreak a redemption through form.

The odious celebration of war, and mechanism, made explicit in, say, Marinetti’s glorification of the destructive effects of war, undoubtedly encouraged many British artists to defect from Modernism, and to reconsider the aesthetics of Ruskin - one of Marinetti’s pet hates. David Bomberg, a sometime Vorticist, was perhaps the first Post-Modernist. He spent much of his later life searching, through drawing, for what he called, ‘the spirit in the mass’. As Roy Oxlade - who was among his pupils - has put it, ‘it also became increasingly clear to him that the self-destructive impulses latent in materialistic and sophisticate societies could be avoided only by reappraising man’s relationship with na­ture’. But Bomberg was not the only artist to follow this kind of direction; in sculpture, Henry Moore also confronted the fragmentation of the figure, and the desolation of the en­vironment brought about through Modernity and, specifical­ly, through war. (For Moore, modern man was but a Fallen Warrior.) He, too, accepted injuriousness almost as the ‘natural’ condition; there is about his early carvings a Gram­pian intractability, which invokes Arnold’s imagery of ‘naked shingles’ and ‘ignorant armies’; but in his great mothers and children, and reclining figures, Moore struggled to realise a new vision which did not deny environmental catastrophe, but endeavoured to reach beyond it to some new spiritual unity, expressed through fully sculptural trans­formations of the figure. As John Read once put it, ‘This blending of human and natural form, this ability to see fi­gures in the landscape, and a landscape in the figures, is Moore’s greatest contribution to sculpture.’ It is something for which there is no equivalent in European Modernism. Moore’s sculpture, one might say, was nothing other than an attempt to fill the void which the destruction of the English landscape tradition had left.

Henry Moore

The most talented artists here seem to have recognised instinctively that they were, first and foremost, British, heirs to a rare sensibility and a unique tradition. If they approached Modernity, it was in order to enrich that tradi­tion to which they belonged - not to desert it for another. Of course, there were exceptions: in the 1930s, in particular, some of the most talented became seduced and deflected. But beneath the surface, a Neo-Romantic vision persisted; it was characterised by the conservationist desire to elaborate an imaginative and aesthetic response to nature, regardless. We are now beginning to understand more about how this specifically English current burst through the charred ground, with unprecedented force, with the departure from these shores of the international avant-garde, on the out­break of the Second World War.

David Bomberg, Late Summer

At this time, a Renaissance occurred in British art which had, at its core, the attempt to make spiritual and aesthetic sense of ‘The Waste-Land’. Neo-Romanticism, given re­newed impetus by a second global conflagration, flowered as never before. Art, in Britain, in the 1940s, was more vigor­ous than anywhere else in the world - America not excluded. One only has to consider the great war-drawings of Moore, his Northampton Madonna, Sutherland’s extraordinary pic­tures of the gnarled Pembrokeshire landscape, Piper’s draw­ings of the Welsh mountains, those fine Hepworths and Nicholsons imbued with their excited rediscovery of natural forms, Bomberg’s bomb-store paintings, the last, visionary, Paul Nash paintings ... the list is endless. And it testifies to how rich, various, and vigorous the British Romantic tradi­tion was as the so-called ‘Century of Change’ approached its mid-point. It must also be said that this modern rendering of a nation’s traditional sensibility met with an unprecedented and unexpectedly enthusiastic response from the public - despite its preoccupation with the demands and vicissitudes of global conflict. When the work of contemporary British artists was shown in the National Gallery, in war time, the crowds were so great that the police had to be called to control them; the sale of prints, under the auspices of CEMA, the war-time Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, soared; and the most popular series of art books on living British artists ever made, the Penguin Modern Painters series, was successfully launched.

This great ‘moment’ in our national cultural history found its most vigorous critical expression in the writings, and indeed the practical patronage, of Kenneth Clark - who gave every assistance to Henry Moore, John Piper, and Graham Sutherland (among others). Britain emerged from the war years with a justified cultural pride. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the British Council sponsored numerous superlative exhibitions of British art, throughout the world. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to see, and to learn from, our Neo-Romantic Renaissance.

John Berger

And then, suddenly, it was all over. This great national achievement was swamped first by the figurative nihilism of Francis Bacon; but later by a more general enthusiasm for tawdry social realism - fashionably embodied in the rhetoric of John Berger’s column for The New Statesman. Berger characteristically scorned Moore’s ‘Piltdown Sculpture’, and Hepworth’s ‘vacuity’; he ignored Sutherland, preferring Bratby, Middleditch, and Jack Smith. After their success at the Venice Biennale, in 1956, Berger seemed to abandon British art altogether. But the damage had been done. The destruction of our indigenous, traditional sensibility con­tinued with the import of wave upon wave of American fashions; and through the shoddiness and commercialism of Pop Art, epitomised in the empty obsessionalism of Richard Hamilton. An infatuation with the mass media led to grow­ing institutional neglect of traditional painting and sculpture, and to a lack of any imaginative response to the world of natural form. An imported technicism, more shallow and inhuman than that of Marinetti, was reinforced by the spu­rious ‘internationalism’ of the post Second World War com­mercial art world. Kenneth Clark, and those who thought and felt like him, increasingly withdrew from patronage of contemporary art, and a new phalanx of international art world bureaucrats enthusiastically peddled this unpalatable mixture of anti-art and anaesthetics, often under the cloak of vanguardism, or even political radicalism, to a dwindling public.

Beneath the surface, and at the edges of official taste, the Neo-Romantic sensibility survived, and even grew. For ex­ample, some of us feel we are just beginning to understand the way in which this vision was transplanted, through Rus­sell Drysdale, to the Antipodes, and how it grew and flourished there in the immediate post-war years in the work of Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, and later Fred Williams. For these painters what Ruskin had dreaded - ‘the glare of the Antipodes’ - became the core of their imaginative re­interpretations of nature. The desert emerges in their work as an appropriate image of ‘The Waste-Land’, the natural wilderness which man is constrained to inhabit in the late 20th century.

Peter Fuller

But, like the best landscape painting which has been pro­duced in recent years here, at home, the antipodean achieve­ment has been woefully ignored and neglected. I believe that one day, perhaps very soon, the true nature of British Neo- Romanticism will be rediscovered. For when one begins to look for it, one discovers the Neo-Romantic tradition has continued to thrive and to develop, unsung and misunder­stood as ever.

We have to find the courage to admit the mistakes of the last thirty years. If the institutional patrons in this country would only focus upon what we as a nation have always done best, they would soon find their galleries filled with an enthu­siastic audience once again. In other words, if the Turner Prize were only given to those who are truly his heirs, then the need for its existence - which is to ‘promote’ modern art - would quickly disappear. After all, a nation which gave rise to Dyce and Sutherland, and whose tradition fostered artists of the calibre of Nolan and Boyd, has no need to import the anaesthetic quagmires, and charred atrocities of Anselm Kiefer. His work seems to me an adolescent response to the dilemmas of Dover Beach, and Pegwell Bay. The best Neo- Romantic artists have seen beyond such tawdry nihilism, and, through their ‘redemptions through form’ realised glimpses of that ecological and spiritual harmony with nature which we must achieve in reality if, as a species, we are to survive. Europe and America, it seems have much to learn from us.

(The Salisbury Review July 1987)