MODERN ART: Matthew Collings BBC Tribute to Peter Fuller 1990

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

Today marks the 30 year memorial of Peter’s passing, below is Matthew Colling’s BBC tribute to Peter from 1990.

MODERN ART: Caro & Fuller Saga III - The Letters

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

These letter correspondences with Caro were some of the more interesting and quirky documents I found during my research for MODERN ART, it’s a great example of why Peter was so effective in challenging these underlying values in the art world and in our culture and if not converting people, then further informing and affirming their own perspectives. In short what makes him so interesting to watch as a character.

That Cassio Loves Her?

Taken from one of Iago’s speeches from Shakespeare’s OTHELLO

MODERN ART: But is it Art?

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

This essay is a great example of why Peter was so controversial. He asks provocative questions, that challenge the reader. I do believe it is both important and yet surprisingly uncommon to ask these sorts of questions internally and deeply. To make these enquiries, to know one’s own truth, is to meet oneself at the end of it. Today we have pieces like The Joker, a banana duct taped to a wall that sold for six figures, should we really just laugh this off, or place it on the court of culture and question it to the same standards we question a Lucian Freud?

BUT IS IT ART?

by Peter Fuller, 1990

In my time as a critic, considerable prominence has been given to 'works of art' of a kind previously unseen. That is, works which apparently embody no imaginative, nor indeed physical, transformation of materials; no sense of belonging to any of the particular arts, such as painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving, etc.; no sense of tradition nor of skill. Such works possess no identifiable aesthetic qualities and offer, in my view at least, no opportunity for aesthetic experience or evaluation.

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain

The prototype for works of this kind was Marcel Duchamp's Fountain - a urinal signed 'R. Mutt', which he submitted to the 1917 Salon des Independants. Duchamp was the start of all the trouble and there is nothing I would wish to say in his defence. Even so, it must be stressed that, in its time, the urinal was a relatively isolated phenomenon, while an overwhelming proportion of the institutionally-approved art of our own time is of the same character.

Over the past twenty-two years I have been invited to attend to all manner of objects and events. They have ranged from a document entitled 'A Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs' to folded blankets; a man seated in a bath of bull's blood; another who successfully amputated his sexual organs; used nappy liners and sanitary towels; a beach covered in polythene; thousands of old tyres arranged in the shape of a Polaris missile; a huge ceramic blow-up of a Pink Panther; a tray of cow brains and used fly-strips set in resin, and of course, the Tate Gallery's notorious Equivalent VIII - a stack of fire-bricks arranged by Carl Andre. All these things have been presented to me as 'Art'.

These are extreme cases, but many less bizarre works of recent years have no less tenuous affiliations with the recognisable arts of painting or sculpture. For example, I'd argue that there is little or no aesthetic content in much Pop art, Minimalism, New Expressionism, Neo-Geo or New Sculpture of the 1980s. A 'painting' these days tends to be identified with the mere presence of paint as a substance. A 'sculpture' can be anything. In a pamphlet accompanying the Hayward Gallery's despicable 1983 Sculpture Show, Norbert Lynton declared that 'sculpture is what sculptors do. No other definition is possible.' This is ludicrous. After all, sculptors get up in the morning, read the paper, take the dog for a walk, and so on. None of this is necessarily sculpture, although it's possible that it could all be designated as such. For Gilbert and George, life is sculpture.

This proliferation of anaesthetic art has been a problem. The temptation is simply to say, 'This is not art', and to pass on without hesitation to consider those things which appear more worthy of attention. That, after all, was the approach favoured by Bloomsbury. In his book, Art, Clive Bell's aesthetic hypothesis was that the essential quality of a work of art was 'Significant Form', which gave rise to aesthetic response and experience. Significant Form was 'the expression of a peculiar emotion felt for reality', and anything which did not possess Significant Form was not a work of art. For Bell, most of that which was presented as art was not art at all. 'I cannot believe,' he wrote, 'that more than one in a hundred of the works produced between 1450 and 1850 can be properly described as a work of art.'

Bell claimed that calling something a work of art, or not, was a 'momentous moral judgement'. He would have experienced no difficulty in dealing with the anaesthesia of late Modernism. He would simply have expressed the view that less than one in a thousand of the works produced between 1950 and 1986 were works of art.

It must be said, however, that Bell's concept of Significant Form (borrowed from Roger Fry), and his idea of aesthetic emotion, are rather unfashionable nowadays. More characteristic of current thinking is the view put forward by the aesthetic philosopher, B. R. Tilghmann, in his book But is it Art? Tilghmann is concerned with the inadequacy of traditional aesthetic theories to deal with the sort of phenomena I have been discussing, from Duchamp's urinal to Andre's bricks. Tilghmann argues that the very idea of a theory or definition of art is a confused one. This confusion, he believes, arises from the fact that the language of aesthetic theory has simply lost contact with the sort of everyday practice we engage in when we look appreciatively at urinals, piles of bricks, muddy smears or acts of castration. Instead of trying to stretch the old aesthetic theories to accommodate these new kinds of artistic practice, we should be elaborating new theories appropriate to the new sorts of practice.

These, then, are two opposing approaches to the problem of anaesthetic art objects: the Bell position, which dismisses those objects which do not give rise to aesthetic effect - anaesthetic objects - out of the category of 'Art' altogether; and the Tilghmann position, which includes everything which anyone ever designated 'Art' as art, but recommends a rejection of traditional concepts of what is and what is not aesthetic experience.

While most discussions of this issue tend to take up a position somewhere between these polarities, I'd like to argue that this whole line of reasoning should be refused.

From Baumgarten onwards, aesthetic response and experience were never regarded as being synonymous with what was called 'art'. The early philosophers of the aesthetic recognised that a great many natural phenomena - flowers, minerals, waterfalls, landscapes, forests and the song of the nightingale among them - also gave rise to aesthetic response; a disinterested response, unrelated to price, necessity or whatever. It may well be that this view depended upon a 'Natural Theology'. That is, the belief that the natural world was, in some sense or other, a revelation of the handiwork of God. As Friedrich Schlegel put it, 'As God is to His creation, so is the artist to his own.'

Natural Theology is no longer very popular, even among Christians. And this may have something to do with the fact that most aesthetic theories do not even pay lip service to the 'non-artistic' aspects of the aesthetic experience. My own belief, however, is that the aesthetic faculty has its roots in our continuities with - and ultimately helps establish our differences from - the remainder of the animal kingdom. It can be understood in terms of our specifically human natural history. This aesthetic potentiality, though threatened by the decline of religious belief and the growth of industrial, and latterly, electronic production, is not necessarily destroyed by it.

Rather than see aesthetic theory rewritten in such a way that it incorporates anaesthetic 'Art', I think we should be attending to the independence of 'the Aesthetic Dimension' from 'Art'. If this implies that we should not go along with Tilghmann, I think it also means that we should not go along with Bell's argument. There is, perhaps, something inherently wrongheaded in the view that most works of art are not 'really' works of art at all. (It is reminiscent of that Left argument which accounted for repression in Socialist countries by arguing that most of these countries weren't really Socialist.)

I think one can, indeed should, concede to the Post-Post- Structuralist contextualisers that art is a category constituted within ideology and maintained by institutions, especially the institutions of contemporary art. But the same does not apply to aesthetic experience and aesthetic values, which are orders of innate and inalienably human potentiality. Aesthetic experience of an imaginative order is a terrain which we can enjoy because we are the sort of creatures that we are. Some art embodies aesthetic values and gives rise to aesthetic experience of the highest order, but much art does so only minimally or not at all.

This statement may seem Lea platitude, but important consequences flow from it, since it implies a new - or, more accurately, an old - set of priorities. We must first of all recognise that the freedom to engage and develop innate aesthetic faculties is being impinged upon by present social and cultural policies. Here I am not launching into a defence of 'artistic freedom', a catch-cry which has been used to justify so many contributions to the spread of General Anaesthesia, and which so often proves to be little more than a rallying cry for philistines. On the contrary, I see my practical task as a critic, as one of fostering those circumstances in which the aesthetic potential can thrive, even if it means opposing certain kinds of 'art'.

One question which I have left in brackets is 'Why, in our own time, has there been such a preponderance of anaesthetic art?' For a start, I believe that post-second world war theories of art education must bear much of the blame.

About fifteen years ago, Dr Stuart MacDonald, an historian of art education, referred to what he called 'articidal tendencies' among art teachers. In my language that would be 'aestheticidal tendencies', but that sounds even worse. He was, I think, concerned with counteracting the continuing effects of the 'Basic Design' approach to art education, which was effectively debilitating the idea of Fine Art.

'Art educationalists,' he wrote, 'have been busy demolishing the subject which supports them . . . "Beauty" as a quality of an artefact was vaporised some years back. "Craft", with its connotation of old-fashioned hard work, has been given short shrift. "Artefact" is now being replaced by "museumart". Art education was deleted recently in favour of "visual education".' Dr MacDonald concluded that 'Art itself will go shortly', and he has since been proven right.

This is not to say that art itself has disappeared. Art remains in abundance, but aesthetic education, the nurturing of aesthetic intelligence and, inevitably, the creation of objects of aesthetic value, have all but gone. What is happening in our schools and colleges of art is a calamity of national proportions. Children in some schools receive lessons in 'Design Education' and 'Information Technology' but not in art. An education in art is becoming indistinguishable from an education in design, which is anything but disinterested.

However, it isn't simply education which is to blame for the general anaesthetisation of our culture. One must not forget how left-wing thinkers have long blamed everything on the market in art. This was, in essence, the teaching of my teacher, John Berger, who argued that there was a special relationship between oil painting and capitalism, and that pictures were 'first and foremost' portable capital assets. This led him to express hostility towards the very idea of 'true' aesthetic values, or of connoisseurship, which he saw as being merely derivatives of oil painting's functions in exchange and as property. Despite my respect for Berger I came to feel that there was something strangely circular in the argument that aesthetic discourse and connoisseurship were simply derivatives of the market. If they were, it was not at all clear what it was that the market could be said to be corrupting, distorting or infecting.

Indeed, there was a very real sense in which the left-wing aesthetic theories of the 1960s and 1970s provided the 'programme' for the right-wing governments of the 1980s; for that unholy alliance between philistines of the Left and the Right. For example, John Berger argued that photography had displaced painting as the uniquely modern, democratic art-form of the twentieth century. Margaret Thatcher's Government squeezed the Fine Arts courses and shifted everything towards design. Berger argued that museums were 'reactionary' middle-class institutions that should 'logically' be replaced by children's pinboards. Margaret Thatcher proceeded to pressurise every one of our art institutions in a way which the Director of the National Gallery likened to the destruction of the monasteries during the Reformation.

Berger led the assault on the idea of Fine Art values, which he dismissed as 'bourgeois' and anachronistic. Mrs Thatcher initiated a regime of stunning philistinism and destructiveness, which aimed to sweep away the last vestige in public arts policy of exactly those things to which the Marxists had objected. If the point is not to understand the world but to change it, then in England the palm must be awarded to Mrs Thatcher. She 'deconstructed' aesthetic values much more effectively than a thousand polytechnic Marxists and art school Post- Structuralists.

Nowadays, the philistine complicity of Left and Right is a fact of life for Britain's art institutions. Charles Saatchi, the advertising man (inventor of the slogan 'Labour isn't working', which did so much to bring Mrs Thatcher to power), has amassed a large collection of anaesthetic art, praised by many of the trendiest Left theorists of recent years. Meanwhile, Gilbert and George have become the salon artists of our times. Praised by Left critics for their hatred of unique objects, painting and 'elitist' aesthetic ideas, they are vociferous supporters of Mrs Thatcher.

Even though I believe that the left-wing thinkers have provided the best moral justification for the growth of institutional anaesthesia, there is also a ring-wing version of the 'corrupting market' theory, as put forward by Suzi Gablik in her slim and slight book, Has Modernism Failed? Here she suggests that the market somehow corrodes 'Higher Values' through the very nature of commercial activity. However, there remains strong empirical evidence against any such line of reasoning. Gablik does not mention Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Barbara Hepworth or Ben Nicholson, all of whom were enmeshed in the higher reaches of the art market but whose work embodies precisely those spiritual and aesthetic values which are so often absent from the work of those less commercially- successful artists of today's official, state-subsidised avant- garde. It also seems to me that the evidence of history is against Gablik's view. The market, in and of itself, did not corrupt the art of sixteenth-century Venice or seventeenth-century Holland. On the contrary, in these cases at least, intense activity in the picture markets seems to have been inextricably bound up with extraordinary efflorescences of aesthetic life.

But this observation must also be qualified, since I have no wish to draw any neat equations between the vitality of capitalism and aesthetics. While it is perfectly true that much anaesthetic art involves an element of subsidy, both historically and in our own time public subsidy has also been associated with high aesthetic achievement. One doesn't have to look back to the heyday of Athens or the Gothic period to find instances of such successful uses of public funds. Not so very long ago, the Arts Council and the British Council helped foster an exceptional generation of British artists, including Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.

While some dealers may prefer to deal in works of quality, rather than in trash, if the art institutions foster a demand for trash, then most dealers will happily service that taste. From this, all one can conclude is that the market clearly does not cause good art (i.e. art of high aesthetic value) or bad art (anaesthetic art, art of low aesthetic value). The operations of the market are, in a certain sense, neutral; neither implying nor eliminating aesthetic values. On its own, the market is simply insufficient or incapable of creating that 'facilitating environment' in which good art can be created. If the Left is wrong to blame the market for destroying art, the Right is equally wrong to suppose that art can be preserved and invigorated by the market.

So what does create a facilitating environment for high aesthetic achievement? Beliefs, faith and even will - but in a very different sense to the way those qualities were manifested in the culture of Modernism or in that of fashionable Post- Modernism.

Modernism resembled the other great styles of the past in at least one important aspect; it aspired to universality, and sought to become 'the genuine and legitimate style of our century' - to use Nikolaus Pevsner's phrase. In this sense, the Modern movement had to be rooted in the Zeitgeist, to be expressive of what Pevsner called 'faith in science and technology, in social science and rational planning, and the romantic faith in speed and the roar of machines'.

Or, as the scientific populariser, C. H. Waddington put it, from a slightly different angle, the artist who wished to paint, or the architect who wished to build for a scientific and sceptical age, 'had to, whether he liked it or not, find out what was left when scepticism had done its worst'.

For a critic of American painting like Clement Greenberg in the late 1940s, 'Cubist and Post-Cubist painting and sculpture, ''modern'' furniture [as he called it], decoration and design,' were all part and parcel of the Modern Movement, which he described as 'Our Period Style'.

'The highest aesthetic sensibility,' Greenberg wrote, 'rests on the same basic assumptions as to the nature of reality as does the advanced thinking contemporaneous with it.' For Greenberg, as for Pevsner and Waddington, this 'advanced thinking' was a belligerent, scientific materialism, which, in terms of painting, meant an art of sensation and materials 'uninflated by illegitimate content - no religion or mysticism or political certainties'. Hence Greenberg's hostility to Neo- Romanticism and to the spiritual and humanist aspirations of a sculptor like Henry Moore, whom he accused of being 'half- baked'. (Even Jackson Pollock was reprimanded for his 'Gothickness'.) Hence, too, Greenberg's notorious talk about the ineluctable search for the material essence of the medium, and the pursuit of 'the minimum substance needed to body forth visibility'.

Greenberg's Modernism has had its day, but its passing entailed not merely the waning of a style of architecture or painting, it was bound up with the decline of those beliefs I have outlined above. It became sceptical of its own aspirations to triumph over nature, it began to recognise the limits of that rampant materialism embodied in Pevsner's 'faith in science and technology'. While we may make ever greater use of gadgets such as personal computers and car phones, who among us now believes that such things are initiating us into a brave new world? As for Modernist ideals of social planning, they are quite routinely despised, now that we can see the horrors to which they led. Modernism is, quite simply, no longer open to us as an option.

So what is Post-Modernism? The critic, Charles Jencks set out to answer this question in a pamphlet of that name, and numerous ancillary tomes on Post-Modernism in architecture and art. Jencks's What is Post-Modernism? essentially argues that Post-Modernism is the Counter-Reformation to Modernism. Jencks even contends that it involves 'a new Baroque'. This is disconcerting to those of us still trying to accommodate ourselves to the idea that Post-Modernism in painting simultaneously involves some kind of appeal to classicism, especially to Poussin, the opponent of the Counter-Reformation, par excellence. But matters become even more perplexing when Jencks declares that, unlike the real Counter-Reformation, Post- Modernism involves 'no new religion and faith to give it substance'. Where then is the parallel? A Counter-Reformation without faith? But this is precisely the point. Post-Modernism is the first of the world styles to have no spiritual content at all, not even the misguided faith of materialist Modernism. For what the Post-Modernists are saying is that the certainties of Modernism - its 'meta-narratives' in Jean-Frangois Lyotard's overused phrase - can only be replaced by self-conscious incredulity about everything. Jencks echoes Umberto Eco, who says that Post-Modern man cannot say to his beloved, 'I love you madly', but must express his passion in such terms as, 'As Barbara Cartland would say, "I love you madly'' '; or perhaps 'as Fuller said Jencks said Eco said Barbara Cartland would say "I love you madly".' Likewise, the Post-Modern sculptor cannot build a monument to his nation's dead, he can only build a structure which refers to what such a monument might look like if honouring the dead were what one did, any more, as it were.

Post-Modernism knows no commitments. It is the opposite of that which is engage. Post-Modernism takes up what Jencks himself once described as 'a situational position', in which 'no code is inherently better than any other'. The west front of Wells Cathedral, the Parthenon pediment, the plastic and neon signs of Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, even the hidden intricacies of a Mies curtain wall: all these things are equally 'interesting'. We are left with a shifting pattern of strategies and substitutes, a shuffling of semiotic codes and devices varying ceaselessly according to audience and circumstances. This is authenticity dissolved. Historicity takes precedence over experience and knowingness is substituted for a genuine sense of tradition.

Speaking as an absolutist and a dogmatist, it has always seemed to me that this Post-Modernist stuff does not escape from the dilemma of all relativist, eclectic and pluralist positions; namely that they are constrained to exempt themselves from those strictures and limitations with which they wish to hem in every other position. For relativism is never able to turn back on itself, to view itself relatively. No relativist will ever proclaim his own position as being only an option, with no greater claims than rival dogmatisms. And so, by subsuming all other positions, relativism is doomed to re-establish itself on the pedestal of the very authoritarianism which it was its sole raison d'etre to challenge. In other words, for all its shifting pluralism, like Modernism before it, Post-Modernist radical eclecticism wants us to know that it is 'the genuine and legitimate style of our century'.

Now I happen to believe, with John Ruskin, that the art and architecture of a nation are great only when they are 'as universal and as established as its language; and when provincial differences of style are nothing more than so many dialects'. I am not a Modernist because I don't believe in a style rooted in the values of triumphant, technist, scientific materialism, and I am not a Post-Modernist because I don't believe in the historical necessity of culture succumbing to a shabby, fairground eclecticism.

Perhaps to prove how all-encompassing Post-Modernism really is, at the end of What is Post-Modernism? Charles Jencks even mentions me. He writes: 'The atheist art critic, Peter Fuller, in his book Images of God: The Consolations of Lost Illusions, calls for the equivalent of a new spirituality based on an ''imaginative yet secular response to nature herself.” ' (This is a bit Post-Modernist - quoting Jencks quoting me.) He continues by arguing that, like himself, Fuller is seeking 'a shared symbolic order of the kind that a religion provides, but without the religion'. He asks, 'How is this to be achieved?'

To answer this question I would like to emphasise three points: the human imagination, the world of natural form and the idea of national traditions in art. In these, I believe, lies the framework for a 'facilitating environment' in which the aesthetic dimension of life can still flourish.

To begin with the imagination, I think it is very important to resist the idea that Post-Modernism is 'the language of freedom'. It would be more appropriate to see it as the language of corporate uniformity in fancy dress. A greater relativist than Jencks was Walter Pater, who, in the mid-nineteenth century, wrote vividly of the fragmentation of human experience into 'impressions' that seemingly did not add up into a coherent whole. Like the Post-Modernists he argued that one ought to take the best from Hellenic and Gothic or Christian traditions, and synthesise them. But, he added, 'what modern art has to do in the service of culture is so to rearrange the details of modern life, as to reflect it, that it may satisfy the spirit'. For Pater, unlike the Post-Modernists, 'a sense of freedom' was rooted not in stylistic eclecticism, but rather in the cultivation of what he called 'imaginative reason'.

To turn specifically to the case of British art, when Baudelaire wrote in the 1850s that British artists were 'representatives of the imagination and the most precious faculties of the human soul', I think that what he was referring to was the persistence in British cultural life of a Romantic tradition, whose twin characteristics were a belief in the human imagination and a close, empirical response to the world of natural form.

I believe that this tradition, a particular national version of a wider Romantic tradition, persisted in England and gave rise to some of our best art in the twentieth century - the work of such artists as Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, David Bomberg and Peter Lanyon - which was all created as much in resistance to the ideas of Modernism as in acceptance of them. Moore, who has often been acclaimed as the greatest sculptor of the twentieth century, far from showing any faith in science and technology, turned his back on what he called 'synthetic culture'. Using a claw chisel, he carved stone into symbols of the unity of man and nature, in what was an essentially anti- Modern vision. In the spirit of Pater, Moore conjoined elements of the classical and the Gothic, but his work could never be considered 'Post-Modern' in that it affirmed the human spirit and, however fractured, the human subject. This was not an art in quotation marks or parentheses.

In Britain, in the late twentieth century, this powerful humanist and Romantic tradition persists, and may even be undergoing a renaissance comparable to that which it underwent in the 1940s. The stimulus this time is not war, but the collapse of the Modern movement and the spiritual bankruptcy of Post-Modernism. Here are the lineaments not of a new heroism - a triumph over nature - but rather of a new imaginative relationship to it.

'There is,' wrote Clement Greenberg, 'nothing left in nature for plastic art to explore.' This has been the tacit assumption of Post-Modernism too. But all human needs are ultimately dependent upon nature, in which and through which we have our being. The best British artists of this century continually set out to explore and reaffirm the primacy of the natural world.

This is not nostalgic, or not necessarily so. Modernism incorporated within itself a view of science as somehow a reduction to the rectilinear, the upright - the exposure of the essential simplicity of phenomena. Yet recent science, one might even say 'Post-Modern science', is very much concerned with the way in which complexity springs out of the combination and recombination of simple elements. I'm thinking, for example, of the fractal geometry of Benoit B. Mandelbrot, and his fascinating doctrine of 'self-similarity', which seems to have so much in common with the insights of poets and philosophers throughout the ages, who thought to see the whole world reflected in a grain of sand. Now some artists in England, and elsewhere, are beginning to take on board the insights of this new science. This, I find far more exciting than more junky pilasters and shifting semiotic codes, intent on demonstrating the equivalence between Poussin and Disneyland. I'd like to think that true Post-Modernism will take on Post-Modern science and explore the immense imaginative possibilities and aesthetic potential which it proposes. This may even lead to an architecture which has more in common with the Gothic than the classical, although this is still merely speculation.

For the time being, I feel that, in Britain, the best chance of a national aesthetic revival lies in the improbable hands of Prince Charles, heir to the throne. The Prince has already-by virtue of his position, which is outside the political and economic arguments - challenged conventional Modernist and Post- Modernist wisdom in architecture. In his speeches he has criticised both the commercial imperatives of the free market and the utopian materialism of the Left, which have often suited each other so well. The Prince seems to echo Ruskin in his longing for an architecture which finds ways of 'enhancing the natural environment, of adding to the sum of human delight by appreciating that man is more, much more, than a mere mechanical object whose sole aim is to produce money'.

'Man,' he has said, 'is a far more complex creation. Above all he has a soul, and the soul is irrational and mysterious.' By his intervention in architecture, the Prince has helped change the fundamental terms of the leading debates. It is to be hoped that he may take a closer interest in the fine arts as well.

When one tries to sum up some of the elements that might sustain aesthetic life in the face of growing anaesthesia, I think the general principle that must be stressed is that the universal can be achieved only through a recognition of the particular. We must return to the 'sense of place' which international Modernism and contemporary Post-Modernism have done so much to devalue. This entails a return to nature and a reconsideration of national tradition for which there are a number of useful guides, from Pater to secular pantheism, from Post- Modern science to the Prince.

Reading of: Edward Hopper: Loneliness Thing

My first post amid social distancing, is a narrated article on Edward Hopper. Hopper’s paintings and the ideas about his work in this essay spoke to me as I picked up groceries from the store and saw expressed in the people around me that underlying sense of loneliness I often feel is present in urban American life in Los Angeles, but sitting quietly beneath the surface of our niceties. The changes we have all faced in the last week seem to have made that quiet loneliness much louder. But I for one am not impartial to a sense of nostalgia, a feeling of longing and persistent incompleteness that could live happily in me forever. Trying to fill in that whole in my chest is the fuel for my creative work.

I hope you also feel that this time of solitude will bring out a great new wave of creative flourishing that has been humming just below the surface. This essay was written by my late father Peter Fuller, the screenplay I recently completed about him called MODERN ART, before the shut down had just won Best Screenplay (3rd Place) at Hollywood Reel Film Festival and had been accepted as Official Selection in competition or Finalist placement in Beverly Hills Film Festival, Manhattan Film Festival, Big Apple Screenplay Competition, Firenze FilmCorti International Festival (Italy), Film Arte Festival (Madrid), Drama Inc Screenplay Competition, and Twister Alley Film Festival. All of which have been postponed by at least a couple months to protect public health and safety. But the good news is they will be back on soon and in the meantime you can read more of Peter Fuller’s essay on my site.

MODERN ART: Questions Of Taste

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 down time! I will be posting regularly.

Questions of Taste

by Peter Fuller, 1983

Design likes to present itself as clean-cut, rational and efficient. Taste, however, is always awkward and elusive; it springs out of the vagaries of sensuous response and seems to lose itself in nebulous vapours of value. Questions of taste have thus tended to be regarded by designers as no more than messy intrusions into the rational resolution of ‘design problems’. Alternatively, others have attempted to eradicate the issue altogether by reducing ‘good taste’ to the efficient functioning of mechanisms.

But taste has conspicuously refused to allow itself to be stamped out - in either sense of that phrase. As the premises of the modern movement have been called into question, so taste has been protruding its awkward tongue again. For many of us, it is becoming more and more evident that pure ‘Functionalism’ is, and indeed always has been, a myth; taste enters deeply even into design decisions which purport to have eliminated it. But, more fundamentally, it is now, at least, beginning to be asked whether good taste and mechanism are in fact compatible, i.e. whether the Modernist ethic did not build into itself some fundamental thwarting or distorting of the potentialities of human taste.

A recent exhibition at the Boilerhouse, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, reflected both the revival of interest in questions of taste, and the confusion among designers concerning them. Stephen Bayley’s exhibition, called simply ‘Taste’, chronicled the history of the concept through ‘The Antique Ideal’; the impact of mechanisation in the nineteenth century and the reaction against it; ‘The Romance of the Machine’; contemporary pluralism; and the growing ‘Cult of Kitsch’ - or bad taste which acknowledges itself as such.

But Minale Tattersfield, who designed the exhibition, opted to exhibit those items which had gained approval in their own time on reproduction classical plinths, and those which had not on inverted dustbins. An exhibition which attempted to tell us that ‘Taste’ was a neglected issue of importance was thus, itself, in the worst possible taste. I believe this contradiction reflects a deep- rooted contemporary ambivalence about the nature and value of the concept of ‘Taste’, an ambivalence which is nowhere more manifest than in Stephen Bayley’s muddled commentary.

In the introduction to the little book produced to accompany the exhibition, Bayley committed himself to the view that taste is ‘really just another word for choice, whether that choice is to discriminate between flavours in the mouth or objects before the eye’. Thus Bayley claimed that taste did not have anything to do with values, beyond questions of personal whim. He claimed there really can be no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ taste: ‘These adjectives were added more than a hundred years after the concept was defined by people seeking to give the process of selection particular moral values which would help them justify a style which satisfied their image of themselves... or condemn one which affronted it.’ So, Bayley claimed, ‘Taste derives its force from data that is (sic) a part of culture rather than pure science.’ Taste, he argued, should be separated out from design ‘so that in future each can be better understood’.

Just a few pages later on, however, Bayley took a different tack. Unexpectedly, he began to argue there was a transcultural and transhistorical consensus about those qualities of an object which led to good design. (These he itemised as intelligibility in form; an appropriate choice of materials to the function; and an intelligent equation between construction and purpose, so that the available technology is exploited to the full.) Bayley then went on to say that those ‘principles of design’ were in fact ‘the Rules of Taste’. In an interview, he once said his own taste was ‘just Le Corbusier, really’: and his universals turn out to be suspiciously close to the sort of thing Le Corbusier might have said about his own style, though they would appear to eliminate numerous works in other styles.

And so, in effect, there are two Stephen Bayleys: one who believes that the issue of taste is as unimportant, and as unresolv- able, as individual whim or fancy; and the other, who, like every good Modernist, wants to assimilate taste to the inhuman author­ity of the machine. This confusion about taste in the heart and mind of the Director of the Boilerhouse project is at least fashion­able in that it is symptomatic of a confusion which prevails among the ‘cultured’ urban middle-classes at large. With the weakening of Modernist dogmatism - at least outside the bunker of the Boilerhouse - it is the tendency to trivialise taste, however, which is uppermost. Again and again aesthetic taste is reduced to the lowest level of consumer preference; almost always, it is assumed to be a mere sense preference and usually the paradigm is taste in food. Such attitudes are inevitably commonly associated with the cult of Kitsch.

For example, among the extracts reproduced in Bayley’s book is one from an American writer, John Pile, who wrote an influen­tial article, ‘In Praise of Tasteless Products’. Taste, according to Pile, means, ‘simply “preference” - what one likes or dislikes’. He notes that taste is the name of one of the five senses which lead ‘one person to prefer chocolate and another to prefer strawberry’. The very concept, he claims, ‘suggests an element of arbitrariness or even a lack of sense, that is, irrationality’. Taste, Pile concludes, ‘is a somewhat superficial matter, subject to alteration on a rather casual basis’.

Similarly, for John Blake, Deputy Director of the British Design Council, ‘the notion that qualitative judgements can be made about a person’s taste makes little sense if the word is used correctly.’ In an article entitled ‘Don’t Forget that Bad Taste is Popular’, Blake defends that pariah of all ‘good design’: the electric fire, embellished with imitation coal. For Blake, the designer has no right to reject such things if the market indicates that people want them. ‘A person’s taste’, writes Blake, ‘is charac­teristic of the person, like his height, the shape of his nose or the colour of his hair.’ He adds, ‘I have a taste for Golden Delicious apples, but my son prefers Cox’s. Does that mean that my taste is therefore superior to his, or vice versa?’

As we shall see, perhaps it does. But, for the moment, let us leave on one side the fact that in matters of taste it would be advisable to trust neither an American (who comes from an anaesthetized culture) nor someone who prefers Golden Delicious apples to Cox’s. My argument runs deeper than that. I believe that modern technological development, in conjunction with a market economy, has demeaned and diminished the great human faculty of taste. Bayley, Pile, Blake and Co. passively reflect in their theories a tragic corrosion brought about by current productive and social processes. Unlike them, I am not interested in rubber- stamping what is happening; rather, I am concerned about seek­ing ways of reversing these developments so that taste, with its sensuous and evaluative dimensions, can flourish once again.

But what sort of faculty is (or was) taste? In Keywords, Raymond Williams explains that ‘taste’ dates back to the thir­teenth century, when it was used in an exclusively sensual sense - although the senses it embraced included those of touch and feeling, as well as those received through the mouth. Gradually, however, the associations of ‘taste’ with sense contracted until they became exclusively oral; while its metaphorical usages ex­tended, at first to take in the whole field of human understanding. By the seventeenth century, taste had acquired its associations with aesthetic discrimination.

‘Taste’ was like having a new sense or faculty added to the human soul, as Lord Shaftesbury put it. For Edmund Burke, ‘what is called Taste ... is not a simple idea, but is partly made up of a perception of the primary pleasures of sense, of the secondary pleasures of the imagination, and of the reasoning faculty, con­cerning the various relations of these, and concerning the human passions, manners, and actions.’

Immanuel Kant, too, insisted again and again that true taste went far beyond the fancy to which Bayley, Pile and Blake would have us reduce it. Kant once argued that, as regards the pleasant, everyone is content that his judgment, based on private feeling, should be limited to his own person. The example he gives is that if a man says, ‘Canary wine is pleasant’, he can logically be cor­rected and reminded that he ought to say, ‘It is pleasant to me .’ And this, according to Kant, is the case not only as regards the taste of the tongue, the palate, and the throat, but for whatever is pleasant to anyone’s eyes and ears. Some people find the colour violet soft and lovely; others feel it washed out and dead; one man likes the tone of wind instruments; another that of strings. Kant argues that to try in such matters to reprove as incorrect another man’s judgment which is different from our own, as if such judgments could be logically opposed, ‘would be folly’. And so he insists, as regards the pleasant, ‘the fundamental proposition is valid: everyone has his own taste (the taste of sense).’ Thus, one might say, Bayley, Pile, Blake and Kant would all agree that it is a matter of no consequence if a man prefers lemon to orange squash, pork to beef, Brooke Bond to Lipton’s tea, or, I suppose, Golden Delicious to Cox’s.

But Kant immediately goes on to say that the case is quite different with the beautiful, as distinct from the pleasant. For Kant, it would be simply ‘laughable’ if a man who imagined anything to his own taste tried to justify himself by saying, ‘This object (the house we see, the coat that person wears, the concert we hear, the poem submitted to our judgment) is beautiful for me.''

Kant argues a man must not call a thing beautiful just because it pleases him. All sorts of things have charm and pleasantness, ‘and no one troubles himself at that’. But, claims Kant, if a man says that something or other is beautiful, ‘he supposes in others the same satisfaction; he judges not merely for himself, but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things.’ Thus Kant concludes that in questions of the beautiful, we cannot say that each man has his own particular taste: ‘For this would be as much as to say that there is no taste whatever, i.e. no aesthetical judgment which can make a rightful claim upon everyone’s assent.’

Kant, of course, regarded such a position as simply a logical reductio ad absurdum-, but it is just this reductio ad absurdum which Bayley, Pile, Blake and Co. wish to serve up to us as the very latest thinking on taste. It does not even occur to them that there may be a category of the beautiful which seeks to make claims beyond those of the vagaries of personal fancy; for them, all ‘aesthetical judgments’ are not only subjective, but arbitrary. The only escape from such extreme relativism is Bayley’s last-minute appeal to the ‘objectivity’ of ‘principles of design’ rooted in talk about efficiency, practical function, technological sophistication and so on.

But my argument against Kant works in the opposite direction from theirs: for I believe that he conceded the relativity of even sensual taste much too quickly. For although tastes vary, it is not true to say that everyone has his or her own taste, in any absolute way, even in matters of sense. For human senses are rooted in biological being, and emerged out of biological functions; though variable, they are far from being infinitely so. Even at the level of sensuous experience, discriminative judgments about taste are not only possible, but commonplace. It is not just that we readily acknowledge one man has a better ear, or eye, than another. Judgments about sense experience imply an underlying consensus of qualitative assumptions. For example, a man who judged excrement to have a more pleasant smell than roses would, almost universally, be held to have an aberrant or perverse taste.

The problem is complicated, however, because this consensus is not simply ‘given’ to us: rather it can only be reached through culturally and socially determined habits, and these can obscure even more than they reveal. For example, we can easily imagine a society in which the odour of filth is widely preferred to the aroma of roses, and no doubt the social anthropologists can tell us of one. But what of individuals who prefer, say, rayon to silk; fibreglass to elm-wood; the dullness of paste to the lustre and brilliance of true diamonds; insipid white sliced bread to the best wholemeals; cheap and nasty Spanish plonk to vintage Chateau Margaux; factory-made Axminsters to hand-woven carpets; or tasteless Golden Delicious to Cox’s apples?

I am suggesting that modern productive, economic, and cultu­ral systems, in the West, are conspiring to create a situation not so very different from that of our hypothetical example in which the odour of excrement was widely preferred to that of roses. In our society it may well be that a majority prefers, say, white, sliced, plimsoll bread to wholemeal. Bayley, Pile, Blake and Co. advocate uncritical collusion with this distortion and suppression of the full development of human sense and evaluative responses. But the judgment of true taste will inevitably be made ‘against the grain’, and equally inevitably run the risk of being condemned as elitist.

In aesthetically healthy societies a continuity between the re­sponses of sense and fully aesthetic responses can be assumed. The rupturing of this continuity is, I believe, one of the most conspi­cuous symptoms of this crisis of taste in our time. This continuity still survives, of course, in numerous sub-cultural activities: for example in the sub-culture of fine wines. The production of these wines has only the remotest root in the function of quenching human thirst; they constitute the higher reaches of sensual re­sponse, where taste reigns supreme. In the connoisseurship of them, questions parallel to those Kant raised about true aesthetic response, as opposed to merely pleasant sensations, soon bubble towards the neck of the bottle. For, when he pronounces, the connoisseur certainly wants to say that such and such a wine is (or is not) good ‘for me’; but that is not all he wants to say.

Our connoisseur will certainly be prepared to admit his person­al fancies, and even, perhaps, the idiosyncratic or sentimental tinges and flushes to his taste. He may well have a general preference for clarets rather than burgundies, and a particular liking for that distinctive, though hardly superb, wine he first drank on his wedding day. But, he will tell us, his fancies do not prevent him from discriminating between a bad claret and a good burgundy; nor from recognising that there are, in fact, better vintages of his wedding day wine than the one he personally prefers. When he makes statements of this kind, our connoisseur is acknowledging that he, too, is not merely judging for himself, but for everyone. He regards quality more as if it was a property of the wine itself rather than an arbitrary response of the taste buds.

Furthermore, he is aware that he exercises his taste in the context of an evolving tradition of the manufacture of and response to fine wines. Of course, this tradition is inflected by a plethora of local and regional preferences and prejudices; but such variations do not exclude the possibility of an authoritative consensus of evaluative responses. Indeed, most disputes between connoisseurs concern the fine tuning of the hierarchy of the vintage years. Connoisseurs assume that the tradition has arrived at judgments which are something more than individual whim or local prejudice. Anyone who consistently inverted the consensus, e.g. who regularly preferred vin ordinare to the supreme vintages of the greatest premier cru wines could safely be assumed to have a bad or aberrant taste in wines.

Even taste of the senses, therefore, can take us far beyond the arbitrariness of pleasant ‘for me’ responses; and as soon as we move into the various branches of craft manufacture, of, say, tapestry-making, furniture design, jewellery and pottery, we real­ise just how inadequate such responses are. For example, if a man said that a mass-produced Woolworth’s bowl, embellished with floral transfers, was as ‘good’ as a great Bernard Leach pot, I could not simply assent that he was entitled to his taste; rather I would assume that some sad occlusion of his aesthetic faculties had taken place. In the case of the fine arts, Bayley, Pile and Blake notwith­standing, it is quite impossible to evade the universalising claims of judgments of taste. It may be that there are those who believe David Wynne’s Boy on a Dolphin is a greater sculpture than Michelangelo’s last Pieta. But it is nothing better than vulgar philistinism to concede that this judgment is as good as any other, even if it happens to be a majority judgment.

The concept of taste then was an attempt to describe the way in which human affective, imaginative, symbolic, aesthetic and eva­luative responses are rooted in, and emerge out of, data given to us through the senses. The idea of taste acknowledges the fact that, in our species, the senses are not simply a means of acquiring practical or immediately functional information for the purposes of survival. Nor is it just that we come to enjoy certain sensuous experiences for their own sake; the senses also enter into that terrain of imaginative transformation and evaluative response which seems unique to man.

Elsewhere, I have tried to explain this phenomenon, upon which the capacity for culture depends, in terms of the long period of dependency of the human infant upon the mother. For us, the senses play into a world of illusion and imaginative creation before they become a means of acquiring knowledge about the outside world. Even after he has come to accept the existence of an autonomous, external reality he did not create, man is compen­sated through his cultural life; there, at least, things can be imbued with value, and tasted through this faculty added to the human soul.

Predictably, the concept of taste only required conceptualisa­tion and philosophical analysis at that moment in history when it became problematic. So long as men and women could ‘Taste and see how good the Lord is’, so long, in other words, as sensuous experience continued to flow uninterruptedly into cultural life, evaluative response and symbolic belief, the idea of taste (as something over and above sensuous experience) was simply redundant. It is not surprising, therefore, to discover that almost from the moment it was first used, ‘taste’ was already a concept fraught with difficulties.

The eighteenth century, for example, was preoccupied with the idea of ‘true’ educated taste, rooted in the recovery of the Golden Age of the classical past, as against popular taste - or the lack of it. The assumption was that this rift could be healed through educa­tion. But even before the end of the century, educated ‘Taste’ had acquired a capital ‘T’ and become suspect. Wordsworth and others railed against the reduction of taste to empty manners. In his history of Victorian Taste John Steegman argues that about 1830, taste ‘underwent a change more violent than any it had undergone for a hundred and fifty years previously.’ This change, he says, was not merely one of direction. ‘It lay rather in abandon­ing the signposts of authority for the fancies of the individual.’ Throughout the later nineteenth century, lone prophets like Rus­kin, Eastlake and Morris denounced the decay of taste into ‘Taste’ or manners among the elite, and its general absence elsewhere in society. But they were bereft of authority. By the twentieth century, all the great critical voices had fallen silent. Even high aesthetic taste was widely assumed to be a ‘for me’ response. The thin relativism of Bayley, Pile and Blake became the order of the day. Commentators began to argue there was ‘no aesthetical judg­ment which can make a rightful claim upon everyone’s assent.’ Even a knowing middle class turned enthusiastically to Kitsch.

The causes of this destruction of taste are various and complex. The puncturing of the illusions of religious faith certainly made it harder and-harder to sustain belief in a continuity between the evidence of the senses and affective or evaluative response. Values came to be characterised as being ‘subjective’ and therefore, by implication, arbitrary; that area of experience which had once united them with physical and social reality began to disappear.

Mechanism began to replace organism, not only as the assumed model for all production and creativity, but as the paradigm for cultural activity itself. Modernism celebrated this elevation of the machine, decrying the ornamental and aesthetic aspects of work in favour of at least a look of standardisation and efficiency. The prevalent taste became the affirmation of those elements in con­temporary productive life inimical to the development of taste; hence the attempt to identify the universals of taste with the principles of functional design.

Meanwhile, the growth of a market economy based on the principles of economic competition tended to lead to the triumph of exchange values over the judgments of taste. Indeed, the intensification of the market led to the eradication of many of the traditional and qualitative preconditions for the exercise of taste. The market in fact encourages the homogenisation of sensuous experience: it gives us Golden Delicious rather than more than two hundred local varieties. Simultaneously, however, through advertising and ideology, the market proclaims the value of choice. But a preference for Coke rather than Pepsi really has no qualitative significance; there can be no such thing as a connois­seur of cola. At the same time, political democratisation has somehow become co.nflated into a cultural rejection of any kind of discrimination or preference: taste has become bereft of authority and has sunk back into the solipsistic narcissisms of the sub­cultures, or the trivialising relativisms of individual fancy.

And yet, and yet. . . despite nerves and doubt about the status of taste, most of us still try to exercise it. And most of us demonstrate by our actions that we believe it to be something more than a ‘for me’ response. Indeed, proof against the assertions of Bayley, Pile, Blake and Co. is readily to be found in everyday life. Today, it is possible to question with relative impunity the politics, ethics, actions and even religious convictions of most of the men and women one encounters. There is widespread under­standing that all such areas and issues offer legitimate scope for radical divergences and oppositions. No such generosity prevails over questions of taste. Rare indeed are the circumstances under which it is acceptable ‘decently’ to challenge an individual’s taste in, say, clothing, interior design, or works of art.

Indeed, I find that because, as an art critic, I offer preferential judgments of taste, by profession, I am exposed to intemperately energetic responses of a kind that simply do not arise in other areas of human discourse. Whatever these responses may or may not indicate about the nature of taste, they do not suggest that there is a general agreement that it is a ‘somewhat superficial matter’, of no greater significance than whether a man has black or brown hair, or prefers Scotch to gin.

Rather, this continuing agitation about taste suggests that it is a significant human responsive faculty, whose roots reach back into natural, rather than cultural or social history. But taste requires a facilitating cultural environment if it is to thrive — and it is denied this in a society which, as it were, chooses mechanism and competition, rather than organism and co-operation, as its mod­els in productive life. Elsewhere, I have argued the case for the regulation of automated industrial production; and for restraint and control of such effects of market competition as advertising and market-orientated styling. I have suggested that, even in the absence of a religion, nature itself can provide that ‘shared symbolic order’ which allows for the restitution of a continuity between sense experience and affective life. But even such drastic (and improbable) developments as these would not, in them­selves, be sufficient to ensure a widespread revival of the faculty of taste. For, if it is to emerge out of narcissism and individualism, taste requires rooting in a cultural tradition; taste cannot trans­mute itself into anything other than passing fashion if its conven­tions, however arbitrary in themselves, are lacking in authority. There is, of course, no possibility that the church, or the court, can ever again be guardians of more than sub-cultural tastes. The history of Modernism has demonstrated that it is folly to believe that the functioning of machines can provide a substitute for such lost authority. We therefore have no choice but to turn to the idea of new human agencies.

One of the most interesting texts in Bayley’s little book is a private memorandum by Sherban Cantacuzino, Secretary of the Royal Fine Art Commission, which deals with this possibility. Cantacuzino, too, cites Kant’s view that although aesthetic judg­ment is grounded in a feeling of pleasure personal to every individual, this pleasure aspires to be universally valid. Thus he seeks a greater authority for the Commission - an authority rooted in democratic representation, rather than public participa­tion. ‘The Commission,’ he writes, ‘as a body passing aesthetic judgment, must feel compelled and also entitled to, as it were, legislate its pleasures for all rational beings.’

Many people understandably have a revulsion against any suggestion of social control in matters of taste or aesthetics; and yet the greatest achievements in this terrain, along with some of the worst, were effected under conditions where such controls applied. In our society, in their absence, the market and advancing technology, are having unmitigatedly detrimental effects on the aesthetic life of society. It is not the fact of institutional regulation, so much as its content, that should concern us: and I am arguing for an institution which, as it were, exercises a positive discrimina­tion in favour of the aesthetic dimension. Unlike Cantacuzino, I do not believe this institution should necessarily be the Royal Fine Art Commission: rather, it might be some new agency, drawn from the Design, Crafts and Arts Councils, as well as from the Commission. But, unlike these bodies, it would have powers of direct patronage, and, as Cantacuzino puts it, ‘feel compelled and also entitled to . . . legislate its pleasures for all rational beings’. Indeed, I believe that such a rooting of taste in the authority of an effective institution of state would not be a limitation on aesthetic life so much as a sine qua non of its continued survival. For what is certain is that left to their own considerable devices, the develop­ment of technology and the expansion of the market will succeed in holding the faculty of taste in a state of limbo, if not in suppressing it altogether. But some kind of effective cultural conservationism, in the face of the philistinism even of ‘experts’ like Bayley, Pile and Blake, seems to me to be as much an obligation of good Government as the protection of our forests and national parks from the intrusions of technological develop­ment; or the provision of adequate educational and health facili­ties, free from distorting effects of market pressures.

1983

MODERN ART: Auerbach versus Clemente

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

Auerbach versus Clemente

by Peter Fuller, 1984

If you too are sick of ‘bad painting’, you should have seen Frank Auerbach’s exhibition at Marlborough Gallery. (Auerbach does not exhibit frequently: this was his first one-man London show since the retrospective at the Hayward in 1978.) If you had done so, you would have seen some very good pictures indeed.

J.Y.M. Seated I, Frank Auerbach, 1981

I especially enjoyed a head and two seated portraits of J.Y.M.; and a reclining head of Gerda Boehm who has modelled for Auerbach over many years. But there were many fine paintings, both portraits and landscapes based on familiar territory for this artist - Primrose Hill, Euston Steps and The Studios, where he works. Auerbach also offered a consummate series of drawings, mostly of heads, including those of the Arts Council’s Catherine Lampert, Charlotte Podro, Julia, and J.Y.M.

In ‘Fragments from a Conversation’, a gnomic interview pub­lished in a quarterly review, X, in 1959, Auerbach once explained that he had painted the same model as many as thirty times. (I wonder what the relevant figure would be today, almost a quarter of a century later. How many times can Auerbach now have painted, say, E.O.W., J.Y.M. or Gerda Boehm?) But Auerbach confessed that he got the courage ‘to do the improvisation’ only at the end. This improvisation he identified with ‘gaiety’, which he described as ‘a serious word’.

But what has been true of his relationship with individual sitters may be even more so of his project as a painter itself. Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1931 and is thus still in his early fifties; I do not wish to suggest for one moment that he is near the end of his working life. He is, however, getting better as a painter all the time; and the strength of his recent work (so apparent in this exhibition) seems to have a great deal to do with qualities which derive from his increasing confidence in his own ability ‘to do the improvisation’.

J.Y.M. Seated II, Frank Auerbach

This statement requires some explanation. Just a few years ago in an article in Art Monthly (reprinted in Beyond The Crisis in Art) I compared Auerbach and Kossoff. I argued that Auerbach’s work was manifesting a growing detachment from perceived objects and persons. At that time, I felt that Kossoff was superior to Auerbach, and I suggested that the qualitative distinction between the two might have something to do with this difference. I felt Auerbach was tending to pursue the sensual qualities of painting (as substance and process) in a way which meant that his pictures were becoming more and more severed from empirical response to the real world. I tried to relate this difference to certain biographical distinctions between the two painters. But, without seeking for one moment to diminish the high esteem in which I hold Kossoff’s work, I would like to emphasise the degree to which these marvellous new paintings by Auerbach show up certain fallacies in my previous line of reasoning.

For it is now clear to me that the ‘looseness’ (if that is an appropriate word) of Auerbach’s recent painting is not the result of any loss of the sense of real, beyond the world of painting itself. Indeed, Auerbach’s superb drawings - and what a draughtsman this man is - seem to me to be the proof of this. He is certainly drawing from the model better than ever before - and he was always among the best. (Look, for example, at the fine Head of Julia, of 1981, illustrated on the cover of the Marlborough catalogue.) Whatever is happening in Auerbach’s painting cannot be ascribed to any attempt to veil given reality before he has taught himself to see it clearly; Auerbach is not intent upon evasion, or the drowning of the appearances of the real in numbing illusions, or a curtain of subjective, expressionistic gestures. Rather, he seems less and less intimidated by the imping­ing facticity of the real (to use the sorts of words he understand­ably rejects as being too ‘windy’) only because he is more and more familiar with it.

If the outside world was once like a forbidding father with whom he had to wrestle, and ultimately to subdue, it has recently become more like the face of a well-loved friend with whom he can afford a reciprocal relationship. Auerbach has thoroughly confronted its otherness, scrutinised its physiognomy, and accurately observed its changing moods; because it is no longer intract­able to him, he has acquired the courage to take what some might mistake as cavalier liberties in his painting and drawing. Look how that brush-stroke seems urgently to be seeking not the twist of a particular lip, but itself! But, in Auerbach, these are signs not of incompetence, or some brash insensitivity, but rather of a true intimacy with both the visual world, and his own practice, painting.

Gerda Boehm, Frank Auerbach

Indeed, I think his willingness to improvise from a position of achieved mastery is edging his work from the good towards the great. For Auerbach is among the very best of our living British artists. Indeed, I know of only one other British painter alive today whose work is of comparable stature, and that is Kossoff. Beside Auerbach, Francis Bacon is simply an able caricaturist and sen­timentalist: the emotions Bacon wishes to evoke are all too rarely earned in the material handling of his forms and colours.

There are those who say that such distinctions are arbitrary and unimportant; that they reveal only the ‘taste’, or the arrogance, of those who make them; and that all such judgments are no more than the exercise of personal whim, or fancy. The case of Frank Auerbach, however, demonstrates why evaluation is so important in our response to works of art.

Auerbach has long enjoyed the admiration of a limited and discriminating circle of artists, critics, collectors and other viewers. His paintings have not lacked buyers. But, as I have argued before, he has rarely been allocated even a niche in ‘The Story of Modern Art’. (Not a mention, let alone a reproduction, in Lynton’s book of that name.) For reasons I have tried to analyze elsewhere, during the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s the art world was blind to the fact that in the late David Bomberg, Auerbach, Kossoff and Creffield Britain had artists every bit as good as, say, De Kooning, and incomparably better than all the fashionable rubbish brought to prominence through the successive vogues of Late Modernism.

But today this position is changing. In ‘A New Spirit in Paint­ing’, at the Royal Academy two years ago, Auerbach was ‘reha­bilitated’ as the precursor, or Old Master, of a new expressionistic movement. Even though Auerbach is at last getting the sort of exposure he deserves, this ‘rehabilitation’ is as distorting as the previous neglect. Let me explain. If you pick up any history of Pop Art, you will see on around page eight a reproduction of Edward Hopper’s painting, Gas: the text will imply that the importance of Hopper lies in the fact that, as an early painter of petrol pumps, he anticipated Pop. Or have a look at the catalogue for ‘The Art of the Real’ exhibition which introduced American Minimalism at the Tate in 1969. A Rothko is similarly reproduced as if his true significance lay in the fact that he precursed all those blank squares and dead cubes, all that insensible ephemera.

Now the fashions for Pop and Minimalism have mercifully gone the same way as wide lapels, no one except the art historians should need reminding that Hopper was opposed to the anaesthe­sia the Pop artists instigated; or that Rothko’s pursuit of a symbolism of pure forms and colours which could convey high sentiments had nothing in common with that trendy renunciation of illusion, emotion and material skill which characterised mini­malist anti-art.

Auerbach’s ‘relation’ to today’s ‘New Expressionism’ is equally fortuitous. It has been elaborated from the observation of trivial and contingent resemblances, which depend upon putting all substantive question of value in brackets. The relationship be­tween Hopper and Pop, Rothko and Minimalism, or Auerbach and the Transavantgarde is really no stronger than that between Piero della Francesca’s Nativity and a plastic madonna from Lourdes.

Plot 78 by Francesco Clemente

Some will undoubtedly want to know in what Auerbach’s superior quality resides, and how it is to be recognised. Aesthetic quality is not some figment constructed outside the work through discourse, ideology, interest or promotional opportunism. Rather, it is realised, or not, as the case may be, through material transformations of paint, canvas and pictorial conventions. The capacity to recognise it, however, appears to be rooted in a genetically variable ability for intuitive judgment and/or the cultivation of exceptional taste.

But painting, as Auerbach once said, is a ‘practical thing’, and ‘words are so windy’. Although we can never strike the ground and reveal the source of aesthetic quality in a way which places it beyond dispute, we can always indicate its necessary, if not sufficient, conditions in things more practical and substantial than verbal exhalations. I would, for example, emphasise here Au­erbach’s consummate mastery of drawing; his relatively recent flowering as a colourist capable of playing the full emotional range; the increasing sureness of touch, which has enabled him to shift from mere accretion of pigment to a vividly lyrical handling which loses nothing in sensuousness; and his evocation of the ‘Great Tradition’ of Rembrandt’s humanist painting, which he calls upon to redeem his expressionism from solipsistic sub­jectivity.

But the mastery of such material and technical elements, though seemingly essential, guarantees nothing. And I believe Auerbach to have been right when he spoke of the seriousness of those qualities (like painterly gaiety) which spring immediately from improvisation.

For, in the absence of a widely accepted iconography, the way in which such improvisation is elaborated becomes decisive. As you can currently see at the Royal Academy, a painter like Murillo could call upon the iconography of the Madonna, celestial utopias and flying putti as the means of changing his childhood yearnings into a present and socially comprehensible vision of a spiritually redolent world. But that transformation of the physically per­ceived which could once be made manifest by allegoric devices, like haloes and ‘human’ wings, can now only be realised through the transfiguration of formal means like drawing, colour and touch. And I think it is because his indubitable technical mastery has transcended itself and entered this arena of imaginative, and improvised, transfiguration that Auerbach is able to produce works of such exceptional quality.

This transfiguration, or what I have called elsewhere ‘redemp­tion through form’, is the hallmark of successful expressionism. It is something which Auerbach shares with Rouault (in his great paintings of Parisian whores) or Soutine (especially in the carcass of beef canvases.) However sour the subject matter they are presenting, or angst-ridden the emotions that inform their work, these painters know how to bring about an illusory aesthetic redemption, and to leave their viewers with a feeling of the ‘good’, through the way in which they improvise upon the formal means they have learned and mastered.

But today’s new expressionistic painters know nothing about this; they want to evoke their feelings, to allude to them, not really to express them at all. Go and look at Clemente at D’Offay’s, and the Whitechapel . . . and then return to Auerbach. Clemente has never looked at the world; at least, he has not yet seen it. He has no idea how a head meets the shoulders, a limb the torso, or a wall the ceiling. But nor can he have looked much at art. He is pictorially illiterate. He has not achieved competence, let alone mastery, in the necessary material skills of painting: he cannot draw; he has no sense of colour at all; his grasp of composition is weak; and he seems to have no virtuosity in the handling of his materials. Little wonder then that there is infinitely more of this magic of aesthetic transfiguration in a single drawing by Auerbach of Catherine Lampert’s head than in both Clemente’s bombastic series of daubings. Clemente cannot even come out fighting, let alone dance like a butterfly, or sting like a bee.

If we compare Auerbach to Clemente we can see revealed (as clearly as it is ever revealed) the palpable difference between work of potentially enduring stature and fashionable trash. Clemente has been elevated to his present cultural prominence on tides of fashion and interest (tendentious as well as financial). But Au­erbach is one of very few painters working in Europe or America today of whom it is possible to say with any degree of credibility that here, I believe, is a master in the making.

1983

MODERN ART: The Rise Of Modernism

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

Today marks the 30 year memorial of Peter’s passing, below is Matthew Colling’s BBC tribute to Peter from 1990.

The Rise Of Modernism

by Peter Fuller

This series of seminars began by pointing to a weakness in the traditional Marxist approach to art, a weakness manifest in the writings of Marx himself, which is immediately raised when we ask the question: How do works of art outlive their origins? I suggested that Sebastiano Timpanaro had pointed to the direction in which we might look for an answer by emphasising the relative biological constancy of ‘the human condition’, a constancy which underlies socio-economic historical variation. I further argued that psychoanalysis, at least psychoanalysis understood as a theory of biological meaning, could thereby be expected to provide a significant component in any materialist aesthetics.

In these last two seminars we will look at what would be another Achilles’ heel of Marxist approaches to works of art, were it possible to have more than one. We will approach the problem of abstraction, or, more generally, why it is that certain types of art which seem to bear no discernible relationship to the perception of the objective world not only appear to us to be ‘good’ but are also capable of giving us intense pleasure.

However 1 am afraid that once again it is going to be necessary to burrow towards tentative answers in a rather labyrinthine way. To hark back to our last session, it may well appear to you at times that I have arrived here with a bag of disjointed fragments. But I would ask you to bear with me. Although it may sometimes seem that we are toying with an extraneous left foot that got attached to the torso of the argument in error, I think, in fact, it does add up.

I would like to begin by referring to a book called, On Not Being Able to Paint, written by Marion Milner, and published in 1950. This book is well-known among educationalists and psychologists, though not, I think, among artists, nor indeed anywhere within the art world. In one sense I suppose that is not surprising: what title could be more seemingly irrelevant to someone who does paint than, On Not Being Able to Paint! In fact, however, Milner’s book is among the most interesting of all texts by practising psychoanalysts on art.

In her introduction, Milner explains how she had spent five years in schools making a scientific study of the way in which children were affected by orthodox educational methods; she found herself subject to growing misgivings about this work and felt that these misgivings were connected with the ‘problem of psychic creativity’. Gradually she came to the view that ‘somehow the problem might be approached through studying one specific area in which I myself had failed to learn something that I wanted to learn.’1 That something, for Milner, was painting:

‘Always, ever since early childhood, I had been interested in learning how to paint. But in spite of having acquired some technical facility in representing the appearance of objects my efforts had always tended to peter out in a maze of uncertainties about what a painter is really trying to do. ’2 The choice of painting as the means towards finding out something about ‘the general educational problem’ was facilitated when Milner discovered that ‘it was possible at times to produce drawings or sketches in an entirely different way from that I had been taught, a way of letting hand and eye do exactly what pleased them without any conscious working to a preconceived intention.’ The book chronicles her attempt to learn to paint largely through the making of drawings in this way. Now I cannot summarise the richness of Milner’s text here, but I do want to focus upon two moments within it. One is what she has to say about her problems with perspective; the other concerns the nature of outline.

Milner explains that at first instead of ‘trying to puzzle out the meaning’ of her free drawings, she carried on ‘trying to study the painter’s task from books’. Up until this point she had assumed that all the painter’s practical problems to do with representing distance, solidity, the grouping of objects, dif­ferences of light and shade and so on were matters for common sense, combined with careful study. ‘But,’ she writes, ‘when I tried to begin such careful study there seemed some unknown force interfering.’ It soon became clear to her the difficulty was that ‘the imaginative mind could have strong views of its own on the meanings of light, distance, darkness and so on.’ A particular instance of this was the interference of imagination in perspective drawing. This is how Milner describes it:

‘In spite of having been taught, long ago at school, the rules of perspective, I had recently found that whenever a drawing showed more or less correct perspective, as in drawing a room for instance, the result seemed not worth the effort. But one day I had tried drawing an imaginary room . . . and after a struggle, had managed to avoid showing the furniture in correct per­spective. The drawing had been more satisfying than any earlier ones, though I had no notion why. ’3 It then occurred to her that ‘it all depended upon what aspects of objects one was most concerned with’:

‘It was as if one’s mind could want to express the feelings that come from the sense of touch and muscular movement rather than from the sense of sight. In fact it was almost as if one might not want to be concerned, in drawing, with those facts of detachment and separation that are introduced when an ob­serving eye is perched upon a sketching stool, with all the at­tendant facts of a single-view-point and fixed eye-level and horizontal lines that vanish. It seemed one might want some kind of relation to objects in which one was much more mixed up with them than that.’4

Now at first it seemed to Milner that her ‘unwillingness to face the visual facts of space and distance must be a cowardly at­titude, a retreat from the responsibilities of being a separate person.’ But it did not feel to her entirely like a retreat; it felt, she writes, ‘more like a search, a going backwards perhaps, but a going back to look for something, something which could have real value for adult life if only it could be recovered. ’5 Milner had read that ‘painting is concerned with the feelings conveyed by space’, but she realised that before she herself set out to learn to paint she had taken space for granted and never reflected upon what it might mean in terms of feeling:

‘But as soon as I did begin to think about it, it was clear that very intense feelings might be stirred. If one saw it as the primary reality to be manipulated for the satisfaction of all one’s basic needs, beginning with the babyhood problem of reaching for one’s mother’s arms, leading through all the separation from what one loves that the business of living brings, then it was not so surprising that it should be the main preoccupation of the painter ... So it became clear that if painting is concerned with the feelings conveyed by space then it must also be to do with problems of being a separate body in a world of other bodies which occupy different bits of space: in fact it must be deeply concerned with ideas of distance and separation and having and losing.’6 Milner also comments:

‘There were many other aspects of the emotions conveyed by space to be considered. For instance, once you begin to think about distance and separation it is also necessary to think about different ways of being together, or in the jargon of the painting books, composition. ’7 Thus Milner came to see that original work in painting ‘would demand facing certain facts about oneself as a separate being’, facts, she felt, ‘that could often perhaps be successfully by­passed in ordinary living. ’

I now want to turn to what Milner says about outline. It was, she writes, ‘through the study of outline in painting that it became clearer what might be the nature of the spiritual dangers to be faced, if one was to see as the painter sees.’ She then points out that, until she set out on this attempt to learn to paint through free drawings, she ‘had always assumed in some vague way that outlines were “real” ’. In a book about drawing, however, she read that ‘from the visual point of view . . . the boundaries (of masses) are not always clearly defined, but are continually merging into the surrounding mass and losing themselves, to be caught up again later on and defined once more.’8 She then started to look at the objects around her more carefully and found that this was true:

‘When really looked at in relation to each other their outlines were not clear and compact, as I had always supposed them to be, they continually became lost in shadow. Two questions emerged here. First, how was it possible to have remained unaware of this fact for so long? Second, why was such a great mental effort necessary in order to see the edges of objects as they actually show themselves rather than as I had always thought of them?’9 Milner then says that outlines put objects in their place\ this seemed the crux of the matter. ‘For,’ she writes:

‘I noticed that the effort needed in order to see the edges of objects as they really look stirred a dim fear, a fear of what might happen if one let go one’s mental hold on the outline which kept everything separate and in its place.’ Milner then goes on to describe a key experience:

‘After thinking about this I woke one morning and saw two jugs on the table; without any mental struggle I saw the edges in relation to each other, and how gaily they seemed almost to ripple now that they were freed from this grimly practical business of enclosing an object and keeping it in its place. This was surely what painters meant about the play of edges; certainly they did play and I tried a five-minute sketch of the jugs . . . Now also it was easier to understand what painters meant by the phrase “freedom of line’’ because here surely was a reason for its opposite; that is, the emotional need to imprison objects rigidly within themselves. Milner began to perceive that we believe outlines are real (unless we learn to paint) despite the fact that they are, as one ‘Learn to Paint’ book puts it, ‘the one fundamentally unrealistic, non- imitative thing in this whole job of painting’. But because the outline represents the world of fact, of separate, touchable, solid objects, ‘to cling to it was therefore surely to protect oneself against the other world, the world of imagination.’12 Milner thus came to see that insistence upon the reality of outline was associated with:

‘. . . a fear of losing all sense of separating boundaries; par­ticularly the boundaries between the tangible realities of the external world and the imaginative realities of the inner world of feeling and idea; in fact a fear of being mad. ’13 She even ventured the aside:

‘. . . I wondered, if perhaps this was one reason why new experiments in painting can arouse such fierce opposition and anger. People must surely be afraid, without knowing it, that their hold upon reason and sanity is precarious, else they would not so resent being asked to look at visual experience in a new way, they would not be so afraid of not seeing the world as they have always seen it and in the general, publicly agreed way of seeing it.’

Later, we will return to the question of the relationship between insistence upon perspective and outline and history; however, for the moment let us leave Milner with her intriguing problems over objective space and the rippling boundaries of her jugs, at least for the time being, and pick up another of the pieces that I am trying to fit together in this seminar.

This section, as a matter of fact, concerns me intimately: we have reached what seems to have become a regular feature in these seminars, the autobiographical interlude. Now I want to tell you something about the changes, I would say the growth, in—I’ll keep the word for the moment—my ‘taste’ since childhood.

As far as I can remember, I first became interested in paintings when I was seven or eight years old. My father had a great many illustrated art books, and I would take these down from his shelves and look at them. My family also frequently visited art galleries and stately homes but, significantly perhaps,

I think I got more at least at first, from the art books. Initially there was an element of naked sexual investigation about my looking. I saw a lot of different works of art in reproduction, but by and large I was most impressed by those of women without their clothes. At first my art appreciation was ac­companied by some guilt feelings; the books belonged to my father and I did not have his permission to gaze upon them. The Oedipal component in this looking is so transparent that it is hardly worth commenting on. Incorporation of visual images is one of the ways in which from infancy to old age we take possession in fantasy of that which we cannot (but wish we could) possess in reality. But despite the primitive character of my interest in art at this time, it would be wrong to suppose that it was entirely without that which someone like Clive Bell might have diagnosed as a rudimentary ‘aesthetic sensibility’.

Let me explain more fully: at first, I did not make much distinction between medical books (of which my father also had a great many) and art books. But soon I was aware of a sense of goodness when I set eyes upon, say, the Rokeby Venus in reproduction, which I did not feel when I looked at, say, Plate V of ‘An Atlas of Gas Poisoning’ contained in a Medical Manual of Chemical Warfare which illustrated, as it so happens, ‘Blistering of the Buttocks by Mustard Gas’. Now this sense of ‘goodness’ could not be explained by reference to the im­mediate sensuousness of the subject matter alone, which was often similar in those art books and medical manuals which interested me—though in the latter, of course, it tended to be more explicit. Nor, I think, could it be wholly accounted for by saying that art allowed me to indulge my unacceptable ‘in­stinctual’ voyeuristic impulses in an acceptable way. This could be no more than a part of the truth, if that. Borrowing art books was no less an offence than borrowing medical books. Despite the specificities of the latter I soon came to prefer the former.

This rather vague sense of ‘goodness’ which I derived from certain paintings, even in black-and-white and colour repro­ductions, had much to do with the development of my ‘taste’. If I was a certain kind of writer about art, I would no doubt claim that this sense of ‘goodness’ and my quest for it represented the awakening of a pure, unsullied, autonomous, ‘aesthetic sensibility’ to ‘Significant Form’, or something of the kind, in the midst of all that crudely sexual researching. But personally, I am inclined to doubt this.

To speak formally, for a moment, it seems to me when I look back that my pursuit of ‘goodness’ was bound up, among other things, with a growing capacity to take greater risks with outline in my perception and enjoyment of images. At first, I was not greatly interested in either colour or what is now called the ‘materiality’ of the paint. Subject matter and drawing were what concerned me most, which was why a black-and-white reproduction was almost as good as the real thing. I began by liking Ingres, where the woman’s body was tightly contained within a constraining outline. I progressed towards Botticelli: despite his ‘naturalism’, his paintings had an abstracted, arabesque quality which was somehow much less insistent on being ‘real’. For example, I was fascinated by the fact that in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus you can still see where the artist changed the position of the outline of the right arm, a degree of ambivalence which would have been quite inconceivable in a major painting by Ingres. Then I became interested in Modigliani, a painter again who insists on the reality of line— where would Modigliani be without it?—but who often hints at a kind of mergence between the figure bound in by the outline and the background against which she is set. (There are some Modiglianis in which it is hard to tell whether a particular passage of paint is depicting flesh, wall, or both.) Later still, I became interested in Matisse—yes, still outline of course, but in him it becomes provocatively fluid, as tremulous and variable as we see it in the real world, rather than as rigid as the non­painters among us often imagine it to be.

I remember that I was stimulated both to start looking seriously at modern art (which was, of course, ignored when it was not derided within the ‘19th century’ culture in which I spent my childhood) and to paint myself through a triggering contingency: seeing Tony Hancock’s film, The Rebel. I was fourteen at the time. Some of you may remember what, in truth, was a rather banal plot. Hancock plays a ‘modernist’ artist of little ability who shares a Parisian garret with a representational artist of great ability. The only thing they have in common is that they are both poor and unknown. One day, Hancock is in the garret and is ‘discovered’; however, he is assumed to be the producer of his friend’s works. These are duly exhibited and Hancock is celebrated on account of them. But soon the pressure is on him to produce more canvases of similar quality, which, of course, he cannot do. Eventually his friend, who for reasons I cannot recall colludes with the mistaken identity, supplies him with a fresh batch of works. These turn out to be abstract paintings; Hancock is horrified and convinced that ‘his’ career is finished. But the backers and critics acclaim these abstract works as loudly as they did the representational ones. Hancock, who thought it was all a question of style, shrugs his shoulders and gives up any attempt to make sense of the art world.

All right: the film was silly enough. I’m certainly not recommending it. It may well have been intended as a satire on the values of the art world, but the message I took away from it was that facility in ‘objective’ representation was not decisive. Up until this time, I had always been relatively indifferent to drawing and painting myself because I was hopelessly inept at what seemed to be the essentials of these practices, and which had indeed been taught as such in my preparatory school, i.e. mastery of such things as perspective and ‘realistic’ outline. Perhaps at this stage in my life I was simply too dissociated from the external world: anyway, I could not even begin to draw in that sort of way. But, when I saw The Rebel, it confirmed a dawning realisation that these were not the only things which counted in image making: this was given tremendous en­couragement by a sympathetic art teacher at public school. And so I entered into a prodigious period of pictorial productivity which really persisted, whatever else I was doing, until I was twenty-one. This was checked, at various times, by a desire— never to be fulfilled—to master the ‘objective’ aspects of drawing. I remember my art teacher once patiently trying to teach me how to draw light and shadow using the surface of an egg as a model—at my own request. It was no use, and I gave up in despair. On another occasion, I abandoned all imaginative explorations, and tried to study artist’s anatomy, and ‘How to Draw the Nude’ books. That did not last either. These two images—both done about the same time, when I was sixteen—indicate the discrepancy between my capacity to depict, as it were, representations of objects in my ‘inner’ and in the ‘outer’ world.

As a matter of fact, that discrepancy never was resolved in terms of my practice as a maker of visual images. My ‘taste’ however did not develop in harness with my creativity. I continued to admire those who were exemplary of that which I was least able to do myself. (I spent many hours gazing at Leonardo’s drawings in a book in the school library.) Of course,

I did become increasingly interested in abstract painting; by the time I was fifteen, I had developed a passion for Mondrian. I even remember writing a poem about him in the style of Robert Browning’s marvellous ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’. Looking back on the development of my relationship to abstract art I am inclined to the view that what was important for me was the affective meaning of the space, and that there was a sense in which at times, though not often and not for long, I could do without the presence of the figure itself. At least I am aware that, once established, the trajectory of my pursuit of abstract painting closely paralleled that of my changing interest in the figure. I got to know Mondrian largely through colour reproductions: I did not realise, therefore, just how painterly some of his works are. I read him essentially as a painter of outline, an Ingres, if you like. I responded to something almost clinical, contained and restrained, linear and ‘objective’ in his ‘classical’ works. Nonetheless, it was through Mondrian that I went on to look at Kandinsky, and later still, Klee, where I felt lost in a world of almost magical transformations and transfigurations. (On looking back at the copy of Klee’s On Modern Art which I had in adolescence I was interested to note that I had underlined the words, ‘I do not wish to represent the man as he is, but only as he might be’15—an idea which was to play a central part in my later aesthetics.)

The painters I was able to appreciate last were those whose space seemed to me to be an attempt to fuse internal and ex­ternal: this was, of course, something I responded to affectively (often initially by defensive boredom) rather than something I thought through intellectually. Although I looked voraciously at everything I came across, I had difficulty with impressionist painting for a long time, because the concrete world just seemed too subjectivised there, too insubstantial, too close to diffusion and dissolution. (I think the lateness of my interest in colour had much to do with this, too. Again, to speak af­fectively rather than epistemologically, colour seems to be the most subjective of an object’s properties; to depict the world through colour alone felt, to me, like depriving it of actuality and solidity, qualities which, psychologically speaking, were difficult enough for me to recognise anyway.) Much the same went for Cezanne, too. Cubism simply did not interest me, or enter my world, until I was at least seventeen.

But, as my interest in painting deepened, artists who were involved in this fusion came to interest me more and more. For example, among painters of the female figure whom I began to enjoy after initial indifference with what I can only somewhat pompously describe as a sense of ‘awakening goodness’ were Bonnard and De Kooning. I am not sure when I first began to like Bonnard: I saw the Royal Academy show in 1966. It must have been about that time. But it is only very recently that I have allowed myself to realise just what an important painter he is for me. In his work, the woman is entirely unleashed from her outline. Berger has brilliantly described what he calls ‘the risk of loss’ in a Bonnard painting, the fact that the figure is ‘simultaneously an absence and a presence,’ because she is ‘potentially everywhere except specifically near.’16 He describes how in a Bonnard painting one is confronted with ‘the image of a woman losing her physical limits, overflowing, overlapping every surface until she is no less and no more than the genius loci of the whole room.’17 You can see this most literally in paintings like The Open Window of 1921—and it is by no means the only one like this—where you sense the fleshly presence of a woman in the whole picture surface, but you do not at first (and sometimes not even at length) notice that Bonnard has literally included an equivocal representation of a woman, in this instance in the extreme bottom right-hand corner of the picture. Although Berger has described this aspect of Bonnard better than any other writer I have read, he is rather critical of it, indeed of Bonnard’s work as a whole.

For myself, let me just say at this stage that this apparent loss of the physical limits of the woman’s body, this restless overlapping, was, I think, what prevented me from enjoying Bonnard when I first saw his work. I was frightened by it, and I covered my fear, as is so often the case, with a veneer of in­difference. Later, the painter Robert Natkin told me the story of a visit by Balthus to an art gallery where a Bonnard hung between a Picasso and a Soutine. Balthus looked at the Picasso, and then at the Soutine, and finally at the Bonnard—at which he exclaimed, ‘Ah! At last, real violence.’ I knew what he meant at once. Today I would say that it is this very in­determinacy of outline, the peculiar kind of space one gets in Bonnard which both is, and is not, based on a perspectival pictorial structure, which, in its imagery as well as through the way that it is painted fuses inner with outer—(it is no accident that one of Bonnard’s favourite themes is an open window simultaneously revealing interior and exterior, another a body almost literally dissolving in water)—that accounts for the intensity of pleasure which I can derive from looking at his works. Do you know Bonnard’s drawings? His lines at first seem to be a literal con-fusion: he seems to me to draw fluently in a way which Milner was struggling towards in that moment with her two jugs.

Pierre Bonnard, The Open Window, 1921

Now Bonnard offers a highly equivocal sort of space. When he paints a woman, an interior, or a landscape, he makes it very unclear indeed who is separate from what, what merges with whom, who belongs where, out there, or in here. I see works of this kind as almost, but not quite, the culmination of that search for ‘goodness’ which began, I suppose, when I noticed that slight blurring or warm fuzzing in the outline of the Rokeby Venus which differentiates it from Ingres, and in­cidentally from pin-ups. Now I am aware that much of my interest in certain ‘abstract’ painters, like De Kooning, Rothko, and Natkin, could be seen as the final step in what has been a relatively continuous, if uneven transformation of an aspect of my taste from the time when I first started poring over Ingres in reproduction. Harold Rosenberg once wrote of De Kooning that in his mature work, ‘landscapes and the human figure become in Shakespeare’s phrase “dislimned and indistinct as water”.’18In Natkin one just goes right over the edge. Out­line vanishes altogether; one is confronted with a sensuous skin of paint which then bursts open into a limitless vista. One moves into a painted world where nothing is locked by line and everything exists in a boundless and plenitudi- nous state of transformation and becoming. I look upon it, and find it ‘good’, though more than a trace of the fear that would have stopped me looking at Natkin at all a few years ago remains. Now I will have a lot more to say about this change in my taste later on. Next time, I will talk in detail about the affective meanings of the space in Natkin and Rothko. But, for the moment, I want to stop here and pick up another of the pieces out of which this seminar is made. This will involve us in a little art history.

Some of you may have an idea of the particular historical perspective with which I have surrounded my art criticism over the last few years.19 However, for the purposes of our argument it is necessary to outline it briefly here.

I try never to let people forget that the idea of ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) is of extremely recent origins. In England, we do not find the words ‘Art’ and ‘artists’ used in the sense in which they are used today, i.e. as referring to imaginative skills and practitioners, rather than to just any skills, until the end of the 18th century. The word ‘Art’ came into being with the rise of the middle-classes and the emergence of a professional'Fine Art tradition. The nature of the Fine Art tradition varied con­siderably from country to country: for example, in the Italian city states at the time of the Renaissance some artists seemed to spring directly out of the indigenous craft traditions; they were acclaimed as men of ‘genius’ and, unlike the ‘primitives’, their own name was attached to their work. In Britain, however, such immediate transcendence out of the craft traditions was not possible. The craft traditions had fallen into decadence before the waning of High Feudalism; they were obliterated through the iconoclasm of the British Reformation. Until the 18th century, fine artists were effectively imported. However, everywhere that national Fine Art traditions established themselves they were characterised by a particular training. Professional fine artists acquired the skillful use of a specific set of pictorial conventions: conventions of pose, anatomy, chiaroscuro and above all perspective. Now these were not taught as historical variables, but as being the way of depicting ‘The Truth’. Hitherto, with Berger, I have argued that these conventions equipped fine artists to depict the world from the point of view of that class which they served, and that only the exceptions tried to defy their training by, as it were, forcing the conventions they had learned to serve the point of view of another class. I still consider that there is much truth in this. Nonetheless, I would now maintain that the science of ex­pression, as elaborated theoretically by Alberti and as practised by such artists as Leonardo and Michelangelo, had a concrete, cultural and class transcendent basis in anatomy, which prevented it from being reducible to a mere ideological in­stance.

It is, however, undeniable that the growth of professional Fine Art traditions was accompanied by the efflorescence of an accompanying ideology of ‘Art’ which was elaborated by artists, art historians, critics, and later museum officials. This ideology turned ‘Art’ into a transhistorical universal and projected it, together with its values, back into the earliest known social formations. As the great archaeological discoveries of the 19th century were made, fine artists came more and more to see themselves as the consummation of an unbroken continuum of ‘Art’ stretching back from the Royal Academy to prehistoric caves.

However, the reality behind this ideological mystification was rather different. Although in every known civilisation men and women had always made visual images of one sort and another, they had done so in a great variety of different ways, and these images had served a multitude of different functions. (Nonetheless, and this is a point insufficiently emphasised in my previous analyses, certain specific practices, most notably painting and sculpture, can be shown to have a material continuity since the beginnings of human civilisation.) Prior to the rise of the professional Fine Art traditions, there was no equivalent of either ‘art’ or artists; but Fine Art’s mystification of itself allowed it to disguise the fact that its status was changing profoundly with the development of new means of visual image making—like photography and lithography. These really came into their own when monopoly capitalism displaced the old entrepreneurial capitalist system, and the bourgeoisie as a progressive class began to wither. Associated with the emergence of monopoly capitalism was the ef­florescence of what I have designated as ‘The Mega-Visual Tradition’: by that I mean that whole welter of means of producing and reproducing images which includes not just photography, mass colour printing, lithography, and hol­ography, but the moving pictures of cinema and television, too. Indeed, I argue that just as free-standing oil painting was the dominant form of static visual imagery under en­trepreneurial capitalism, advertising is the dominant form of static visual image making under monopoly capitalism.

Now this process of displacement of the old Fine Art tradition from the task of conveying the world-view of the bourgeoisie initially had the effect of opening up possibilities for the imaginative artist. He was no longer pinned down within a particular ‘visual ideology’. For a very brief period— roughly from the time of Cezanne’s maturity in the 1880s until the death of Cubism — what I would characterise as a ‘progressive’ Modernist movement (or rather plethora of related movements) thus came into being.

Certain of the artists in some of these movements at­tempted—in some instances consciously, in others not—to act as visual prophets of the new world order which they felt was in the process of coming into being. We must not forget the exhilarating promise which seemed to be implicit in the advance of the bourgeoisie throughout the 19th century, a promise which seemed to be on the very threshold of realisation in the technological progress associated with emergent monopoly capitalism. An attainable vision of the transformation of the world into a place where the problem of need had been solved and natural resources fully socialised seemed to be at hand. I agree with Berger when he depicts Cubism as an attempt (even if it was not recognised as such by those engaged in it) to struggle out of the old perspective-based Fine Art conventions towards a half-expression of a new way of seeing and represent­ing the world appropriate to what seemed to be the new, emergent world order.20 Actually, this initiative was smashed to pieces by the First World War and the long, and still con­tinuing, series of historic calamities and catastrophes which put an end, forever, to hopes for a peaceful, ‘evolutionary’ tran­sition to the new Utopia.

By and large, it is possible to characterise Modernism after the decline and disillusionment of the great avant-garde movements as a retreat, by artists, from even the attempt to articulate a historic world-view to replace the now displaced 19th century, middle-class optic and perspective. The reasons for this retreat appear to have been two-fold: on the one hand, history seems simply to have dazed and outstripped artists; on the other, the ‘Mega-Visual Tradition’ continued to pump out an ever escalating quantity of banalising lies as the century progressed, swamping, marginalising, disrupting and eclipsing the products and practices of fine artists.

Thus Berger has described most post-First-World-War Western Art as a sort of epilogue to the European and American 19th century professional Fine Art traditions, an epilogue in which painting is reduced to a dialogue with itself, about itself, because there is no other area of experience upon which it can touch meaningfully, except itself. I have elaborated the notion of the kenosis or self-emptying of the Fine Art tradition: kenosis is a term I borrowed from theology. I am using it to refer to the apparent relinquishment of the professional and conventional skills by Fine Artists and to the abandonment of the omni­potent power the painter once seemed to possess to create, like God, a whole world of objects in space through illusions on a canvas. I see this general kenosis as having been ruptured at various points—most notably after the Second World War in Europe, New York, London, Chicago and elsewhere—by tremendous outbursts of expressionism in which artists at­tempted to find ways of speaking meaningfully of their ex­perience, including historical experience, once more. Nonethe­less, the process of kenosis, with these occasional regenerative hiccups, proceeds.

That is the historical perspective which underlies my critical practice. By and large, it still seems to me to be a truthful and a useful analysis. But I now want to modify it slightly. I want to approach the problem in a rather different way.

To this end, I now wish to produce the next fragment of that statue which I am piecing together. It consists of a book by Clive Bell, called simply Art, first published in 1914, that pivotal year in the destiny of the old professional Fine Art traditions and, as it turned out, of much else besides. Together with Roger Fry, Bell is often regarded on the Left as the source of all the trouble. Fry and Bell are seen as the theoretical precursors of the self-critical formalism of late Modernism. In them, we find the elaboration of the idea that ‘Art’ constitutes an autonomous, self-contained, entity which we can only truly experience if and because it evokes in us certain types of sui generis emotion, which have nothing to do with other human emotions, or with lived experience beyond the experience of art. Art, they maintain, should thus be appreciated without reference to the representational, psychological, social, politi­cal, religious, or other non-aesthetic considerations which it might evoke.

Let me say straight away, to preclude the possibility of misunderstanding, I am absolutely not about to re-habilitate Bell: he was opinionated, arrogant, ultimately down-right reactionary—one of the nastiest weeds to have flourished in Bloomsbury, and he got it all (or almost all) wrong to boot.21 But equally, if I am not going to rehabilitate Bell, I am not going to kick him either: that would be much too easy. The brand of aesthetic formalism to which his kind of critical thinking gave rise has been getting an atrocious press recently. Formalism is no longer a cultural danger or a worthy opponent. On the other hand, I would maintain not just that Bell’s book is a key text in the emergent ideology of late Modernism (which it is), but also that embodied within it are kernels of truth which have escaped almost all of those who have put forward critiques of formalism from left positions. With a little help from psychoanalysis, I want to isolate one of those kernels of truth, to extract it, unravel it, and preserve it. It not only constitutes something germane to my argument, but also that which ‘Social Criticism’, the rising orthodoxy, seems in danger of losing sight of altogether.

Let me explain.

Bell claims to offer ‘a complete theory of visual art’, and in many ways it is a very simple theory. He argues that ‘all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we speak of “works of art” we gibber.’22 He then asks, ‘What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions?’ And he arrives at what seems to him the only possible answer:

‘—significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call “Significant Form’’; and “Significant Form” is the one quality common to all works of visual art. ’23 You can spot right away the sort of clangers which this rope of reasoning is going to wring from our Bell. What can be the status of ‘works of art’ which fail to stir his aesthetic emotions? According to the theory, they must lack Significant Form, and therefore, cannot by definition, be thought of as works of art at all. It is, I suppose, to Mr. Bell’s credit that he pushed this view through to its logical conclusion: most works of art are not works of art at all. The book is peppered with such observations as:

‘I cannot believe that more than one in a hundred works produced between 1450 and 1850 can be properly described as a work of art.’24 Or again:

‘. . . the Impressionists raised the proportion of works of art in the general pictorial output from about one in five hundred thousand to one in a hundred thousand. . . . Today I daresay it stands as high as one in ten thousand.’25 You also quickly come to realise that whatever stirs Clive Bell’s aesthetic emotion, it is not the products of the professional Fine Art tradition. It is no exaggeration to say that Bell had an almost hysterical disregard for the Renaissance (although he modified this position in his later works) and especially for its discovery of perspective. He calls the Renaissance ‘a strange new disease’, and ‘nothing more than a big kink in a long slope’. He often makes such comments as, ‘the decline from the 11th to the 17th century is continuous,’ or, ‘more first-rate art was produced in Europe between 500 and 900 than was produced in the same countries between 1450 and 1850,’ or:

‘This alone seems to me sure: since the Byzantine primitives set their mosaics at Ravenna no artist in Europe has created forms of greater significance unless it be Cezanne. ’26 Now the curious thing about the way in which Mr. Bell argues is that it is precisely ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) in the historically- specific sense which he effectively denies to be art at all. Art, for Bell—i.e. that which stirs his aesthetic emotions—flourished among the so-called European Primitives of the Dark and Middle Ages, was all but extinguished by the Renaissance and that which followed it, and came to life again with Cezanne who ‘founded a movement’, a movement which Bell (writing before the First World War at a time when he would still have described himself as some sort of socialist) described as ‘the dawn of a new age’.

What did Bell have against the Renaissance? Well, he felt that during it ‘Naturalism’ and ‘Materialism’ had driven out what he called ‘pure aesthetic rapture’. He compalined that in the art of the Renaissance, ‘intellect is filling the void left by emotion’, and that the work of artists was being supplanted ‘by Science and culture’. These things, in Bell’s view, had nothing at all to do with art: he was even more scathing about 17th century Holland, another place where, he felt, art barely existed at all. ‘We have lost art,’ he wrote of Dutch painting of this period, ‘let us study science and imitation.’27 In short, he complains that ‘the outstanding fact is that with the Renaissance Europe definitely turns her back on the spiritual view of life.’28 Bell could not even accept the Impressionists, because, in his view, they were too scientific.

At this point, I simply want to raise the fact that Bell’s view of art is exceptionally close to his conception of religious ex­perience. He says that ‘Art and religion belong to the same world. Both are bodies in which men try to capture and keep alive their shyest and most ethereal conceptions. The kingdom of neither is of this world.’ He describes art as ‘an expression of that emotion which is the vital force in every religion . . . We may say that art and religion are manifestations of man’s religious sense if by “man’s religious sense’’ we mean his sense of ultimate reality.’2'' At one point, he even exclaims, ‘from the beginning art has existed as a religion concurrent with all other religions.’

Is all this, as Bell himself might have said, mere ‘gibbering’? In one sense, yes, I am afraid that it is: but, like religious piffle itself, it does contain that vital kernel which I referred to earlier. It is not enough simply to laugh at Bell and to throw ‘aesthetic emotion’ otlt of the window as so many of both the ‘left’ social critics and ‘right’ formalists have done. We have to do to Bell’s aesthetics what Feuerbach did to Christianity: we have to invert them, to locate the experiences which they describe in this world, to resolve them into their anthropological and biological determinants. I think this may be possible. For the moment, let us leave Bell with a passage in which he contrasts ‘the superb peaks of aesthetic exaltation’ with ‘the snug foothills of warm humanity’. The latter, he writes, is ‘a jolly country’:

‘No one need be ashamed of enjoying himself there. Only no one who has ever been on the heights can help feeling a little crestfallen in the cosy valleys. And let no one imagine, because he has made merry in the warm tilth and quaint nooks of romance, that he can even guess at the austere and thrilling raptures of those who have climbed the cold, white peaks of art.’30

We will return to examine those thrilling raptures and those cold white peaks later, but I hope that by now at least some of you will be beginning to see where all our threads are going to be tied. I am suggesting that there is something significant in common between the difficulties Milner had with perspective and outline; the development of my taste from Ingres to Natkin and Rothko; the historical crisis in the Fine Art tradition; and Bell’s rejection of the most characteristic products of that tradition in favour of raptures on those cold, white peaks. That something was not just a retreat from experience: it was also a retrieval of it.

You will remember that I made some reference to Adrian Stokes’ ideas about ‘modelling modes’ and ‘carving modes’—a distinction which, of course, he regarded as being as relevant within painting as sculpture. Stokes, a Kleinian, tended to associate the carving mode with ‘the depressive position’, with the separateness, autonomy and otherness of the object; whereas he links the modelling mode with the ‘paranoid- schizoid’ position, with flatness, decoration, and failure to establish a separate identity, or to recognise the distinction and space between the self and the mother.

For a moment, I want to talk in gross generalities. I want to say, preposterously, that, prior to the Renaissance, the ideology of space and its representation in visual images was essentially a projection of the fused and con-fused infantile space of what Stokes calls the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position. Before I make what I mean by this a little clearer, I want to offer a warning: it is very difficult indeed for us to think ourselves back into an earlier spatial system, whether we are talking about an his­torical, or a biographical-developmental one. The commonest mistake when attempting to do so is to assume that the spatial system out of which one is, oneself, operating must have dawned upon those who first began to discover it like a self-evident truth, whereas in fact, of course, they felt it as a violent disruption of self-evident truths.

Let me give you a good example of this. Writing in 1876, Leslie Stephen commented on how the emergence of a new cosmology through the rise of modern science changed men and women’s perception of themselves and their world:

‘Through the roof of the little theatre on which the drama of man’s history had been enacted, men began to see the eternal stars shining in silent contempt upon their petty imaginings. They began to suspect that the whole scenery was but a fabric woven by their imaginations. ’31 Now that image seems to me vivid and good: but what is in­teresting is that elsewhere in the same book, speaking of his own late Victorian age, which was the inheritor of a world in which the old stage cloths had finally been, if not torn down, then ripped to shreds, Leslie Stephen could write:

‘Our knowledge has, in some departments, passed into the scientific stage. It can be stated as a systematic body of established truths. It is consistent and certain. The primary axioms are fixed beyond the reach of scepticism; each subordinate proposition has its proper place; and the conclusions deduced are in perfect harmony.’32

In other words, he saw the Victorian scientific world-view in very much the same way that a medieval school-man regarded his own cosmological world-view as a ‘systematic body’ of eternal truths existing in ‘perfect harmony’. Stephen, per­ceptive as he was, had no intimation of the fact that within thirty years of writing this passage, his cosmology would begin to be devastated as thoroughly as when Newtonian science finally revealed the ‘imaginary’ character of the medieval world-view. In the first of these seminars, we considered the way in which that water-shed of history, the First World War, was associated with the disintegration of the Victorian way of conceiving of the world, part of which was the rise of a new physics which put everything once more well within the reach of scepticism.

With that warning, let us turn to a text by the mathematician Kline about ‘early Christian and medieval artists’ who, he says:

‘. . . were content to paint in symbolic terms, that is, their settings and subjects were intended to illustrate religious themes and induce religious feelings rather than to represent real people in the actual and present world. The people and objects were highly stylized and drawn as though they existed in a flat, two dimensional vacuum. Figures that should be behind one another were usually alongside or above, Stiff draperies and angular attitudes were characteristic. The backgrounds of the paintings were almost always of a solid colour, usually gold, as if to em­phasize that the subjects had no connection with the real world.’33

That sort of description of medieval art seems true enough to us: essentially, I think that it is true; but it also leaves out of the account the degree to which the medieval painting was a depiction of ‘the real world’ as the medieval painter conceived it. Certainly, medieval painting is highly conventionalised, but then, as we have seen, outline and perspective are themselves conventions. It may be that there was a much greater correspondence than this quotation implies between the flat, planar earth of medieval cosmology, with its ascending and descending angels not subject to the laws of gravity, and its over-arching dome of a heaven above, and a hell below, and the flat, two-dimensional, ‘unreal’ way in which the painter depicted the world. I suspect that there is a sense in which the space in medieval paintings is expressive of the way in which men and women felt themselves to be within their world. We must therefore be careful when we say that the medieval painter worked ‘in symbolic terms’. Such statements are not entirely untrue. However they greatly over-emphasise the degree to which the painter conceived of the ‘real’ world in one way and then turned away from it and set about painting another ‘unreal’ or ‘religious’ world of symbol.

What I am saying is, of course, that the medieval painter was—as Milner put it when she had problems with per­spective—much more mixed up with his objects than were the painters of the Renaissance. He made much less distinction between internal and external space—and religious ideol­ogy encouraged, indeed enforced, this confusion. Religious cosmology was effectively the institutionalised version of a projection of a subjective space into the real world. Up there, you have the good heaven with its sustaining "and nurturing deities; down there, the bad hell into which all one’s own evil, destructive and aggressive impulses can be projected. The ‘real world’ is no more than an integral part of this system, which is freely peopled with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ father and mother imagos, and with winged and weightless creatures representing benign impulses, and hooved and cloven ones standing for bad. This, of course, is what I mean when I say that the conception of space prior to the Renaissance was, if we accept the Kleinian terminology, ‘paranoid-schizoid’.

The Renaissance changed that. To persist with our ex­travagant generalisations, the Renaissance involved that sifting out of mind from matter, of self from other, that recognition of space, distance and separateness which in individual de­velopment characterises the achievement of the ‘depressive - position’. Evidently, this can today be seen most clearly in those Renaissance paintings in which the conventional means were found for the introduction of the third dimension, that is, the rendering of recessive space, of distance, volume, mass, and visual effects. The initiation of these conventions, particularly through the re-creation of perspective, is, for me at any rate, what makes the painting of Duccio, Giotto, Lorenzetti, and Van Eyck so exciting. By the early 15th century, in the work of Brunelleschi—the elaborator of a complete system of focused perspective and the tutor of Donatello, Masaccio, and Fra Filippo—painting became very like a science; not only was it based upon its own laws and mathematical principles, but it had also become a significant means for the investigation and propagation of knowledge about the external world.

Perspective, too, was conventional; I do not wish to be thought to be saying that it allowed ‘truthful’ representations of the ‘real’. Like the medieval spatial representations before it, perspective did not even represent as the eye sees:

‘The principle that a painting must be a section of a projection requires . . . that horizontal lines which are parallel to the plane of the canvas, as well as vertical parallel lines, are to be drawn parallel. But the eye viewing such lines finds that they appear to meet just as other sets of parallel lines do. Hence in this respect at least the focused system is not visually correct. A more funda­mental criticism is the fact that the eye does not see straight lines at all . . . But the focused system ignores this fact of perception. Neither does the system take into account the fact that we ac­tually see with two eyes each of which receives a slightly different impression. Moreover, these eyes are not rigid but move as the spectator surveys a scene. Finally, the focused system ignores the fact that the retina of the eye on which the light rays impinge is a curved surface, not a photographic plate, and that seeing is as much a reaction of the brain as it is a purely physiological process. ’

As I have already suggested, perspective also became inflected by the class interests of those whom the professional artists who elaborated, practised and developed it, served. Nonetheless, when all this has been said, it remains true that perspective was essentially an attempt to explore the character of the world out there, the external world, and the properties and material relations through which exterior space was constituted. Tech­nically, perspective involved a literal carving, pushing or cutting back through the surface of the picture plane. Neither artists, nor other men and women, were any longer so ‘mixed up’ in the objects which they perceived. Affective representa­tions of space became increasingly rare.

As Bell perceived, we can (ignoring for a moment all the possible exceptions, of which there are many) say crudely that this separation out of men and women from the ‘paranoid- schizoid’ space of the medieval world characterised the task of the painter from the decline of Primitive Christian Art (which, you will recall, Bell loved) to the rise of Cezanne (whom he also loved). Michelangelo’s paintings, for example, seem to me in general less masterful than his sculptures because, in the paintings, he is, as it were, endeavouring to constitute ‘real’ bodies within what is essentially the older spatial modality and mythology.) During the long period from the rise of the Renaissance, until the emergence of Modernism, painters were, to continue with the Kleinian terminology, working through, or at least within, the ‘depressive position’.

At the time of Cezanne, however, we have already seen that the ideological obligation upon artists to elaborate an external world-view was rapidly diminishing. As the painter’s cultural position was usurped through the rise of the Mega-Visual tradition, he became in one sense at least, freer. I would also emphasise that, by the end of the 19th century, with the emergence of a new physics—i.e. a new conception of the nature of the physical world—and the transformation of science, the old system of ‘objective’ perspective representation was itself exposed, except for those who were ideologically over­committed to it, as largely a conventional and historically relative means of representing the world. This was one reason why, as we saw in the first seminar, the generation of Freud’s mechanist teachers became interested in the depiction of movement. But, evidently, the camera and film played a large part in that too.

At this point, I want to raise a question mark about Cezanne. Much has been written about Cezanne by other Marxist writers, for whom I have the greatest respect. One theory suggests that Courbet produced a ‘materialist’ view of the world; Cezanne a ‘dialectical’ view; and the Cubists a 'dialectical materialist view. ’ It is a ‘nice’ argument, but I am not sure that it is entirely true.

Certainly, Cezanne’s work poses a new kind of relationship between the observer and the observed: it is with Cezanne that we begin to be made aware that what I see depends upon where I am and when. He shows us landscape in a state of change and becoming, from the point-of view of an observer who is himself no longer assumed to be frozen and motionless in time and space. But I wonder whether this perceptual reading of Cezanne is not sometimes greatly over-done. Perhaps the real sense in which Cezanne was ‘The Father of Modern Painting’—and certainly the sense in which writers like Bell responded and over-responded to him — was that for the first time since prior to the Renaissance, Cezanne mingled a subjective with an ob­jective conception of space, but of course he did so playfully and in an explorative rather than a dogmatically decreed fashion. Bell, it is worth noting here, constantly emphasises in his book, Art, that what he takes to be the ‘religious’ com­ponent of Christianity can be separated out from its dogma: ‘religion’was, for him, the perception of this mingling of inner and outer. Thus, too, Greenberg writes of Cezanne, ‘What he found in the end was, however, not so much a new as a more comprehensive principle; and it lay not in Nature, as he thought, but in the essence of art itself, in art’s “ab­stractness”.’35 I consider that what Greenberg calls here its ‘abstractness’ is its capacity to be expressive of psychological experience. What we get from Cezanne, I would suggest, is exactly that sensation which Milner was looking for, that ‘some kind of relation to objects in which one was much more mixed up with them’ than classical, focused systems of perspective allowed.

Interestingly, it was the abstract painter Robert Natkin, of whom I will have more to say next time, who first led me to perceive this aspect of Cezanne when he pointed out how, in many of Cezanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, some­thing very peculiar goes on between the foreground and the background of the picture. At moments a branch on a tree in the front seems to be depicted only feet away from others; but soon after, it seems to touch the slopes of a mountain which is ‘in reality’ twenty miles or so away. This sort of playful toying with his perception of the external world, which involves both the acceptance and also the denial of distance and separation, seems to me to have a lot more to do with the re-introduction of certain kinds of affects into painting than with Cezanne’s perceptual responses alone.

This is confirmed, I think, when one considers the theme of naked figures in a landscape, with which Cezanne was always fascinated. Towards the end of his life the way in which he handled this subject changed; he became less interested in the eroticism of appearance. Although each of the figures in his groups retained its autonomy, Cezanne sought ways of rep­resenting them in which they were simultaneously indissoluble from the ground, water, sky and trees which surrounded them. Women Bathing was painted within four years of his death: although the whiteness of the canvas surface plays its part, the painting is anything but loose or unfinished.

Cezanne made it in his studio; if he relied on petites sen­sations they were in the form of memories, rather than of things immediately seen. Anyway, he learned as much from looking at Poussin as at Provence. Like Poussin, Cezanne offers an attempt at a total view of man-in-nature, but it is a very different kind of view from that of the 17th century master. Cezanne refuses focused perspective and breaks up and re-orders his picture space in a radically new way. His memories have been realised, through an elaborate structuring of coloured planes, into a vision of a new kind of relationship between human beings and the natural world which they inhabit. Poussin’s totalisation was one of eternal stasis. Cezanne’s (although, as I shall argue, it involves a retrieval of affects belonging to an early phase of life) is essentially a promise, characterised by becoming. It revives the emotions of his individual past, to speak of a possible transformed future.

Paul Cezanne, Grandes Baigneuses, 1899-1906.

And now, I hope, you will be beginning to see the point I am getting at. Although the modern movement failed, for reasons we have already explored, to realise a new ‘world-view’ through painting, in the work of Cezanne himself and of at least some of his successors —e.g. Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, Klee, and later De Kooning—it did re-introduce to painting an aspect which had been absent from it, or at least heavily muted, during the era of the dominance of professional Fine Artists. These early modernist painters certainly acknow­ledged the external otherness, the separateness and ‘out- thereness’ of the outside world, but having acknowledged it, they sought to transfigure and transform it, to deny, or otherwise to interrupt it, as a means of expressing subjective feelings too. Their new forms emerge as neither an indulgence nor an escape from the world, but rather as an extension into an occluded area of experience.

Now I think that it was only when painters attempted to do this that Bell experienced his ‘aesthetic emotion’, those strange indefinable yearnings on which he places such great im­portance. But the point is that this was actually a new thing for those who made visual images to explore and to attempt to do. Bell made the mistake of identifying this as the essence of ‘art’, universalising it, and projecting it back through history, so that any work which did not show this quality could be dismissed as not really worth looking at. (Bell wrote off not just the ‘world­view’ painters of the Renaissance, of 17th century Holland and of 19th century England, but also, of course, those who were trying to elaborate new world-views through painting in the 20th century—the Futurists and Vorticists, for example.)

This leads us to an important point. Stokes’ taste, for most of his life, was for work in the ‘carving mode’, for art in which the depressive position had been worked through, for the Quattro­cento and the High Renaissance. Bell’s taste, on the contrary, was for the modified ‘modelling mode’ (though of course the terms would have been quite foreign to him) for the Christian Primitives and the Post-Impressionists, for an art which as it were, pushed back even further emotionally from the ‘depressive position’ towards the prior ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position. (Actually, this polarisation is not fair to either of them. As I said last time, unlike many Kleinian aestheticians, Stokes was prepared to recognise the importance of feelings of mergence and fusion in aesthetic experience. In later life, he became ever more sympathetic to the modelling modes. Whereas Bell, of course, modified his vituperative dismissal of Renaissance ‘world-view’ painting.)

Bell disguised this. He insisted that he was talking about an autonomous, irreducible aesthetic experience, when in fact he was responding to the capacity of a certain type of visual image to evoke and arouse a certain type of relatively inaccessible—not everyone, he stressed, was capable of aesthetic sensibility— human emotion which he and (I better admit it) I, too, find intensely pleasurable. The nature of that exquisite aesthetic emotion is, I think, rendered all but manifest in that passage about the raptures that can be experienced upon the cold white peaks of art. Bell found in the modern movement, and enjoyed there, a capacity of painting to revive something of the spatial sensations and accompanying ‘good’ emotions which the infant feels at his mother’s breast. By this, however, I mean much, much more than that Bell liked art because he found it to be a symbol of the ‘good’ breast in the Kleinian sense. Let me ex­plain.

Bell’s Art is full of indications of resistance: he is peculiarly keen on dismissing any attempt to penetrate or reduce aesthetic emotion. He also engaged, as one might expect, in polemic against psychoanalysis. For example, in a communication called ‘Dr. Freud on Art’, Bell tells how he once begged a roomful of psychoanalysts,

'. . .to believe that the emotion provoked in me by St. Paul’s Cathedral has nothing to do with my notion of having a good time. I have said that it was comparable rather with the emotion provoked in a mathematician by the perfect and perfectly economical solution of a problem, than with that provoked in me by the prospect of going to Monte Carlo in particularly favourable circumstances. But they knew all about St. Paul’s Cathedral and all about quadratic equations and all about me apparently. So I told them that if Cezanne was for ever painting apples, that had nothing to do with an insatiable appetite for those handsome but to me unpalatable, fruit. At the word “apples” however, my psychologists broke into titters. ’

Yes, the word was ‘titters. ’

‘Apparently, they knew all about apples, too. And they knew that Cezanne painted them for precisely the same reason that poker-players desire to be dealt a pair of aces.'"’

It is not clear whether Bell was aware of the transparency of the symbolisation he recorded here. In any event, he goes on to say that the real reason Cezanne used apples was because ‘they are comparatively durable’ (unlike flowers) and can be depended upon ‘to behave themselves’ (unlike people). If this story is correctly reported, it is hard to say who was the more stupid: the tittering analysts who uncritically interpreted the figurative elements in Cezanne’s painting as being straight­forward breast symbols; or Bell himself. What we need to ask of psychoanalysis is not a capacity to unmask subject matter or manifest figurative symbols in painting, but rather whether it can help us to understand those subjective spatial represen­tations which begin to appear with the rise of Modernism, and with Cezanne. I think that psychoanalysis does have much to contribute here, or, to be more exact, I think there is much to be learned from a particular tendency within psychoanalysis, the British object relations school, to which Milner, for example, belongs. But before I can clarify this, I have to produce another fragment from my bag of pieces, and that is a short chunk of psychoanalytic history and theory.

Some of you may have noticed the direction in which we are moving through this series of seminars. In one sense, this corresponds simply enough to the chronological development of psychoanalytic theory. We begin with Freud; we moved on to Klein; and now we are about to find ourselves standing in the clear, bright light of British ‘object relations’ thought. But this trajectory also corresponds to an inverse chronology of human development. My first paper, with Moses as its focus, revolved around aspects of the infant-father relationship and its survivals in adult life. In my second paper, we were involved with the mother, albeit as an ‘internal object’, and the nature of the reparative processes which could be lavished upon that object when it was felt that it had been damaged or destroyed through the subject’s own hate and aggression. In these last two sessions, we are concerned with the earliest infant-mother relationships, but we are focusing on the nature of the infant’s experience before he (or she) has become fully aware of himself (or herself) as a being separated from the mother or the world.

Moses by Michelangelo

I want, now, to return to the British School, and to sketch out aspects of the way in which theory developed there after the arrival of Melanie Klein. You will recall that Freud himself conceived of the infant as auto-erotic and narcissistic. In Freud’s view, the baby was motivated by the desire to secure instinctual pleasure by evading tension. Freud postulated three phases of libidinal development—oral, anal, and phallic—prior to the Oedipal conflict and the emergence of so-called ‘genital sexuality’ involving the desire for objects outside the self. Freud supposed that the infant was only interested in the mother insofar as she served the purposes of the child’s auto-erotism, by gratifying instinctual desires such as that for food. As a matter of fact, Freud had only the dimmest conception of the nature of the infant’s relations to the mother, which he did not discuss until as late as 1926. Indeed, Freud often writes as if the relationship with the father was more important. (The reasons for Freud’s blindness in this respect were at least in part defensive; he never satisfactorily analysed his relationship with his own mother, a fact which led to distorted inflections in his theoretical formulations. There were also cultural factors: given the relative status of fathers in the 19th century, European, middle-class homes, Freud was often unable to see beyond the authority of Moses. As we saw, he was indifferent to the Venus.)

Venus De Milo

Klein’s theories, evidently, were in this respect a real advance on Freud’s. Klein gave a centrality to the infant’s early relationship with the mother, to the degree that, as Brierley put it, Freud’s more orthodox followers found it ‘difficult to reconcile Melanie Klein’s assumption that the infant very soon begins to love its mother, in the sense of being concerned for her, with Freud’s conception that in the earliest months the infant is concerned with its environment only in relation to its own wishes.’37 Nonetheless, despite Klein’s formal assurances to the contrary, it remains true that in her system the course and character of this relationship is determined not so much by the quality of the mothering which the child receives as by the way in which the child plays out its innate, instinctual ambivalence. As we have seen, Klein was concerned with what she took to be the working out of an instinctual opposition between love and hate, which was not greatly affected by the nature of the environment. In general, Klein emphasised, indeed over­emphasised., orality, feeding, etc. As Guntrip puts it, ‘Mrs Klein states that “object-relations exist from the beginning of life”. . . but this seems to be something of an irrelevance; it does not matter much whether they do or not if they are merely incidental to the basic problems. ’38

A decisive step in psychoanalysis, however, was the replace­ment of dual instinct theory, whether of the Freudian or Kleinian variety, by a full object relations theory, i.e. by a theory in which the subject’s need to relate to objects plays a central part. Psychoanalysis arrived at this focus in Britain long before it did so elsewhere. (Only during the 1960s did some American analysts also become involved in this area of work.) The way in which this came about involved a number of disparate, and often seemingly incompatible strands and elements. Flere, I can only sketch a few of the more significant.

Some came from the serious critiques of psychoanalysis which were being elaborated outside the movement itself. For example, in the 1930s, analysts were often involved in theoretical jousting with members of the Tavistock Clinic. (Glover has written that within the British Psychoanalytic Society, ‘suggestions that a closer contact might be made even with more eclectic medico-psychological clinics, such as the Tavistock Clinic, were frowned on.’)39 Nonetheless, at the Tavistock, J. A. Fladfield, who was far from totally rejecting analytic findings, argued against Freud’s auto-erotic conception of infancy that the fundamental need of children was for protective love. In the early 1930s, Ian Suttie was one of Hadfield’s assistants. Suttie died at the age of 46, in 1935, but the following year his critique of Freud’s psychology, The Origins of Love and Hate, was published.

Suttie provides a systematic account of man as a social animal, whose object-seeking behaviour is discernible from birth. Suttie abandons Freud’s concept of Narcissism arguing that ‘the elements or isolated percepts from which the ‘‘mother idea” is finally integrated are loved (cathected) from the beginning.’ Thus Suttie found it possible to speak of the infant’s love for an external object, the mother, from the earliest moments of life. This was not sentimentalisation of the infant-mother relationship; he identified its biological basis clearly:

‘I thus regard love as social rather than sexual in its biological function, as derived from the self-preservative instincts not the genital appetite, and as seeking any state of responsiveness with others as its goal. Sociability I consider as a need for love rather than as aim-inhibited sexuality, while culture-interest is derived from love as a supplementary mode of companionship (to love) and not as a cryptic form of sexual gratification.’41 Suttie was not approved of by the psychoanalytic establish­ment in his life-time. Today, however, many of the criticisms he made of Freud—including his observations of the latter’s ‘patriarchal and antifeminist bias’—are very widely accepted, even within the psychoanalytic movement itself. Indeed, by the 1940s, hostility between the Tavistock and the Institute of Psychoanalysis was diminishing. For example, John Bowlby was analysed by Joan Riviere, one of Klein’s foremost followers; Klein herself was one of his supervisors when he was a trainee analyst. In 1946, Bowlby joined the Tavistock, without relin­quishing his psychoanalytic associations. Bowlby was further strongly influenced by the work of ethologists, especially Tinbergen and Lorenz. Bowlby acknowledges a debt to Suttie, but in his own work he elaborated a. thorough-going critique of Freudian instinct theory: ‘in the place of psychical energy and its discharge, the central concepts are those of behavioural systems and their control, of information, negative feedback, and a behavioural form of homeostasis.’42 Bowlby strongly opposed the idea that the infant’s relationship to the mother was based on primary need gratification, such as the wish for food. Bowlby emphasised the need for ‘a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship’ with the mother ‘in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment’. He held that the ‘young child’s hunger for his mother’s love and presence was as great as his hunger for food.’4' Although retaining psychoanalysis as his frame of reference, Bowlby drew on a mass of empirical data from other disciplines. The fact that he stands at the inter­section between psychoanalysis, behavioural studies, ethology, biology, and contemporary communications theory should have rendered his work of enormous significance to all of us on the left who are looking for a rigorously materialist account of the early infant-mother relationship. Instead, socialists have tended to revile his work without attending to it but that is another story.

Other influences were also inflecting the unique course which psychoanalytic theory was taking in Britain. You may remem­ber that in my last seminar, I referred to Sandor Ferenczi, a close colleague of Freud’s until his latter days, and Klein’s first analyst. Ferenczi was the leader of the psychoanalytic com­munity in Budapest, until his death in 1933. Guntrip has ac­curately described the differences between Ferenczi and Freud, differences which were to have tragic consequences for the former:

‘Ferenczi recognised earlier than any other analyst the im­portance of the primary mother-child relationship. Freud’s theory and practice was notoriously paternalistic, Ferenczi’s maternal- istic. His concept of "primary object love” prepared the way for the later work of Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, Balint, Winnicott, and all others who to-day recognize that object-relations start at the beginning in the infant’s needs for the mother. Ferenczi held that this primary object-love for the mother was passive, and in that form underlay all later development.’44 Many of those gathered round Ferenczi developed his approach. Hermann, for example, pointed towards such components in the infant’s relation to the mother as clinging and clasping, which could not be accommodated within the traditional Freudian perspective. Alice and Michael Balint began to develop a more radical critique of Freud’s theory of narcissism, but Hermann’s observations enabled them to progress beyond Ferenczi’s essentially passive conception of the infant’s relation to the mother, to a fuller characterisation of this ‘archaic’, primary object-relation. In the Balints’ view, the infant was ‘born relating’, even if its mode of loving was egotistic.45 Early object relations possessed autonomy from erotogenic activities. The Balints came to live and work in Britain, where their ideas had a considerable influence'among some Kleinians.

But, within Kleinian circles, parallel critiques and extensions of classical theory had already sprung up independently. Among the most significant was that put forward by W. R. D. Fairbairn, an analyst who, in the middle and late 1930s, was strongly under the influence of Klein. However, between 1940 and 1944, Fairbairn published a series of controversial papers— including, ‘A Revised Psychopathology of the Psychoses and Psychoneuroses’ of 194 1 46—in which he essentially revised psychoanalytic theory ‘in terms of the priority of human relations over instincts as the causal factor in development, both normal and abnormal’. Fairbairn described libido as not pleasure-seeking, but object-seeking; the drive to good object relationships is, itself, the primary libidinal need. In the words of Guntrip, his most devoted disciple:

‘From the moment of birth, Fairbairn regards the mother- infant relationship as potentially fully personal on both sides, in however primitive and undeveloped a way this is as yet felt by the baby. It is the breakdown of genuinely personal relations between the mother and the infant that is the basic cause of trouble. ’47 Fairbairn, like Klein before him, was something of a systems builder: I do not think that there are many analysts today who make use of all his bizarre terms and constructs. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that Fairbairn’s work—together with the influences coming from Budapest, and the ‘Tavistock’ critiques of psychoanalysis—paved the way for a great deal of original work in the post-Kleinian tradition on the nature of the infant- mother relationship. D. W. Winnicott, Marjorie Brierley, Marion Milner, Harry Guntrip, John Padel, Masud Khan, and Charles Rycroft were among those who contributed sub­stantially to the development of object-relations theory. Evidently, I am talking about a heterogeneous tradition, one which was characterised by internal contradictions, polemics, and controversies—nonetheless, in my view this tradition represents the most constructive development within psycho­analysis, and that which, incidentally, has the most to tell us about the nature of creativity, visual experience and their enjoyment.

In our next seminar, we will be examining the work of D. W. Winnicott in detail, in relation to certain types of abstract art. Here, I merely wish to point out that it is in the work of Winnicott and his colleagues that we find a focusing upon a transient phase of development which is between that of the ‘subjectivity’ of the earliest moment, in which even the mother’s breast is assumed to be an extension of the self, and the more ‘objective’ perceptions of later childhood. As Winnicott himself put it:

‘I am proposing that there is a stage in the development of human beings that comes before objectivity and perceptibility. At the theoretical beginning a baby can be said to live in a subjective or conceptual world. The change from the primary state to one in which objective perception is possible is not only a matter of inherent or inherited growth process; it needs in ad­dition an environmental minimum. It belongs to the whole vast theme of the individual travelling from dependence towards independence.’48

I will have more to say about this phase next time; meanwhile, I would just point out that it is characterised by tentatively ambivalent feelings about mergence and separation, about being lost in the near, of establishing and denying boundaries about what is inside and what is outside, and concerning the whereabouts of limits and a containing skin, so that the infant, while beginning to recognise the autonomy of objects, nonethe­less feels ‘mixed up in them’ in a way in which the child or adult does not.

Now all this work has been done since that moment when the psychoanalysts ‘tittered’ at Bell for saying that ‘if Cezanne was for ever painting apples, that had nothing to do with an in­satiable appetite for those handsome but to me unpalatable fruit.’ To say that for Cezanne (or Bell) the apple was a symbol of the breast tells us rather less than nothing: to say, however, that the kind of space which Cezanne constructs, with its ambivalences between figure and environment, foreground and background, and between concepts and perceptions, is in some way related to the way in which the infant relates himself to the breast, the mother and the world is to say a great deal. It is in the light of this later analytical work that we can best begin to arrive at a materialist anlaysis of what happens in the out­standing paintings of the modern movement. Through this work, I can give some theoretical spine to my deeply held feeling that there are moments in the now threatened modern movement which are not just examples of kenosis and epilogue, but genuine extensions of the capacity of painted images, and spatial organisations, to speak of certain aspects of human experience in ways which simply could not be reproduced in other media, where space cannot be imaginatively and af­fectively constituted in the same way.

Winnicott himself was very much aware of correspondences between his findings and the work of many writers and artists; unfortunately, however, few of those involved in theoretical aesthetics, or critical work, have attended to his texts. Indeed one has to confront the fact that although British ‘object relations’ theory is well known among clinicians, therapists and educationalists, it has had very little impact upon culture beyond those specific disciplines. Perry Anderson, editor of New Left Review, commented on this in his historic 1968 text, ‘Components of the National Culture’.4'’ Although he acknowledged that the British School of psychoanalysis was ‘one of the most flourishing’ in the world, he pointed out that its impact on British culture in general has been virtually nil. Psychoanalysis ‘has been sealed off as a technical enclave: an esoteric and specialized pursuit unrelated to any of the central concerns of mainstream “humanistic” culture.’50 Anderson relates this to his ‘global’ analysis of British culture, to the failure of the British bourgeoisie to elaborate a world-view, to the resultant ‘absent centre’ of British culture, and its resistance to alien ‘impingements’. His analysis is one with which, by and large, I am in substantial agreement. But why has the British achievement in psychoanalysis been so widely ignored on the left which opposes itself to that ‘mainstream’ whose lacunae Anderson describes? I have not, after all, noticed much discus­sion of Klein, Winnicott, Rycroft, etc. in the pages of New Left Review.

I cannot attempt a complete answer to this question here, but I would like to throw out two indications. Firstly, I am con­vinced that what Suttie called ‘a taboo on tenderness’ operates among many intellectuals, a taboo which is characterised by a radical distrust of those areas of experience which, by their very nature, cannot be fully verbalised. (I have in mind here, for example, the tendency of certain Althusserian writers on art to seek to replace the experience of the work with a complete, they would say ‘scientific’, verbal account of it.) Winnicott wrote that ‘the individual gets to external reality through the omni­potent fantasies elaborated in the effort to get away from inner reality.’51 There are those on the left who never stop elaborating such omnipotent fantasies in the attempt to obliterate the encroachments of a subjectivity which they deny. This is one reason why so many who have any interest in post-Freudian psychoanalysis scuttle across the channel to the structural- linguistic models through which Lacan endeavours to describe the infant-mother relationship. In effect, the very forms in which Lacan casts his work, with all its pseudo-algebraic pretensions, are a denial of the affective qualities of precisely that which they purport to describe, whereas Winnicott’s ‘metaphoric’ mode does not allow one any such escape into the irrational ‘rationality’ of a closed system.

There is another, related reason which is perhaps more ex­cusable: in many of these psychoanalysts there is a trace, and sometimes more than a trace, of philosophical idealism. What they discovered about the early infant-mother relationship sometimes led them, for example, to direct or indirect apologetics for religion. (This was true of Brierley, Guntrip, and Suttie.) But the point is that these writers and researchers were uncovering the material, biological, roots of such phenomena as religious and aesthetic experience: by this, I mean, they were exposing their rootedness in a certain definite, developmental phase. There are times in which, lacking a historical materialist perspective, some of these writers tended to conflate the specific social, cultural religious and artistic forms within which such experiences and emotions were structured and accommodated with those experiences and emotions themselves. (This was never true of Winnicott, or of Rycroft who has, for example, drawn attention to the way in which certain theological con­cepts were, prior to developments in object relations theory, the most adequate accounts of certain kinds of experience, for which non-theological explanations are now possible.) How­ever, in developing an ideological critique of those social and cultural forms, the Marxist left has, in my view, sadly neglected the major advances made by the British psycho­analytic school into what it is that is structured through such forms. This is one reason why, as yet, there is no adequate Marxist analysis of religion, music, or abstract painting.

In this respect, the Marxist left may be said to resemble Freud himself. We have already had occasion to note how Freud dreaded any potential contamination between psychoanalysis and ‘mysticism’. But again, it is important to ask whether in his opposition to certain definite cultural forms, such as religion, and his pathological indifference to others, such as music, and non-representational art, Freud was manifesting not just his commitment to ‘science’ and rationality, but also his denial of significant areas of his own experience.

For example, in his discussion of religion, Freud talked about a mystical state which he described as a feeling of being at one with the universe, which he correlated with feelings of dependency and being overwhelmed. Freud described this feeling as ‘oceanic’—a term he got from a friend—but confided that he had never, himself, experienced anything like it. Freud explained this feeling as a regression to the early infantile state when the child’s ego is not differentiated from the surrounding external world. Anton Ehrenzweig has observed that Freud is thus claiming that the feeling of union is no mere illusion, but the correct description of a memory of an infantile state otherwise inaccessible.52 In telling us that he never experienced such emotions Freud is indicating an area of his personality which would appear to be subject to defensive denial: he is pointing to a failure in his historic self-analysis. The oceanic feeling of union does not only manifest itself in mystical or religious forms: it seems to be an important element in certain types of auditory and visual aesthetic experience, too— experiences to which, as we know, Freud was notoriously in­sensitive. On all such experiences and areas of human life, Freud has almost nothing of interest to say: his silence, I am sure, may be correlated with his indifference to and denial of the real nature of the infant-mother relationship, as described in the work done by the British object relations school over the last quarter of a century.

Freud, you will remember, admired the Moses of Michelangelo, but had nothing to say about those ‘unfinished’ or ‘incomplete’ works—now almost universally more widely admired—in which the figure seems to be struggling to free itself from (or is it to submerge itself back into) the matter out of which it has been wrought. Evidently, this was partly culturally as well as psychologically determined: in the 19th century, Michelangelo’s late drawings were widely regarded as merely the products of a senile old man who had lost his touch; today, there are many who would acclaim these figures with multiple, ebbing outlines as among the finest which the artist did.  My point is that these drawings speak of significant areas of experience which, in the past, tended to be either locked within the mystifications of religion, or denied altogether.

Perhaps I can demonstrate this by referring to a writer whose ‘taste’ and whose psychoanalytic theories can both meaning­fully be described as being somewhere between Freud’s and my own, E. H. Gombrich. Gombrich, you will remember, can certainly appreciate the art of Post-Impressionism; he has, howev.er, never enjoyed abstract painting: In his essay, ‘Psycho- Analysis and the History of Art’,53 Gombrich draws heavily upon Michelangelo, Crucifixion. The ideas of Edward Glover, and especially on the latter’s study, ‘The Significance of the Mouth in Psycho-Analysis’.54 This was written before Glover was deeply influenced by Melanie Klein. (Later, you may remember, he polemicised strongly against her: when her ideas obtained partial acceptance within the British Society, Glover, who had been among its most influential members, resigned and joined the Japanese Society instead.) Gombrich here suggests a wholly oral ontogenesis of aesthetic taste, describing ‘oral gratification as a genetic model for aesthetic pleasure’. Gombrich proposes two polarities in taste, the ‘soft’ and the ‘crunchy’, which, through Glover’s ideas, he correlates with the ‘passive’ and the ‘active’, and with ‘sucking’ and ‘biting’ oral modes respectively. Gombrich implies that the ‘soft’ is more primitive and infantile; while the crunchy corresponds with sophisticated, civilised taste.

To make his point, Gombrich takes an atrocious academic painting of the Three Graces by Bonnencontre, and, as he puts it, tries to ‘improve the sloppy mush by adding a few crunchy breadcrumbs’. He does this by photographing the picture through wobbly glass. ‘You will agree,’ he writes, ‘that it looks a little more respectable’. And, indeed, he is right. It does. Gombrich explains this by saying, ‘We have to become a little more active in reconstituting the image, and we are less disgusted.’'6 He repeats the experiment by taking another photograph through the same glass at a greater distance, so that the figures are even more shadowy, and their outlines blurred and dissolved. He comments, ‘By now, I think, it deserves the epithet “interesting”. Our own effort to reintegrate what has been wrenched apart makes us project a certain vigour into the image which makes it quite crunchy. ’

Gombrich goes on to say:

‘. . . this artificial blurring repeats in a rather surprising way the course that painting actually took when the wave of revolt from the Bouguereau phase spread through the art world. ’57 He comments on the blurring achieved by Impressionism which ‘demands the well-known trained response—you are expected to step back and see the dabs and patches fall into place’; and Cezanne, ‘with whom activity is stimulated to even greater efforts, as we are called upon to repeat the artist’s strivings to reconcile the demands of representation with obedience to an overriding pattern.’58 Interestingly, all Gombrich’s examples— the Bonnenconue, Impressionist, and Cezanne’s—here are of the female nude. His conclusion is that whereas ‘taste may be accessible to psychological analysis, art is possibly not’.

Now evidently there is much that is true in Gombrich’s account, but what is wrong with it is his underlying assumption that the infantile relationship to the mother is instinctual in character, that is, realised exclusively through the mouth and the search for oral satisfactions and reducible to a matter of taste in a limited, oral sense. I doubt whether the reason why the blurred Bonnencontre is more ‘interesting’ now is simply, or even at all, due to a maturer preference for a later oral phase, for biting over sucking, for crunchy over soft. There are hints that Gombrich, too, realises this because the way he develops the notions of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ with reference to the pleasure to be derived from the attempt to ‘reintegrate what has been wrenched apart’ suggests the kind of Kleinian notion of the restoration of internal objects which we discussed at the end of our last talk. (The differences between the Bonnencontre original, and the ‘wobbly glass’ versions can be compared with those between the Hiram Powers sculpture and the Venus de Milo.) But we, ourselves, are now ready to go beyond even such Kleinian accounts. I would say that the reason the distorted Bonnencontre is more ‘interesting’ has to do with its capacity to begin (however thinly and vaguely) to evoke that critical phase, to which Winnicott referred, between experience as wholly subjective, and the achievement of objectivity and per­ceptibility, when the child is relating to another whose otherness is at once recognised and denied; when the existence of the boundaries (outlines) or limiting membranes of the self and of its objects are at once perceived and imaginatively ruptured. An explanation of this order allows us to see the developments in Modernism, to which Gombrich refers, as much more than a change of taste, or the addition of a few breadcrumbs to mush. We can begin to take into account the affective expressiveness of pictorial spatial organisations them­selves. In comparison, Gombrich is merely engaging in a slightly more sophisticated variant of that psychoanalytic ‘tittering’ in front of Cezanne’s apples than that which so understandably irritated Bell.

Indeed, I hope that you will now be able to see that we are ready to leave the Kleinian aesthetics which, up until now, have served us so well. Adrian Stokes, you will remember, found elements belonging not only to the ‘depressive position’, but also to the prior ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position in both artistic creativity and aesthetic experience. For Stokes, the sense of ‘fusion’ was combined, though in differing proportions, with the sense of ‘object-otherness’. This led to criticism from more orthodox Kleinians, who felt that, by associating aesthetics and creativity with the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position, and its mechanisms, Stokes was characterising them as regressive. But Winnicott rejects the notion of a ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position, with its overtones of primary insanity, and disjuncture. Indeed, in the work of many of those involved in the British ‘object relations’ tradition—as Anton Ehrenzweig put it—‘the concept of the primary process as the archaic, wholly irrational function of the deep unconscious’ underwent a ‘drastic revision’.5'' Marion Milner once wrote that this revision ‘has been partly stimulated by the problems raised by the nature of art’,60 not least, of course, by much of the art of the modern movement.

We do not have time to go into all the implications of these revisions of psychoanalytic thinking on the nature of the primary process here. Suffice to say that Freud’s view of them as something menacing in later life, to be defeated by ‘science’ and the Reality Principle, or Klein’s view of them as an analog of madness have been increasingly eclipsed. To cite one specific example, Ehrenzweig drew attention to a distinction between ‘the narrow focus’ of ordinary attention, and the ‘diffused, wide stare’ which had its origins in the infantile gaze. This has considerable importance in our understanding of the difference between, say, perspective painting and abstract expressionism. Rycroft has done more work demolishing the view that the primary and secondary processes are mutually antagonistic, and that the primary processes are maladaptive. He has pointed out how the attitude of psychoanalysis towards these processes derives from a paradox:

‘Since psycho-analysis aims at being a scientific psychology, psycho-analytical observation and theorizing is involved in the paradoxical activity of using secondary process thinking to ob­serve, analyse, and conceptualise precisely that form of mental activity, the primary processes, which scientific thinking has always been at pains to exclude.’61 Rycroft, however, emphasises the importance of primary process thinking in many imaginative, creative, and aesthetic en­deavours. One might say, therefore, that the re-appropriation of these modes within the modernist tradition was not simply a regressive evasion of the world.

In her theoretical paper on art, Milner says:

. .the unconscious mind, by the very fact of its not clinging to the distinction between self and other, seer and seen, can do things that the conscious logical mind cannot do. By being more sensitive to the sameness rather than the differences between things, by being passionately concerned with finding “the familiar in the unfamiliar” (which, by the way, Wordsworth says is the whole of the poet’s business), it does just what Maritain says it does; it brings back blood to the spirit, passion to intuition.’62 But Milner is not suggesting that the primary processes belong in adult life to a separate category, of no use in understanding the real, as opposed to the imagined or imaginary world. In­deed, she says that ‘it was just this wide focus of attention’, as described by Ehrenzweig, which made the world ‘seem most intensely real and significant’ for her. Thus, we might say, those spatial organisations constructed by the early modernists are not merely enrichments of nostalgic fantasy life, but also potentially of our relationship to the world itself. (This seems to me the real secret of Cezanne.)

At one point, while she was trying to overcome her inability to paint, Milner found herself thinking about a statement of Juan Gris, who once defined painting as being ‘the expression of certain relationships between the painter and the outside world. ’ ‘I felt,’ writes Milner, ‘a need to change the word “ex­pression” of certain relationships into experiencing certain relationships; this was because of the fact that in those drawings which had been at all satisfying there had been this experiencing of a dialogue relationship between thought and the bit of the external world represented by the marks made on the paper. Thus the phrase “expression of’ suggested too much that the feeling to be expressed was there beforehand, rather than an experience developing as one made the drawing. And this re-wording of the definition pointed to a fact that psychoanalysis and the content of the drawings had forced me to face: the fact that the relationship of oneself to the external world is basically and originally a relationship of one person to another, even though it does eventually become differentiated into relations to living beings and relations to things, inanimate nature. In other words, in the beginning one’s mother is, literally, the whole world. Of course, the idea of the first relationship to the outside world being felt as a relationship to persons was one I had frequently met with in discussions of childhood and savage animism. But the possibility that the adult painter could be basically, even though un­consciously, concerned with an animistically conceived world, was something I had hardly dared let myself face.

Looked at in these terms the problem of the relation between the painter and his world then became basically a problem of one’s own need and the needs of the “other”, a problem of reciprocity between “you” and “me”; with “you” and “me” meaning originally mother and child. ’63 And now that I have exposed all the fragments of my statue—at least all of those which I have to hand—it only remains for me to attempt to fit them into place. I am suggesting that there is something significant in common between Milner’s difficulties with perspective and outline in her attempts to learn to draw; the shift in my taste from Ingres’ linearly cloistered figures to the paintings of Bonnard, Rothko and Natkin; the kind of space which begins to manifest itself in paintings with the eruption of the modern movement—say in Cezanne’s trees touching and not touching those distant mountains; and poor, dim-witted Mr. Bell’s exquisite raptures on his cold white peaks of art.

I am suggesting that what these phenomena have in common is a relatedness to a significant area of experience, that per­taining to a critical phase in the infant-mother relationship; I do not conceive of that relationship as ‘a matter of taste’, or instinctual orality, so much as a determinative moment in the self’s discovery of, and exploration of its relationship to, its world. The nature of the ‘primary processes’ in this early phase is no longer necessarily opaque to us: ‘object-relations’ theory, as it developed in the post-Kleinian tradition in Britain, permits us intellectual and affective understanding of this infant-mother relationship. It also causes a revaluing of the ‘primary processes’, and of the part which they play in the realisation of the full potentialities of the relationship of the self to others and its world. To speak crudely, in the medieval era, the ‘primary processes’ constituted the lived relation of self to the world (e.g. in religious cosmology). But, particularly with the 19th century emphasis upon ‘Science’, rationality, and inevitable progress, these areas of experience tended to be excluded from the dominant culture, or locked into mystified enclaves—such as religion.

Not even classical psychoanalysis succeeded in penetrating this terrain. In part, this was the result of the deficiencies of Freud’s self-analysis, his inability to reach back towards the affects pertaining to this determinative phase in the infant- mother relationship, and his consequent misconstruing of the nature of the primary processes. But the world-view of that culture within which Freud was enmeshed reinforced his prejudices and defences, his ambiguous belief in the value of ‘science’ over and above that of the imaginative faculties. However, 1914-1918 saw the final shattering of that world­view. Those areas of experience which had been denigrated, distorted, eclipsed or excluded flooded back—sometimes in their most archaic and mystifying forms. For example, in the later 19th century Liberal Protestantism in Germany, from Ritschl to Harnack, had effectively purged Christianity of its religious content, through a theology of immanence in which Jesus was nought but a particularly well-behaved bourgeois. The First World War shattered this ‘progressive’, middle-class faith, and gave birth to a ‘mystical’ revival, exemplified in Otto’s The Idea of the Holy of 1917, and a ‘Crisis Theology’ (soon to be known as ‘Neo-Orthodoxy’) which re-asserted the transcendence, and unutterable otherness of God. At this time, too, a species of cosmic idealism flooded back into physics as the Newtonian conception of the universe seemed to collapse.

In art, as we have seen, the validity of the focused system of perspective was shattered. But the Modernist enterprise does not seem to me to have been just an escape, or a retreat into idealism and ‘subjectivity’ (although, of course, there were elements within it that could be so characterised). It was almost as if the painter had to go back to experiences at the breast (and before) in order to find again, in a new way, his relationship to others and the world. This, I think, was what happened in the best elements of Modernism—and it was what Bell responded to, though he structured his response in terms of ‘aesthetic emotion’ and ‘significant form’.

Perhaps I can here elaborate an analogy of a kind which I would suspect if it was put forward by anyone except myself! Michael Balint describes a certain type of pathology as a manifestation of what he calls ‘basic fault’. In these instances the patient’s whole mode of being in the world, of relating to it, and to others is faulty and false; he maintains this can only be overcome if the patient is allowed to regress to a state of dependence on the analyst, in which he can experience a ‘new beginning’. (This corresponds to a distinction Winnicott makes between ‘true’ and ‘false’ self.) In a certain sense, 1914-1918 exposed the ‘basic fault’ of European culture: the kenosis of modernism (at least in certain of its aspects) may be compared with the individual patient’s necessary regression towards a position from which a ‘new beginning’ (in this instance, presumably, a new realism) was possible. Although he does not draw this comparison, Balint himself implies something similar in his 1952 paper, ‘Notes on the Dissolution of Object- Representation in Modern Art’. Balint refers to the disap­pearance of ‘the sovereign, sharply defined and delineated object’ from both physics and art; but he ventures the view:

‘The present narcissistic disappointment and frightened withdrawal, degrading the dignity of the object into that of a mere stimulus and laying the main emphasis on the sincere and faithful representation of the artist’s subjective internal mental processes, will very probably give way gradually to a concern for creating whole and hearty objects. (This is meant in a purely descriptive sense and no value judgement is either implied or intended with it.)64 Balint goes on to ‘the unavoidable integration of the discoveries of “modern art” with the demand of “mature love” for the object.’65 But this is already to look forward to the subject of our final seminar, that of the ‘promise’ inherent within certain of the most emptied-out examples of full abstraction.

MODERN ART: Letter To Fuller

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

SEEING BERGER: LETTER TO FULLER

Mike Dibb, the director of John Berger’s film, ‘Ways of Seeing’ takes issue with Peter Fuller on his attack in NEW SOCIETY on Berger.

Mike Dibb directing Peter Fuller and David Hockney

Dear Peter,

Having been out of the country for several weeks, it was strange and sad to come back and read your assault (New Society, 29 January) on Ways of Seeing and John Berger’s bitterly ironic riposte. As the producer and director of Ways of Seeing among other films with Berger, as well as several films in collaboration with you, I want to tell you why I dissociate myself from your argument.

Clearly the bitter breakdown of your once close rela­tionship with Berger has further distorted your reading of Ways of Seeing. If you feel that we were disingenuous in our references to Clark and Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, it is as nothing compared with the disingenuous­ness with which you treat the detailed text of both the televi­sion series and subsequent book.

To suggest, as you do, that Ways of Seeing, with its diffe­rent and trenchant critiques of, among other things, the materialist obsessions of European culture, of the objecti­fication of women, of the values of advertising, can now be seen as a Trojan horse of Thatcherism, is ludicrous. We never said that ‘advertising was the modern version of art.’

What we did try to suggest was that many of the pictorial codes of European painting now find a regular if more de­graded place within advertising, with colour photography even more than oil painting providing a means for rendering the physical world ever more tactile and desirable.

We admitted that the essays touched only on certain aspects of each subject, that our principal aim was to start a process of questioning, that the survey of European oil paint­ing was very brief and therefore very crude. We emphasised that there were important distinctions to be made between the experience of seeing the original painting and its repro­duction, and between great works and the average ones, and so on and so on - all of which you slide over in your quest to get Berger as once you had used Berger to get Clark.

John Berger and Tilda Swinton

Reading your article made me go back to your first review of the series back in 1972, written for the radical weekly, Seven Days. It was also the first time we met. EJnder the heading ‘Berger’s anti-Clark lecture’ you celebrated the series at the expense of the ‘rubbish’ epitomised by Civiliza­tion, concluding with praise for the programme on women ‘which crashes through as many cultural myths in half an hour as Clark managed to fabricate and reinforce in the whole of his interminable series’.

Maybe today you want to vilify Berger as once you vilified Clark. But don’t you think it’s time you grew out of this need to have heroes and villains, to mix love and hate?

I noted R.B. Kitaj’s warning letter to you in Modern Painters: ‘I think the best art writing is about what the writer truly loves ... Personal hatreds will leave a stain, not the distinctive mark I hope you will leave ... be partisan of course, but there is no useful place for malevolence in art where there are precious few eternal truths.’ What I have always liked in the work we have done together is the fact that it has drawn only on your positive insights and analysis. We have never found space for abuse.

So in retrospect I rather regret that Ways of Seeing made any direct reference to Clark at all. There were only two references, but for those brief moments it personalised the argument leading to the possibility of the kind of crude oversimplifications of which I think you were guilty in 1972 and still are today (though in reverse).

Ways of Seeing was not conceived and mounted as a pole­mical riposte to Kenneth Clark. But because it appeared in the backwash of Civilization it was, I think, experienced and enjoyed as its antidote. As the director of the series, my main interest was in conceiving a form in which all the assumptions and conventions surrounding films about painting could be taken apart and re-examined. The first film was an attempt to give the dense text of Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a playful and dramatic form. The theme of the last film on advertising emerged only during the making of the series.

The thinking behind the two essays on women and the European oil painting had existed in other forms well before Civilization was broadcast. Indeed your attack stimulated me to dig out the very first drafts of the scripts (in so many ways different from the finished films). Interestingly, there were no references to Clark whatsoever or to Mr and Mrs Andrews. I might even have been partly responsible for encouraging John to address this painting in the programme; certainly I will plead guilty (though I feel no guilt) to pinning the ‘Trespassers Keep Out’ sign on the tree behind them. (One viewer even wrote in that he had never noticed the sign before!)

And when you say that predictably Ways of Seeing has not given rise to any alternative art appreciation, I would point immediately to, among much else, important new work sub­sequently done on the representation of women, and on the analysis and decoding of advertisements.

Ways of Seeing, despite its sometimes overassertive simpli­fications, unlocked a whole spray of ideas to be argued over and refined by others. And frankly I cannot believe that art teachers and their students could seriously be undermined by it. It is not a sacrosanct book, just one to be used, together with much else.

And here I would like to tell you a little story. During my recent trip to Mexico I spent a short time in Tijuana, the fast growing border city just a few miles from the USA. It’s an amazing place, a surrealist and bizarre cornucopia where weekly waves of American tourists descend on and devour the kitsch end of Mexican popular culture. While I was there I went to an exciting exhibition. There was one young painter whose work I particularly liked. His subject matter was, among other things, the relationship between Mexico and the United States and he used every means at his disposal to express it: sensuous colours, collage, erotic shapes, an old gramophone, photographs, references to popular art, feath­ers transformed into fighter planes, and so on and on. It was full of wit and intelligence, political awareness and huge love of his medium - even when talking to me in a bar he doodled continuously.

John Berger

I asked him about influences and he replied immediately, Ways of Seeing. It was a moment to reflect on when that same series is being burdened with spawning the reactionary post­ures of Gilbert and George. But it becomes clear to me that by blaming Berger for Gilbert and George, you can conve­niently, in one hurtful and surprising paradox, appear to kill two birds with one stone. But I’m afraid I’m not convinced. Writing in a spirit of revenge may feel sweet to you, but it sours your argument and saddens me.

You see, like you, I value the films on which we have collaborated, but, what may seem odd to you, find no contra­dictions between our most recent film Naturally Creative and Ways of Seeing. Each used a different means, for a different end, at a different historical moment.

And just for a moment consider the range of John Berger’s own writing about art. His essay, ‘The white bird’, could have been a text for Naturally Creative. And a few years after Ways of Seeing he wrote one of his best and most moving essays connecting the act of drawing with the death of his father. It inspired me to embark on what became the two hour film, Seeing through Drawing. In that film (minus Ber­ger), I tried to demystify and open up the significance of drawing, but using techniques completely different from Ways of Seeing. The two projects were for me com­plementary, the one polemical, the other reflective and dis­cursive.

In filming with you and in films with others, I always try to connect areas of thought often kept separate by the institu­tionalised divisions of academic discourse, taking art away from the specialised preserve of the art historian, and ideas out of the confines of the university seminar, seeing where they touch psychoanalysis, politics, history, science and peo­ple’s everyday experience of living and working.

The richness of the films is a product of the richness of the synthesis which film allows. This in turn depends on our ability to use images mechanically reproduced, detached from their original context. As we said in Ways of Seeing: ‘The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what pur­pose. This touches upon questions of copyright for reproduc­tion, the ownership of art presses and publishers, the total policy of public art galleries and museums.’ Let me quote once more: ‘We are not saying original works of art are now useless. Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is. Even a reproduction hung on a wall is not comparable in this respect for in the original the silence and stillness permeates the actual material, the pain, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate ges­tures. This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one’s act of looking at it. In this special sense all paintings are contemporary. Hence the immediacy of their testimony. Their historical moment is literally there before our eyes.’

Peter Fuller

I don’t believe Ways of Seeing argues against looking at original works of art, any more than the vivid reproductions in Modern Painters pre-empt the need or desire of your readers to see the exhibitions on which many of the articles are based. But don't let’s have any illusions, either about the extent to which reproduction, and photography, in general, has changed our relationship to painting, or indeed about how the form, style and price of your new quarterly journal of the fine arts will mean it reaches one kind of audience and not another.

But enough is enough. Please heed Kitaj’s advice.

(New Society 22.4.88)

MODERN ART: Spencer's Lost Paradise

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

Spencer's Lost Paradise

by Peter Fuller, 1980

Snt. Francis and The Birds, Stanley Spencer, 1935

As a child, I was sometimes taken to see the chapel Stanley Spencer covered with murals of the first world war at Burghclere in Berkshire. Spencer was admired within the Nonconformist milieu, within which I was brought up, as the last considerable religious artist. He impressed me deeply: I was fascinated by The resurrection of the soldiers on the east wall; there was something compellingly mundane about the way they rose from the ground amid mud and horses and handed in their white crosses to Christ.

Visiting his exhibition at the Royal Academy, I realized how deeply he is etched on my memory. This was not just the result of childhood impressionability. Although Spencer produced some atrocious works, this exhibition confirms that he was, at his best, a good, even a great, painter. But art teachers rarely recommend their students to look at him; art historians do not know what to say about him; and museum curators have no idea where to hang him. For a long time, his magnificent The Resurrection, Cookham was almost invisible in the darkness of a Tate stairway.

How are we to explain the Spencer phenomenon? He was born in Cookham in 1891, the seventh of eight children of the village music teacher. The family was intense, closed, talented and religiously fraught—father was church, mother chapel. Stanley and his younger brother, Gilbert (later also a painter), were educated by two elder sisters in a schoolroom behind the house. In 1907, Stanley attended art school in Maidenhead, where he drew from classical casts. In 1908, he went to the Slade where he was taught by Henry Tonks, who believed that the only basis of artistic expression was anatomical drawing.

His fellow-students nicknamed him ‘Cookham’ because he travelled up and down from the Berkshire village every day by train. Spencer’s early religious paintings, like The Nativity of 1912, and Zacharias and Elizabeth of 1914, are saturated with elements drawn from Cookham. They indicate how carefully he had been looking at early Renaissance painters, and they are compositionally impressive. But they also have the ring of expressive authenticity about them.

Speaking of these pictures, Spencer himself said in the 1940s that the religion which informed them was ‘utterly believed in.’ ‘Somehow religion was something to do with me, and I was to do with religion. It came into my vision quite naturally like the sky and rain.’ Religion was bound up with his continuing experience of his birthplacce, too. He once wrote: ‘I could see the richness that underlines the bible in Cookham in the hedges, in the yew trees.’

When Piero Della Francesca painted his Nativity (now in the National Gallery), he did so against the background of the Italian countryside. Through his compositional skills, he brought together his personal imagination, and his experience of the world as seen, and unified the two within a shared religious mythology. Few twentieth century painters have ever felt themselves to be in such a fortunate position. Until 1914, however, Spencer was.

The idyll was soon shattered. In old age, Spencer looked back on his early paintings. ‘Those pictures,’ he said, ‘have something that I have lost. When I left the Slade (in 1912), and went back to Cookham, I entered a kind of earthly paradise. Everything seemed fresh and to belong to the morning. My

Stanley Spencer, The Nativity, 1912, London University College ideas were beginning to unfold in fine order, when along comes the war and smashes everything.’ (Spencer enlisted with the Royal Army Medical Corps and served with field ambulances in Macedonia.) ‘When I came home, the divine sequence had gone. I just opened a shutter in my side and out rushed my pictures anyhow. Nothing was ever the same again.’

The first world war split Spencer’s imaginative life. None­theless, at first, this experience served only to enrich his work. Demobilized, he was commissioned to produce an official war painting. Travoys, of 1919, shows a dressing station during a battle in Macedonia. It is among the outstanding British paintings of our century.

Spencer saw the figures on stretchers ‘with the same veneration and awe as so many crucified Christs.’ Thus he found ‘a sense of peace in the middle of confusion,’ but one which is neither sentimental nor idealizing. The contrast between the picture’s calculated compositional serenity, and the searing tragedy it depicts evokes the sentiments of some of the finest Renaissance crucifixions.

Spencer produced other major works in the 1920s. But his greatest achievement of this, or any period was the Burghclere memorial chapel, which was commissioned to commemorate a dead officer and which he executed between 1927 and 1932. John Rothestein did not exaggerate when he contrasted it favourably with Matisse’s more famous chapel at Vence.

Nonetheless, there is a sudden falling off of Spencer’s creative powers after the completion of the chapel. In the beginning, the ‘earthly paradise’ of Cookham had, like all utopias, been elaborated out of transfigured elements of infantile, emotional experience, represented through religious pictorial conventions. Spencer tried to comprehend even the ‘negative utopia’ of war in these terms.

Significantly, he never engaged in ‘horrors of war’ painting. Burghclere shows ordinary soldiers doing everything but fighting, and rising from the dead rather than dying. The attempt to see war in terms of his ‘earthly paradise’ gave rise to his finest pictures. But the two would not truly fit, and he never successfully revived the idyll. Religion could no longer authentically mediate between his inner and outer worlds.

In 1932, after more than ten years’ absence, he moved back to Cookham. He painted many landscapes of the village, but there is about these works a deadening, sharp-focused literalism: Cookham is now clearly seen, but not felt. How different this glazed vision seems from when he looked lovingly on the same landscape for the elements of his early religious paintings. But Spencer was also seeking a mythology to fill the vacuum of his collapsed religious world-view. He thought he had found it in bodily relations between human beings.

You find hints of this in his continuing obsession with the resurrection, which began much earlier. Spencer never saw this as the coming of the cataclysmic spiritual Kingdom of God on earth, but rather as the collapse of the spiritual into the mundane. There is something resolutely common-or-garden about all those well-dressed village folk, popping out of their graves.

In the 1930s his view of religion became increasingly sexual. ‘The erotic side I am so drawn to really belongs to the very essence of religion,’ he once wrote. In 1935, he painted Love among the nations, in which utopia now becomes a kind of

Stanley Spencer, Travoys arrivingata dressing station, 1919, Imperial War Museum, London mutual masturbatory grappling between persons of all colours, races and creeds. ‘During the war,’ he commented concerning this picture, ‘when I contemplated the horror of my life, and the lives of those with me, I felt the only way to end the ghastly experience would be if everyone suddenly decided to indulge in every degree and form of sexual, carnal love, bestiality, anything you like to call it. These are the joyful inheritances of mankind.’

Spencer’s attempt to translate religious experience into human terms sounds promising. In fact, it proved a pictorial disaster. Love among the nations is hideous. Sunflower and dog worship (in which sexual activity is extended to contact with the animal and vegetable worlds) and Adoration of the old men (in which a group of infatuated male geriatrics wait to be felt- up by village girls) are even more grotesque. Few of his scenes celebratory of sexual encounters and conjugal life are much better. So what went wrong?

The answer is partly pictorial. Many pioneers of the modern movement discovered that profane illumination could be expressed through a certain kind of aesthetic experience, dependent upon the emotional symbolism of form itself—the handling of paint substances, colours and shapes in ways evocative of significant affective states. You find this in Cezanne, post-impressionism, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and some recent abstract painting. You can see something similar in pre-Renaissance art, and, significantly, in very early Spencer, too. His picture, John Donne arriving in heaven, was not out of place in Fry’s 1912 post-impressionist show.

But Spencer despised such techniques, when they were not linked to specifically religious imagery. Pictorially, he came to insist exclusively on anatomical expression. He could not even take impressionism, complaining of its ‘utter lack of spiritual grace.’

Spencer’s failure was as much to do with his personal as his aesthetic limitations. The reduction of religious experience into secular terms cannot be done through instinctual, sexual love alone. The life of adult human beings embraces a gamut of emotions, of which the explicitly sexual forms just a part. Spencer’s vision of transformed human relations becomes a travesty. In the midst of Love among the nations he appears, clothed, while two naked Negresses fondle him. Thus was the ‘earthly paradise’ reduced.

He himself was incapable of full relationships. He married Hilda Carline when he was thirty-three. In 1935, he began a series of perverse nudes of Patricia Preece, sometimes in­cluding a self-portrait. These are redolent with oppressive sexual tension, but without trace of feeling in touch, composi­tion or gesture. Hilda was divorced from Spencer in 1937, and he promptly married Preece. He invited his first wife to attend his honeymoon with his second, whereupon the latter (who was already established in an enduring lesbian relationship) accused him of adultery with the former, and declined to live with him.

He made repeated overtures to Hilda to remarry him; but she refused. He wrote her endless letters—some over 100 pages long—which were not inhibited by her death in 1950. Thus though Spencer celebrated good human relations as the realized essence of religion, he knew little about them. Even his affirmation of the sexual was born of frustration rather than fulfilment—and, in the paintings, this shows.

Perhaps not surprisingly, he often tried to revive his religious ‘world-view.’ Sometimes, in The Christ in the wildnerness series of 1939, or Southampton’s Resurrection, of 1947, he almost succeeded. But the repulsive, comic-book character of such works as The crucifixion of 1958 indicate only the desperateness with which he sought to invest the old mythology with meaning and feeling again.

The psychiatrist, Anthony Storr, has recently suggested that there is a special link between utopianism and sexual perversion. Both involve transfiguring the world according to one’s fantasies and wishes. When Spencer’s ‘earthly paradise’ collapsed, he failed to find a secular equivalent for it. Had he been a socialist, or even someone more sympathetic to modernist art, would he have fared any better? We cannot say. As it was, he lapsed into a chaos of perverse fantasy.

1980

MODERN ART: Edward Hopper: The Loneliness Thing

MODERN ART intertwines a life-long battle between four mavericks of the art world, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty, and the preciousness of life. Based on the writings of Peter Fuller, adapted by his son.

Before the shut down MODERN ART had just won Best Screenplay (3rd Place) at Hollywood Reel Film Festival and had been accepted as Official Selection in competition or Finalist placement in Beverly Hills Film Festival, Manhattan Film Festival, Big Apple Screenplay Competition, Firenze FilmCorti International Festival (Italy), Film Arte Festival (Madrid), Drama Inc Screenplay Competition, and Twister Alley Film Festival. All of which have been postponed by at least a couple months to protect public health and safety. But the good news is they will be back on soon and in the meantime you can read selected essays by Peter Fuller here on my blog during down time! In consideration of social isolation it may be a good time to revisit Peter Fuller’s essay Edward Hopper: The Loneliness Thing.

EDWARD HOPPER: THE LONELINESS THINGs

By Peter Fuller, 1981

Edward Hopper, a large man as taciturn as the figures in many of his paintings, used to grumble that those who talked about his paintings overdid ‘the loneliness thing.’ Nonethe­less, his best pictures seem to depict the experience of isolation: Hopper’s people are lost within themselves even when they are in the presence of others.

Hopper did not like being called ‘an American scene painter’ either: and there it is easier to go along with him. His famous pictures of a man standing by a row of petrol pumps outside a rural filling station, or of shop facades in Seventh Avenue, Manhattan, on a Sunday morning are as concerned with a certain ‘structure of feeling’ as with topography. But that ‘structure of feeling’ is ‘the loneliness thing.’

You feel it in Hopper’s masterpieces, like Nighthawks, with its four jaded figures in the illuminated interior of an all-night cafe, and in many of the pictures of office workers, travellers, hotel guests and theatre people. You can hardly avoid it, either, in the compelling studies of anonymous women glimpsed dressing, or undressing, in the cold but intimate spaces of brilliantly lit bedrooms. It even pervades the pictures of isolated buildings by railroads or the later images of empty rooms in which no men or women appear at all. These too seem somehow dominated by the absence of the figure.

It would, in fact, be hard to say anything convincing about Hopper without stressing ‘the loneliness thing.’ His paintings are so conspicuously about the vacuity, sadness, futility, emptiness and, yes, experience of alienation on the fringes of ‘the American dream.’ But how does this relate to the qualities of his work and to his stature as an artist?

According to many contemporary American critics, Hopper has been crippled by his preoccupations. For example, a standard text on American art, declares that ‘pictorially’ Hopper was as ‘limited, average, and undistinguished as the humiliated landscape, the dilapidated and gloomily picturesque architecture and the drab urban scenes’ that he made the ‘stock-in-trade’ of his subject matter.

Hopper is an embarrassment to American partisans of modernism and avantgardism. Their art history books and the lay-out of their modern art museums are designed to prove that all that is of value in recent art has been created by handing down the torch of stylistic innovation first ignited by Cezanne. They assume this was borne aloft in a triumphant, historicist progression through the early European modernist move­ments and on, into the achievements of American abstract expressionism and its successors. But it was just this develop­ment Hopper refused. He objected to the ‘papery qualities’ of Cezanne, and was not significantly affected by anything that happened later. And yet Hopper clearly could not be dismissed as some hill-billy regionalist or dumb ‘primitive’.

When Henry Geldzahler organized his massive 1970 exhibi­tion of American art since 1940 at the Metropolitan Museum, Hopper was the only outsider at the modernist garden party. But he was hardly a welcome guest. Not one of the copious critical essays in the catalogue so much as mentioned his name.

More recently, however, even the art institutions have begun to acknowledge that modernism is in crisis. What once looked like Hopper’s weaknesses are now acclaimed as his strengths. He is praised as the painter of ‘modern life,’ par excellence. Alternatively, he is interpreted as a great, neutral ‘realist’ who refused style altogether, and simply transcribed, exactly, the appearance of contemporary reality.

But these estimates of Hopper won’t stand up either. There are many bad paintings about ‘modern life.’ Hopper himself painted some of them: he is, in fact, a very uneven artist. Not more than fifteen of his pictures are wholly convincing, and there are works in this exhibition so second-rate that it is hard to believe they were made by the man who produced, say, Nighthawks. But those Hoppers which approach the condi­tion of masterpieces are certainly not the ones in which he most faithfully transcribes appearances. The working drawings included in this exhibition demonstrate how carefully his best paintings were constituted-, all sorts of disparate observed elements are used to construct a single picture. The artist’s role is anything but ‘neutral.’ The case of Edward Hopper appears more complex than either the modernists or their opponents allow.

Hopper was taught by Robert Henri, a turn-of-the-century American artist with a deep admiration for Velasquez, Hals, Goya, Daumier and the pre-impressionist pictures of Manet and Degas. Henri wanted an art saturated in ‘modern life’: but he tried to realize this through physiognomy—the expressions of his subjects. He was a versatile portraitist of men and women in every condition. Henri opposed aestheticism and revived the concerns of earlier nineteenth century American painters, like the great Thomas Eakins, who had tried to root their art in the scientific study of the body. Hopper thought Eakins greater than Manet. Under Henri, Hopper learned to draw the figure; the transformations of its expressions and poses were the first expressive language he mastered.

But in 1906 Hopper went to Paris and encountered impressionism. All he had learned led him to resist the dissolution of concrete forms into hazes of light. Nonetheless, in his painting he began to rely not just on the body (and the world) as objects of perception, but also upon elements drawn from the processes of perception themselves. In particular, transformations of luminosity and of depicted space joined

Edward Hopper, Automat, 1926, Des Moines Art Centre, Iowa those of the figure as part of the material upon which he drew to make his pictures.

After 1910, Hopper never crossed the Atlantic again. But it took him a long time to integrate what he had learned during his American apprenticeship with the discoveries of his visits to Paris. For a time, he stopped painting and found work as an illustrator. But he complained that he never felt satisfied drawing people ‘grimacing and posturing.’ He longed to ‘paint sunlight on the side of a house.’ Of course, he did not just wish to record it: Hopper was contemptuous of painting which tried to short-circuit imagination. ‘Great art,’ he once wrote, ‘is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.’

In the 1920s, when he was in his forties, Hopper finally found a way of working in which the expressive potentialities of the figure, perceived space, and light were combined together under the directing force of the imagination to create convincing pictures. Through these painterly means he could, when he wished, say something about those ‘structures of feeling’ characteristic of ‘modern life.’

Take Automat of 1926. A woman is seated at a circular table near the door of the automat. The chair in front of her is empty. Beneath the dome of her hat, her eyes are downcast. She has just taken a sip of coffee. Perhaps she is thinking about someone who is not there. Behind her, on the sill, is a bowl of fruit. The round lights of the interior, reflected in the window, run out into the night and are swallowed up by it: she is framed by a great pane of emptiness and silence. She is alone.

Why is this such an effective picture? In part, it is because of the handling of the figure itself. She is comprised of very simple forms: yet everything about her—eyes, lips, hands and legs—is expressive of those emotions Hopper wishes to communicate. But the play of lights and colours, particularly the contrast between the uncomfortable luminosity of the cafe and the undispersable darkness of the night outside, serve the same purpose. These elements, however, acquire their expressive strength within the compositional structure of the picture.

This is not, of course, a transcription of a given scene, or anything like it. The forceful geometry of the painting has been built up through Hopper’s self-conscious choices and simplifi­cations—for example, in the way he plays off the circular forms of the woman’s hat, coffee cup, table, fruit bowl and lights against the rectangular shapes of this corner of the room. Above all, Hopper has carefully framed the woman against that potentially engulfing plane of blackness. This is intended to tell us more about her emotional state than about his empirical observations.

The content of this painting is thus certainly ‘the loneliness thing.’ But it is not this, on its own, which makes it effective. James Joyce once said, ‘Sentimentality is unearned emotion.’ It is easy to imagine a sentimental picture on the theme Hopper depicts here. But the emotion in Automat has been earned by the way in which the artist brings it to cohere in all aspects of his expressive practice (including those to do with figure, light and structure) and further unifies all these elements into a convincing compositional whole.

And this is why I think both the modernists (with their insistence that only new styles can be of value in painting) and their opponents (with their vague appeals to ‘modern life,’ or the need faithfully to record appearances) are both missing the point about Hopper’s best work. Indeed, Hopper reminds me strongly of Mark Rothko, who was perhaps the best of America’s ‘abstract expressionist’ painters. Stylistically, of course, they have nothing in common. Yet the area of experience which Rothko expressed, through his chosen pictorial conventions, was peculiarly close to Hopper’s.

Rothko, at first a figure painter, turned to wholly abstract works of glowing colour fields through which he chronicled his struggle against depression, alienation and despair. Eventually, a billowing black cloud of negative space began to appear ever more frequently in his work: visually, it looked not unlike the purplish, subsuming plane'm Automat. Finally, it engulfed not just his pictures, but Rothko himself.

Hopper’s work seems to follow a similar, though less dramatically extreme, development. As he grew older, Hopper seemed to become less and less comfortable with the presence of figures in his paintings. Sometimes, his later works seem cluttered, as if he was throwing in as many forms as he could to cover that nothingness glimpsed in Automat. In other works, the figures are so badly drawn and proportioned that one feels Hopper would have been happier leaving them out altogether. Indeed, the most successful of his later interiors are those of the walls of empty rooms. In these, the proximities to Rothko’s concerns are self-evident. It is as if Hopper no longer wished the figures of others, in the world, to impinge upon that expressive space which he was trying to construct in his pictures.

To some, this comparison between Hopper and Rothko may sound forced, or fanciful. But Hopper himself once said, ‘To me, form, colour and design are merely means to an end, the tools I work with, and they do not interest me greatly for their own sake. I am interested primarily in the vast field of experience and sensation.’ Similarly Rothko, protesting against those who called his works ‘abstracts,’ wrote, ‘It is not [my paintings’] intention either to create or to emphasize a formal colour-space arrangement. They depart from natural rep­resentation only to intensify the expression of the subject implied in the title—not to dilute or efface it.’

The painterly means Hopper and Rothko used may have been very different: but the areas of experience and sensation which they each so effectively expressed were, in fact, very similar.

1981

MODERN ART: Fine Art After Modernism

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.

FINE ART AFTER MODERNISM

by Peter Fuller, 1978

The London art community is very like a gymnasium. Every time you enter into discourse with your colleagues you first have to take a look around and see what posture everyone is adopting today. The collapse of the central, modernist consensus has led to exceptional enthusiasm among those who were once its High Priests for the volte-facing horse. For example, one critic, really quite recently, argued — and I quote — ‘the ongoing momentum of art itself’ is ‘the principal instigator of any decisive shift in awareness’. He dismissed all but a handful of ultra avant-gardists gathered around an obscure Paddington gallery as ‘obsolescent practitioners of our own time’. He assured us that the future would ‘overlook’ all but this minority he had identified.1 Thus he adopted the classical modernist position. Today, this same critic has spoken of his blinding experience on the road to Wigan; he is now urging upon us the joys and necessities of collaboration without compromise. I have never been of an athletic disposition : the sight of the vaulting-horse filled me with terror as a child, and it still does. Unfortunately, this means that those of you who have been following the over­heated polemics and debates which have been going on within the art community, and in the art press, may therefore find many of my arguments, some of my examples, and especially my overall position, familiar. I can only apologize for my rheumatic fidelity to a position which expresses the truth as I perceive it. I hope you will bear with me.

When I was asked to come to this conference to discuss the artist’s ‘individual’ and ‘social’ responsibilities under the rubric, ‘Art: Duties and Freedoms’, I sensed, perhaps wrongly, the subtending presence in the very terms of the debate of that common, but I believe erroneous, assumption that the artist’s individual freedoms and social responsibilities stand in some sort of irreconcilable and potentially paralysing opposition which is somehow destined to reproduce itself in one historical situation after another.

In fact, there are many historical situations in .which this opposition cannot take us very far. For example, an artist who works under the ‘Socialist Realist’ system in, say, the USSR can fulfill his social responsibilities only by an apparently individualist defiance of his ‘social duty’, at least as that is externally defined by the official artists’ organizations, the Party, and the State. Not every artist who defies the ‘Socialist Realist’ system is necessarily exercising social responsibility; but for those who attempt through their art to bear witness to the truth as they see it, individualistic defiance constitutes social responsibility. Take Ernst Neizvestny : in all of the USSR there was probably no artist with a comparable individualistic, narcissistic energy. But Neizvestny rejected his so-called ‘social duties’ and harnessed his narcissism for the creation of new and monumental sculptural forms which function not only as a great visual shout for the exploited, the suffering and the oppressed everywhere, but also imply within the way that they have been made that there is hope for a changed and a better future.2

Ernst Neizvestny

The situation for Fine Artists in Britain is very different, but here too the simple opposition of individual freedoms and social responsibilities does not work. The post-war Welfare State has invested the artist with no official ‘social duty’ which he can choose to transform into genuine social responsibility; in return for state patronage and support our artists are not required to depict cars coming off the production line at British Leyland, Party Conferences, or ‘glorious’ moments from Britain’s imperial past. Indeed, they are not required to do anything at all. The Fine Art tradition has thus become marginalized and peripheralized, and Fine Artists find they have been granted every freedom except the only one without which the others count as nothing : the freedom to act socially. It is only a mild exaggeration to say that now no one wants Fine Artists, except Fine Artists, and that neither they nor anyone else have the slightest idea what they should be doing, or for whom they should be doing it. Thus, far from there being an awkward tension between ‘social duty’ on the one hand and individual freedom on the other, it is possible to say that a major infringement of the freedom of the artist at the moment is his lack of a genuine social function. This, as I see it, is the paradox of the position of the Fine Artist after modernism. But how has this situation arisen?

Raymond Williams has pointed out how in the closing decades of the eighteenth and the opening decades of the nineteenth centuries the word ‘art’ changed its meaning.3 When written with a capital ‘A’ it came to stand not for just any human skill (as previously) but only for certain ‘imaginative’ or ‘creative’ skills; moreover, ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) came also to signify a special kind of truth, ‘imaginative truth’, and artist, a special kind of person, that is a genius or purveyor of this truth. Subtending this etymological change was the emergence of a historically new phenomenon for Britain, a professional Fine Art tradition.

Given the state of national economic and political development, the arrival of this tradition was exceptionally tardy: the causes of this belatedness (which inflected the course of the subsequent development of British art) are to be sought in that peculiar lacuna in the national visual tradition which extends from the beginning of the 16th century until the emergence of Hogarth in the 18th. The medieval crafts had been eroded by baronial wars and technological advance and had fallen into terminal decay in the later 15th century; they were effectively extinguished by the mid 1530s. Although, as Engels remarked, a new class of ‘upstart landlords . . . with habits and tendencies far more bourgeois than feudal’ was coming into being at this time, a prevalent iconoclastic puritanism, associated with the dissolution of the monasteries and the formation of a national church, was among those factors which inhibited the development of a secular painting peculiar to this new class. At the level of the visual, Britain thus lacked a ‘Renaissance’: no ‘humanistic’ world-view emerged within a flourishing tradition of ecclesiastical representation, to transcend and supersede it, as happened, for example, in the Italian city states. In Britain the prior medieval tradition was literally erased during the Reformation.

Subsequently, the courts required only portraiture: competent practitioners above the artisanal level tended to be imported. Henry VII patronized a Flemish artist, Mabuse;

Henry VIII, Holbein. Successive monarchs employed immigrant painters: Scrots, Eworth, Gheeraerts, Van Somer, Mytens, Van Dyck and Lely. These artists brought with them a heterogeneous assortment of European modes. Although some took on individual pupils and apprentices, in no sense did this amount to a national visual tradition. The principal exception accentuates the predicament: Nicholas Hilliard arguably emerged out of the subtending artisanal tradition to produce a peculiarly English world-view of Queen Elizabeth and her courtiers. But Hilliard’s pictorial conception was that of a miniaturist who looked back towards the represen­tational modes of medieval manuscript illumination. The retardate character of English painting can be gauged when one recalls that Hilliard — the most illustrious figure not only of Elizabethan painting but among all indigenous artists during the long visual lacuna — was born some seventy years after Titian. (Historical materialism has as yet no way of assessing how far this peculiar stunting of visual expression can be correlated with the precocious efflorescence of literature in the same period.)

The agrarian capitalists who consolidated their power in the 17th century created a demand for two limited but indigenous genres of painting, country-house conversation pieces, and sporting paintings — particularly of horses; but visual practice was suspended in a vacuum between aristocratic patronage and an open market. ‘Art’ and artists had yet to come into being. Horace Walpole believed this was ‘the period in which the arts were sunk to their lowest ebb in Britain’. Change came with Hogarth: he was conscious of the need to found a national visual tradition, and to oppose debased European imports. By making use of mass sale engravings, he forged a new economic (and aesthetic) base for image-making which opened a potential space (allowing for satire) between himself and the ruling class. This enabled him to refer to areas of experience — poverty, oppression, sexuality, work, criminality, cruelty and politicking — previously excluded from painting. Uniquely, he depicted the whole social range from the Royal family to the derelicts of gin lane. His real subject — rare enough in any branch of British cultural activity — was English society in its totality. But his project was only briefly possible. Although largely freed from agrarian class patronage, he opposed himself to the professionalization of painting, especially to the establish­ment of a national academy. He thus came into being between two traditions and was able to achieve something in terms of scope and audience which had never been before in English painting, and would never be again.

During the later eighteenth century, the outlines of the professional Fine Art tradition became increasingly dis­cernible. It was characterized by the establishment of an open market in pictures. (This had the effect of turning the artist effectively into a primitive capitalist rather than a skilled craftsman.) The old system based upon apprenticeship and direct patronage broke up and was eventually almost entirely displaced. All sorts of related developments accompanied this change: art schools began to appear; professional organiza­tions and institutions including a Royal Academy, were established; exhibitions open to the public, salons, journals dealing with modern art, professors of painting, and very soon museums too began to appear for the first time. None of these had existed previously. When we talk about the problems, duties, and freedoms of artists, even today, we are not talking about a transhistorical category, but about the achievements, difficulties, and potentialities — if any — of those who are working within a professional apparatus which came into being in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and which now appears to be threatened.

John Constable

The emergence of the professional Fine Art tradition was associated with, indeed was a direct product of, the transformation of the economic structure in Britain by the emergence of industrial capitalism. It would be simple if we could say that professional Fine Artists emerged and expressed the point of view of the industrial bourgeoisie; but you have only to look at the pictures themselves to realize that this cannot be the whole story. In his discourses Reynolds may have yearned for a new ‘history’ painting which we might interpret as the metaphorical vision of a class conscious that it was forging its own history; but what he produced in practice consisted largely of portraits of My Lords and Ladies embellished with flourishes of the aristocratic, European Grand Manner. Similarly, in the early nineteenth century John Constable expressed the desire to develop landscape painting as a branch of ‘Natural Philosophy’. He made impressive advances in the precise representation of the empirical world in the richness of its momentary changes and the processes of its natural becoming. But even he seems to have been held back and inhibited in his work; the economic necessity of continuing to produce ‘country house portraits’ also seems to have involved him in the internal retention of the point of view of the rural landlord. Despite the sketches there is a peculiar identity between his known political views and the nostalgic, noon­day stasis of many of his larger pictures, especially perhaps The Cornfield. Similarly, the main difference between the Royal Academy and the European salons lay precisely in the fact that it was a Royal Academy, whose finances were guaranteed by the monarch himself. Thus, although it is true to say that the new Fine Art tradition was a product of the industrial revolution, we cannot simply identify the practice of its painters with the vision of an emergent, industrial middle class.

The causes of this peculiar disjuncture lie deep in the history of the social formation in Britain: here I can do no more than indicate them schematically. Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn have pointed to the way in which capitalism was established throughout the countryside in Britain by the destruction of the peasantry, the imposition of enclosures and the development of intensive farming long before the industrial revolution.4 They have suggested that no major conflict arose between the prior agrarian class and the rising industrial bourgeoisie because these classes shared a mode of production in common: capitalism. Thus there was no real social, political, or cultural revolution associated with the coming into being of an industrial bourgeoisie. Although the latter effected the titanic achievement of an industrial revolution, socially, politically, and culturally — after surmounting the tensions which came to a head in the 1830s — they fused with the old formerly aristocratic, agrarian elements to form a new hegemonic ruling bloc with a highly idiosyncratic ideology. Thus that selfsame bourgeoisie which unleashed the transforming process of the industrial revolution, conserved the Crown, Black Rod, a House of Lords, innumerable other ‘ornamental drones’ and goodness knows what other clutter from feudal and aristocratic times: it developed no new world view peculiar to itself. Now it was precisely for the benefit of, and hence through the spectacles of, this highly eccentric ruling bloc that professional Fine Artists were required to represent the world. I believe that this why so much Victorian painting seems to us to combine heterogeneous elements, to possess, albeit unwittingly, an almost surrealist quality. I also believe that the famous flat or linear aspect of British art in part arises because the flattened forms characteristic of feudalism (e.g. in stained glass windows, altar pieces, and manuscript illumination) were never thoroughly challenged and overthrown by an indigenous bourgeois realism which emphasized the tangibility and three- dimensional materiality of things. The rise of the bourgeoisie in Britain culminated in Burne-Jones’s angels, and the flat ethereality of Pre-Raphaelitism, not in the concrete sensuousness of Courbet’s apples, rocks and flesh.

Burne-Jones

It is characteristic of ruling classes — even bourgeois ruling classes shot through with feudal and aristocratic residues and encumbrances — that they like to represent everything which is peculiar to themselves, their own historically specific values, as if they were universal and eternal. John Berger has demonstrated how the representational conventions of the professional Fine Art tradition, conventions of pose, chiaroscuro, perspective, anatomy, etc., came to be taught not as the conventions which they were, but as the way of depicting ‘The Truth’.5 The same was also true of the emergent ideology of art itself. Many artists, and the new practitioners of art history too, began to propagate the view that there was a continuum of ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) extending back in an unbroken chain to the Stone Age. Thus they identified the images produced by the Fine Art professionals of nineteenth-century capitalism as the apoth­eosis or consummation of an evolutionary tradition of ‘Art’ almost magically constituted in theory without reference to lived history, with its ruptures and divisions.

This sort of thinking, exemplified in the lay-out of museums and public art galleries, helped to create what can best be called the historicist funnel of ‘Art History’. Art historians accepted as legitimate objects of study, even if they sometimes labelled them as primitive, a very wide range of images from, say, a decorated Greek mirror to a Roman mosaic, or a Christian altar-piece. Such things had served disparate functions within disparate past cultures. All that they had in common was that they were images made by men and women. On the other hand, from existing bourgeois societies art historians accepted only the particular products of the professional Fine Art traditions. Everything else was excluded.

This kind of distortion of history should not blind us to the fact that, say, in most feudal societies there was nothing which even approximated to ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) and certainly no tradition of professional, trained Fine Artists who produced free-standing works for an open-market, nor any ideology which associated the creation of visual images with ‘specialness’, or the expression of individual, ‘imagina­tive truth’. Thus it was not ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) that formed an unbroken continuum stretching back into the earliest social formations but rather the production of images of one sort or another which took very different forms in different cultures; in Western, medieval, feudal societies such images were often realized through manuscript illumination, stained-glass windows, tapestries, wall paintings, and so on: never through free-standing oil paintings on canvas.

By and large, the professional Fine Art Tradition in Britain served the composite ruling class very well; artists went to art schools where they acquired the skilful use of certain pictorial conventions which they then put to work in representing the world to the ruling class from its point of view. These conventions were capable of fully expressing only the area of experience peculiar to that class. Some artists tried to extend them, to put them to uses — such as the depiction of working- class experience — for which they were not intended; such attempts in Britain, however, tended to be mechanical. Because the British lacked a progressive bourgeois vision they could produce a Ford Madox Brown but not a Daumier or a Millet. The peculiar ataraxy of the bourgeois aesthetic in nineteenth century England goes far beyond subject matter; after Constable the attempt to depict change to find visual equivalents for ‘moments of becoming’ in the natural and social worlds simply freezes. The Victorian world view, as expressed through Victorian paintings, is one of stasis. Even in the later nineteenth century no indigenous minority tendencies like the Impressionism of France, Cezanne’s dialectical vision, or the later manifestation of Cubism arose; all these aesthetics were characterized by a preoccupation with the depiction of change and becoming. Compare, say, a Rossetti painting with an Alma Tadema. These artists occupied polar opposites within the British Fine Art tradition and yet today we are more likely to be impressed by their similarities than by their minor differences, so narrow was the range of painting in this country in the last century. In the absence of a progressive bourgeois culture, artists fulfilled the ‘social duty’ demanded of them by the ruling class almost with servility and, despite the ideology of artistical ‘specialness’, without even that degree of imaginative distancing which led, on the continent, to the creation of Bohemia.6

Although the work of the professional Fine Artists thus dominated the visual tradition, as they re-constituted the world in images for the bourgeoisie, throughout the nineteenth century we can trace the gradual emergence of modes of reproducing and representing the world based on conventions distinct from those of the Fine Art tradition. Between 1795 and the turn of the century lithography, or chemical printing from stone, had been invented; within thirty years a colour process was in commercial use. By 1826 photography too had come into being.

Now it is sometimes suggested that it was simply the invention of these new techniques which led to the displacement of the Fine Art tradition. I cannot accept this. Professional Fine Artists, with their aesthetic conventions and their ideology of ‘Art’, remained the unquestioned, culturally central, hegemonizing component within the visual tradition until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The professional Fine Art tradition was not displaced until the competitive, entrepreneurial capitalism (whose interests it had come into being to serve) was itself superseded in the late nineteenth century and the earliest years of the twentieth century, by the emergence of the monopoly capitalist system. Among the myriad of global changes associated with this monumental upheaval of the base was the emergence of a new kind of visual tradition, peculiar to the new social and economic order. This constituted a far more profound transformation of the way that images were produced and displayed even than that which had been brought about by the rise of the professional Fine Art practitioners in the eighteenth century. The complexity, diversity, and sheer ubiquity of the visual tradition under monopoly capitalism, involving new mechanical, electrical, cinematic, and most recently holographic means of reproducing all manner of static visual images, entitles us to refer to it as the first ‘Mega- Visual’ tradition in history — a tradition which of course soon included moving as well as static images.

Now the question which really confronts us when we talk about the duties and freedoms of Fine Artists today is what has happened to the old professional Fine Art tradition in this radically changed situation. I have previously used the example of Henry Tate, of Tate Gallery fame, to illustrate this change. The example is a good one and so I hope those of you who have heard or read of it before will forgive me for citing it again.

Henry Tate was born in 1819 and apprenticed to a grocer at the age of thirteen; by the time he was twenty our budding capitalist had his own grocery business; aged thirty he had a chain of shops; aged forty he became partner in a firm of sugar refiners and soon sold off the shops to buy out his partner. In the early 1870s, at the depth of the slump, he patented the revolutionary Boivin and Loiseau sugar refining process rejected by his larger competitors. He then scrapped his original capital investment in the old method, gambled all on the new plant, and won. Soon after he patented the sugar cube. His profits rocketed. As befitted a self-made, entre­preneurial millionaire he frequented the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy where he bought great numbers of paintings by Hook, Millais, Orchardson, Riviere, Water­house and so on to decorate his Streatham home. He gave these to the nation as the kernel of the Tate Gallery, which opened in 1897; and two years later he died.7

Tate had made his very considerable fortune in bitter-sweet competition with other sugar refining families, the Macfies, Fairries, Walkers and Lyles, but within a matter of years of his death all these rival firms had been swallowed up into a new swollen amalgam: Tate and Lyle’s. The growth of such monopolies meant that the kind of individualist, capitalist trajectory which Tate had so successfully pursued in the nineteenth century was much rarer in the twentieth, and with the endangerment of that species of bourgeoisie began the withering, atrophy, and shunting out towards the margins of cultural life of the academic, professional Fine Art tradition which had so efficiently represented the world to the nineteenth century middle classes.

Of course, this is not to say that the new monopolists and their burgeoning corporate empires did not require artists to produce static visual images for them as every ruling class in every known culture had done in the past. On the contrary they had an insatiable, unprecedented greed for images. At first some of the most famous Fine Art professionals benefitted from this. For example, in 1886 Levers, the soap firm, spent a grand total of £50 on advertising; but the previous year their leading rivals, Pears, had taken on Thomas Barratt as a partner. Barratt passionately believed in the value of the new-fangled advertising methods and in 1886 he spent £2,200 in purchasing Millais’ Bubbles to promote his company’s product. To go back to Lever’s accounts we now see that in response, over the next twenty years, they spent a total of £2m, or £100,000 a year, on advertising.

This increase reflected a general trend in Britain and America. In their important study, Monopoly Capitalism, Baran and Sweezy report that, in America, in 1867 expenditure on advertising was about $55m; by 1890 this had reached $360m; and by 1929 it had shot up to $3,426m. The authors point out, ‘from being a relatively unimportant feature of the system [the sales effort] has advanced to the status of one of its decisive nerve centres. In its impact on the economy it is out-ranked only by militarism. In all other aspects of social existence its all pervasive influence is second to none.’8 This may be to exaggerate the relative importance of the sales effort; nonetheless there should be no need to emphasize its significance, or the important role which visual images play within it.

As early as 1889, M.H. Spielmann, writing in The Magazine of Art, was able to predict, ‘we may find that commerce of today will, pecuniarily speaking, fill . . . the empty seat of patronage which was once occupied by the Church’.9 Certainly, the development of monopoly capitalism led to the efflorescence of a new public art, but what Spielmann failed to foresee was that the old Fine Art professionals would get less and less of the new cake. The demands of the monopolists soon created an entirely new profession which established, much as the prior Fine Art profession had done in the late eighteenth century, its own professional organizations, institutes, training courses, journals, codes of practice, and ideology, which notably excluded both concepts of artistic ‘specialness’ and imaginative truth. Ir fact, it might be said that just as monkish manuscript illumination constituted the dominant form of the visual tradition in certain feudal societies, free-standing oil painting produced by Fine Art professionals constituted the dominant form in certain entrepreneurial capitalist societies; but under monopoly capitalism, wherever it established itself, the dominant form of the static visual tradition was advertising.

This is of very great importance. For example, there is a tendency among the more cavalier type of Marxist critics to endeavour by a deft sleight of hand to equate the crisis in the arts, i.e. the indubitable decadence of the professional Fine Art tradition, with the alleged crisis of monopoly capitalism itself. But if we attend to the visual tradition as a whole, and not just to the Fine Art tradition, however much it goes against the grain we are compelled to concede that far from being in a moribund condition monopoly capitalism must be diagnosed as being unnervingly alive. I have already mentioned holograms: it is no accident that their develop­ment and display has been sponsored by Guinness. Within a few years, perhaps sooner, we will have to endure the sight of forty foot bottles projected into the night sky over the Thames, and no doubt 100 foot three-dimensional images of British Leyland trucks will be roaming above the hills and valleys of Wales.10 You may not like this prospect: I personally view it with dismay. It does not however indicate the tottering visual bankruptcy of the existing order.

Perhaps more common is the argument that in some sense or other advertising does not really count; nowadays the old continuum theory is sometimes dressed up in smart, leftist fancy dress, significantly usually by those whose leftism is first and foremost an academic, art-historical method. We tend to hear a lot about the enduring ‘autonomy’ of art, and so on. But this position can be defended only through the kind of sophistry which accepts, say, the markings on a Boetian vase, or Lascaux cave paintings, decorated Greek mirrors, Cycladic dolls, Russian icons, or Italian altar-pieces as art, but which denies that billboards, colour supplements, or posters belong to this category while going on to assert that certain (but not all) piles of bricks and certain (but not all) grey monochromes do. I believe that it really only makes sense to talk about the visual tradition as a whole as constituting a relatively enduring and autonomous cultural component. There will always be images but under different social formations they will emerge in different forms and be put to different uses. There is nothing about the institutions or ideology of the professional Fine Art tradition which makes it more likely to endure and to continue to occupy the centre of the visual tradition than, say, the great medieval tradition of manuscript illumination.

Indeed if we look at the Fine Art tradition from the closing decades of the nineteenth century until the present day it is clear that not only has it become progressively less central culturally and socially but internally it has itself been ebbing away. In the late nineteenth century in Britain theologians developed a concept which can usefully be adapted to the Fine Art situation. They found themselves pondering a persistent problem in Christian dogma: Jesus was manifestly often wrong in his judgements and limited in his knowledge yet how could this be if he was really very god of very god, who was, of course, supposed to be omnipotent and omniscient. Charles Gore, a theologian of the Lux Mundi school, attempted to resolve this tricky problem by reviving the idea of kenosis, or divine self-emptying. He held that the knowledge possessed by ‘The Christ’ during his incarnate life was limited because in taking to himself human nature god had actually emptied himself of omniscience and omni­potence. Now it is just such a process of kenosis or self­emptying that characterizes the Fine Art tradition from the late 1880s onwards. Paintings and sculpture acquire an ever more drained out, vacuous character, as if artists were voluntarily relinquishing the skills and techniques which they had previously possessed. But those skills have not vanished altogether. They have been picked up by advertising artists.

W.P. Frith was one of several Victorian artists who complained that the new advertisers were pillaging and pirating his paintings for their own purposes: his picture, The New Frock, had been incorporated without his permission into an ad for Sunlight Soap. If we look at an image like his better known Derby Day we can see how easy it was for this displacement to occur. According to Frith himself, Derby Day was the culmination of fifteen months’ incessant labour. He employed a team to produce it, including 100 models, a photographer who took pictures on the race-course for him, and J. Herring, a specialist, who added the horses. Frith knew exactly whom he was aiming his picture at; when it was first shown at the Academy the crowds were so great that they had to put a special rail round it. Frith then issued a popular print which sold in tens of thousands. It is inconceivable that any professional Fine Artist today would invest so much time, labour, and skill in a single picture. Even if he did so, it is even less conceivable that a crowd of thousands would throng round at its first exhibition. However, the elaborate work on location, the use of numerous models, the hiring of specialist skills, and indeed the eventual mass audience itself are all typical of the way in which the modern advertising poster artist constitutes his images. Indeed, Frith’s image was so close to the conventions of the new tradition that quite recently it was simply taken by the Sunday Times’s advertising agency and blown up with a superimposed slogan to fill their bill-board slots.

Whatever judgement we may wish to reach on Frith’s project, we cannot deny that he was deploying definite skills which enabled him to relate effectively to an audience capable of responding without difficulty to what he was doing. The same is also true of the modern advertising artist. Like Frith’s, his skills too are identifiable and teachable. This is by no means so manifestly true of what the professional Fine Artist does today. A recent sociologist’s study reported that ‘half the tutors and approaching two-thirds of the students of certain art colleges agreed with the proposition that art cannot be taught.’ Understandably the authors then asked, ‘In what sense then are the tutors tutors, the students students, and the colleges colleges? What if any definitionally valid educational processes take place on Pre-Diploma courses?’ The authors reported that nearly all tutors ‘rejected former academic criteria and modalities in art’ — but none had any other conventions to put in their place.11 The kenosis within the professional Fine Art community has reached such an advanced stage that although the apparatus of a profession persists, no professionalism, or no aesthetic, survives to be taught; such a professionalism would be dependent on the social function which the Fine Artist does not have.

Why then has the professional Fine Art tradition not withered away altogether? Why has advertising not supplanted Fine Art in a more definitive sense? Even if we cannot attribute absolute transhistorical resilience to ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’), we can say that the Fine Art tradition has acquired a relative autonomy, through its institutional practitioners and intellectuals, which allows it to reproduce itself like the Livery Companies of the City of London, or the Christian Church, long after its social function has been minimalized and marginalized. Its survival has also been assisted by the disdain of the intelligentsia for the new profession of advertising. John Galbraith has pointed out that to ensure attention advertising material purveyed by bill­boards and television ‘must be raucous and dissonant’. Fie writes:  ‘it is also of the utmost importance that’

advertisements ‘convey an impression, however meretricious, of the importance of the goods being sold. The market for soap,’ he continues, ‘can only be managed if the attention of consumers is captured for what, otherwise, is a rather incidental artifact. Accordingly, the smell of soap, the texture of its suds, the whiteness of textiles treated thereby and the resulting esteem and prestige in the neighbourhood are held to be of the highest moment. Housewives are imagined to discuss such matters with an intensity otherwise reserved for unwanted pregnancy and nuclear war. Similarly with cigarettes, laxatives, pain-killers, beer, automobiles, denti­frices, packaged foods and all other significant consumer products.’ But, Galbraith goes on, ‘The educational and scientific estate and the larger intellectual community tend to view this effort with disdain... Thus the paradox. The economy for its success requires organized public bamboozle­ment. At the same time it nurtures a growing class which feels itself superior to such bamboozlement and deplores it as intellectually corrupt.’12

Although the intellectuals knew that they deplored advertising and indeed all the mass arts, they were much less certain about what images they wanted the residual professional Fine Artists to produce, though they knew that they wished them to continue to be ‘real’ artists who took as their content and subject matter not soap-suds but all that was left after the kenosis, i.e. art itself. This is spelled out in the critical writings of the American modernist-formalist critics. Clement Greenberg, for example, has written: ‘Let painting confine itself to the disposition pure and simple of colour and line and not intrigue us by associations with things we can experience more authentically elsewhere.’13 Geldzahler, a sub-Greenbergian hatchet man of late modernism, has explained that art today ‘is an artists’ art; a critical examination of painting by painters, not necessarily for painters, but for experienced viewers.’ This ‘artists’ art’ was, he said, limited to ‘simple shapes and their relationships’. He thoroughly approved of the fact that ‘there is no anecdote, no allusion, except to other art, nothing outside art itself that might make the viewer more comfortable or give him something to talk about.’ Very soon, of course, even the intellectuals preferred the texture of soap-suds, or whatever, and so there were very few viewers either. This did not worry Geldzahler unduly: ‘There is something unpleasant in the realization that the true audience for the new art is so small and so specialized,’ he wrote. ‘Whether this situation is ideal or necessary is a matter for speculation. It is and has been the situation for several decades and is not likely soon to change.’14

In Britain, the position of the residual professional Fine Art tradition was worse even than in America. There was almost no basis for the acceptance of modernism among the intellectuals with the exception of those few who were themselves involved in the art community. Furthermore, in contrast to the US, the domestic picture market in modernist work failed to boom. Indeed, after the last war an impartial observer might well have come to the conclusion that the Fine Art tradition was about to contract into a residual organ, rooted in the Royal Academy, but with perhaps a ‘populist’ penumbra, serving the needs of a shrinking squirearchy and the continuing demands of clergy, army, Masters of Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, chairmen of the board, sporting men, etc. for portraits of themselves, their fantasies about the past, and animals, boats, and trains.15 But in 1954 Sir Alfred Munnings, sometime President of the Royal Academy and campaigner against ‘Modern Art’, wrote to The Daily Telegraph describing a day out at the Tate with Sir Robert Boothby when they roared with laughter at new English works which, he wrote, ‘today rival the wildest and drollest of French and other foreign cubists, formalists, and expressionists of the past’. The ‘drolleries’ were to flourish, and culturally, at least, to eclipse the residual academic works.

For just at the moment when the professional Fine Art tradition in Britain seemed destined to go the way of manuscript illumination, politics stepped in to save it. Although, unlike the CIA,16 MI5 did not choose to promote modernism throughout the world as a cultural instrument in the Cold War, the post-war Welfare State became heavily involved in the patronage of it. Keynes advocated increased intervention in the economy to ameliorate the worse effects of capitalism. One of the first institutions of the Welfare State to be set up after the declaration of peace was the Arts Council. So far as visual arts policy was concerned, the Arts Council committed itself to the exhibition and subsidy of the professional Fine Arts tradition alone; it commissioned nothing and imposed no constraints on artists of any kind. According to the Council, professional Fine Artists were supposed to be ‘free’ in an absolute, unconditional sense. The early Arts Council reports make clear that this policy was intended to show the world that in the so-called ‘Free World’ artists produce works of great beauty and imaginative strength, whereas the Soviet ‘Socialist Realist’ system produces only hollow, rhetorical, academic art officiel. Keynes himself wrote of ‘individual and free, undisciplined, unregimented, uncontrolled’ artists ushering in a new Golden Age of the arts which, he said, would recall ‘the great ages of a communal civilized life’.17 Moreover the Arts Council itself was no more than the cherry on the top of the state patronage cake. This included increased subsidies to museums and above all the rapid expansion of the art education system.

The injection of money into the Fine Art tradition on what has come to be called the ‘hands-off’, or totally unconditional basis, has proved an unmitigated failure. Far from producing the new Golden Age, the splendid efflorescence envisaged in the Keynesian dream, it has ushered in an unparalleled decadence. Piles of bricks, folded blankets, soiled nappies, grey monochromes, and what have you, can hardly demonstrate to those nasty Russians, or to anyone else for that matter, the creative power with which ‘freedom’ invests our artists in the West.

What went wrong? The real comparison was never between the residual Fine Art professionals in the West and the ‘Socialist Realists’ in the USSR, but between their respective visual traditions as a whole. Thus advertising artists served the interests of the ruling organizations in the West just as ‘Socialist Realists’ served the Party and the State in the USSR. The majority of artists under monopoly capitalism were thus hardly more ‘free’ than under the Soviet system. As servants of the great commercial corporations they were required to produce visual lies about cigarettes, beer, cars and soap suds, whereas Socialist Realists were required to produce parallel lies about the condition of the peasantry and the proletariat in the Soviet Union. Monopoly Capitalism thus had its art officiel, too, which, if anything, was more pervasive, banalizing, and destructive of genuine imaginative creativity than its equivalent in the USSR.

Meanwhile, it soon became apparent that whatever freedoms subsidized professional Fine Artists in Britain had been given, they had been deprived of the greatest freedom of all: the freedom to act socially. What were they supposed to be doing? For whom were they supposed to do it? They just had to be artists, and neither the Arts Council, nor the Tate, nor anyone else was prepared to tell them what that meant. Some sought to escape merely by imitating what the Mega- Visual professionals were doing: hence Pop Art. But it became more and more apparent that the subsidized Fine Art professionals were becoming like Red Indians herded into a reservation. Their state hand-outs meant that they could not die a decent death, nor were they likely to drift off and take up some other activity in the world beyond the art world corral. And yet, by the very fact that they were artists, they were insulated from lived experience, from social life beyond the art world compound. As people on reservations are wont to do, many committed incest: i.e. they did nothing but produce paintings about paintings, and train painters to produce yet more paintings about paintings, leading to an endless tide of vast, boring, thoroughly abstract pictures, expansive in nothing except their repetitive vacuity. Others of course went insane, and, abandoning their ‘traditional’ crafts altogether, raced round the reservation tearing off their clothes, gathering leaves and twigs, sitting in baths of bull’s blood, getting drunk, walking about with rods on their heads, insisting that their excrement, or sanitary towels, were ‘Art’ — either with or without the capital ‘A’.

Recently it has become quite clear that something has to be done; but there is little agreement about what. False solutions abound: in 1978, a crude ‘Social Functionalism’ was paraded at several exhibitions, most notably the justifiably slated ‘Art for Whom?’ show at the Serpentine. Richard Cork, a recent convert to this tendency, ended a polemical article with the sentence, ‘Art for society’s sake ought to become the new rallying-cry and never be lost sight of again.’18 The kind of work he appeared to favour was either the most deadening, dull, derivative, work carried out in a quasi-‘Socialist Realist’ style or the sort of modernist, non-visual art practice which packages bad sociology and even more dreadful Lacanian structuralism and presents them as art because they would not stand up for one moment when presented in any other way. Now it may be that those who are peddling this solution at the moment are no worse than naive. Time will show. But one would be foolish to forget that it was under just such banners as ‘Art for society’s sake’ that the National Socialists made bonfires of ‘decadent’, that was very often truthful, art. When ‘society’ is posited as an unqualified, homogeneous mass in this way we are forced to admit that we have had altogether too much of ‘Art for society’s sake’. But, in the end, it is probably not necessary to take this ‘Social Functionalist’ charade too seriously. To revert to our earlier metaphor it is rather as if some Red Indians within the reservation rebelled by dressing up in factory workers’ overalls, without, of course, ever leaving the confines of the corral. This sort of protest tends to fade out through its own ineptitude. Unlike the ‘Social Functionalists’ I believe that it is absurd superficially to politicize overt content and subject matter and then to shout, ‘Look, we are acting socially!’ But, despite everything I have said, I believe the professional Fine Art tradition is worth preserving. Why? Simply because it is here and only here that even the potentiality exists for the imaginative, truthful, depiction of experience through visual images, in the richness of its actuality and possible becoming. This is not an idealist assertion: despite all that I have said about the ideological character of the concept of ‘Art’, I consider that certain material practices — namely drawing, painting, and sculpture — preserved within the Fine Art traditions cannot themselves be reduced to ideology — least of all to bourgeois ideology. It is not just that these practices have a long history antedating that of ‘Art’ and artists: the material way in which representations are imaginatively constituted through them cannot be reproduced through even the most sophisticated ‘Mega-Visual’ techniques in static imagery. (The hologram, for example, can only reproduce a mechanically reflected image.) For these reasons despite its roots in emergent bourgeois institutions, despite the historical specificity of its conventions, despite the narrowness and limitations of its past achievement in Britain, and its virtually unmitigated decadence in the present, despite all this, I believe that the professional Fine Art tradition should be defended. For this to happen, the art community must change position rather than posture. From a new position one can act effectively in a different way; a new posture is just for show. Concretely, this means the pursuit of changes in the existing system of state patronage, changes in art education, and changes in the museum system. For example, it could involve the development of machinery for implementing group or community commissioning of artists (with a right of rejection of the end product); the introduction of mural techniques courses into the Pre-Diploma syllabus; and an overhaul of the currently disastrous procedures through which the Tate makes its acquisitions in modern art. The Arts Council itself may have much to learn from those small-scale, local traditions of image-making which, far from the failure at the centre of the modernist compound, have persisted in relation to small, disparate, often localized, but very definite and tangible publics.

Although I regard measures of this kind as necessary, I see them as also being relatively independent of the question of aesthetics. The process of modernist kenosis means that the professional Fine Art practitioner has no aesthetic, by which I mean, in this context, no identifiable skills and no set of usable representational conventions in the present. There are those, including many ‘Social Functionalists’, who simply wish to revive the old 19th century bourgeois aesthetic and mechanically to apply it to contemporary social and working- class subjects. Self-evidently, this is a disastrous course. However, in more general terms, it may be said that what the professional Fine Artist lacks, whether or not he is reinstated with a genuine social function, is that initial resistance at the level of the materiality of his practice which Raymond Williams has described as the necessary constraint before any freedom of expression is possible, for writers; deprived of 19th century pictorial conventions, the Fine Artist appears to have no language. One way out of this impasse may be to begin to emphasise again the specificities and potentialities of those material practices, drawing, painting and sculpture, which are not reducible to the ideology of ‘Art’. Indeed, not all bourgeois achievement within these practices is necessarily so reducible: the classical tradition and science of ‘expression’, for example, owed much to the scrutiny of certain material elements of existence, and biological processes, which, though mediated by specific social and historical conditions, are not utterly transformed by them.

The preservation of the Fine Art tradition, and of these material practices, seems to me a political imperative. If we look to the possible historical future, I am not prepared to put it more strongly than that, to a future of genuine socialism, one can foresee that the genuinely free artist will be in a culturally central position again. In such a society, the truthful, imaginative, creative depiction of experience through visual images would take the place of both the drab ‘Socialist Realism’ we see in the USSR today, and the banal spectacle of corporate advertising. These artists will be free to act socially not in any travestied sense, but in the fullest sense, to act socially, that is, within a socialist society. What will their works be like? We do not know. We cannot even be certain that we know what the experiences they will be endeavouring to represent will be like. Nevertheless, in the present the visual artist must dare to take his standards from this possible future. He must, and I say must simply because in effect he has no choice if he is to produce anything worthwhile, try to produce, a ‘moment of becoming’, or a visual equivalent of that future which realizes a glimpse of it as an image now. The artist who does this, through whatever ‘style’ or composite of styles in which he works, will embody exactly that socially responsible individualism which I set out by hinting at.

It has sometimes been said that when I talk about ‘moments of becoming’ I am talking about a mystical or quasi-religious experience. I cannot accept this view. I am not advocating some vague utopianism. On the contrary, I would argue that we can learn about our future potentialities only by attending more closely to our physical and material being in the present. (If the concept of transcendence means anything to me it is transcendence through history, not above history.) Like the Italian Marxist, Sebastiano Timpanaro, I believe there are elements of biological experience which remain relatively constant despite changes at the historical and socio­economic levels.19 One such relatively constant component was effectively suppressed, or conspicuously ignored, for social reasons, by the Victorian Fine Art professional aesthetic: significantly, that was the experience of becoming itself. The new aesthetic which we can only hope to realize in momentary fashion, the new realism in effect, must contain an equivalent for that experience.

The physicist A.S. Eddington — who was, admittedly, an idealist ‘in the last instance’ — once contrasted the nature of the experience of colour with that of becoming. Eddington’s point was that the experience of colour is wholly subjective: what he calls ‘mind-spinning’, or mental sensation. Colour bears no resemblance to its underlying physical cause or its ‘scientific equivalent’ of electro-magnetic wave-length. Thus Eddington believed that when a subject experiences colour he does so at many removes from the world which provides the stimuli: ‘we may follow the influences of the physical world up to the door of the mind’, he writes, ‘then ring the door­bell and depart.’ But he goes on to say that the case of the experience of becoming is very different indeed. ‘We must regard’, he wrote, ‘the feeling of “becoming” as (in some respects at least) a true mental insight into the physical condition which determines it. If there is any experience in which this mystery of mental recognition can be interpreted as insight rather than image-building, it should be the experience of “becoming”; because in this case the elaborate nerve mechanism does not intervene.’ Thus Eddington concludes: ‘ “becoming” is a reality — or the nearest we can get to a description of reality. We are convinced that a dynamic character must be attributed to the external world. I do not see how the essence of “becoming” can be much different from what it appears to us to be.’20

I believe that imaginative image-building has to attempt to find a visual equivalent for becoming: indeed, the hope for a new ‘realism’ may depend upon this. Some of those artists who are attempting to use their freedom with social responsibility by taking their standards from the future may at least hope to make some progress by further exploration of this possibility.

MODERN ART: In Defence Of Art

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.

IN DEFENCE OF ART

by Peter Fuller, 1979

This paper is a revised, version of a contribution to a conference on ‘Art, Politics and Ideology’ held at Dartington Hall in November 1979. It is provocative and polemical in tone: in part this is the result of the circumstances under which it was delivered. The conference had been called by those who sought to reduce art to ideology. The art practitioner, Victor Burgin; the nappy-liner, Mary Kelly; and the structuralist-feminist art historian, Griselda Pollock were among those invited to give papers. This text was intended to oppose such reductionism from a left position. It asserts the dependence of art on 'relatively constant’ elements of human experience and potentiality.

In the museum at Baghdad there is a carved, white, marble head of a woman known as The Lady of Warka. The sculpture belongs to the predynastic period of Sumerian civilization: it was made some time between 3200 B.C. and 3000 B.C. when the great temple was constructed on the white-washed walls of the Anu Ziggurat at Uruk. The Lady of Warka belongs to an era before the Sumerians, indeed, as far as we know, before men and women anywhere had developed a written language.

Today, she is but a fragment. You can see that the nose has been broken. Perhaps this proud head once belonged to a body. The eyes were almost certainly encrusted with shells and lapis lazuli, and her brow adorned with jewels and ornaments in precious metals. But if — to use the sort of jargon I want to avoid — the ‘signifier’, or physical object through which the sculpture has been realized, has fragmented through time so, too, has the ‘signified’. We know something about Sumerian society, about the growth of large-scale, centralized agriculture among these peoples, and about their ‘enlightened’, authoritarian, theocratic political structures: but our knowledge is at best hazy, incomplete, and distorted. When we gaze into the hollow eyes of The Lady of Warka we are looking at an expression which has come down to us from the very moment of becoming of human civilization itself. What — to use another of those phrases — the ‘signifying practices’ of the artist who realized it in stone were, we cannot say. Is this a sculpture of a priestess, a goddess, a princess, or a courtesan? We do not know, and, probably, we never will.

The Lady of Warka, Sumerian sculpture, Museum of Baghdad

Despite this, The Lady of Warka is not opaque to us. Her great age may give her an authority she did not have in her own time, but she is neither merely a document, nor a relic. Even after the passage of millenia upon millenia, this sculpture has the capacity to move us directly. More than that, I find myself able to formulate the judgement that of all the Sumerian sculptures which have survived that I know, this one is among the best, if not the best. The Lady of Warka manifests an extreme restraint and economy in its handling of planes and yet, at the same time, the delicacy and softness of the modelling, especially around the cheeks, mouth and chin, is such that the work seems expressive of pride, power, and sorrowful pessimism.

Not all Sumerian sculpture was as good as this. The Lady of Warka belongs to a brief sculptural efflorescence which seems to have sprung up on the threshold of the founding of the great Sumerian dynasties. Of course, she did not emerge from nowhere. The style — including that planar restraint — is characteristic of that which can be seen in animal amulets of the period. But not only is The Lady of Warka superior to almost everything surviving from its own time: nothing comparable has survived from several centuries afterwards. The Lady of Warka is of such quality that we can still recognize it as good when set beside sculpture of any age.

But what am I doing when I look back through aeons of time into a marble face from a civilization than which none is more distant from our own and pronounce, ‘This is good.’ How is it possible that this remote work can move me and communicate actively to me? For bourgeois art historians this is hardly a problem. For example, Andre Parrot happily chirps that ‘despite mutilation’ ‘this mysterious, impene­trable face still remains the perfect synthesis of “eternal Woman”.’ He continues:

She is truly Eve, a Mesopotamian Eve, with lips closed but seeming to express a melancholy disenchantment, a certain disdain towards life — life which is never really fulfilled, since pain and sadness far exceed the satisfaction and joy experienced by man. Such is the message conveyed by the Woman of Warka, which ranks among the greatest sculptures of all time and whose unknown author is worthy of place beside Michelangelo.

Now those of us who, according to the deathless prose of the conference prospectus, are working within ‘a definite field — that of a radical left intervention’, know just how to treat such writing on art. Parrot speaks of ‘Eternal Woman’. He even says, ‘Across the millenia, woman has never changed.’ Nonsense!. There are only specific women in specific histori­cal circumstances, and what they are like is determined — in the last instance, of course — by the mode of production and the resultant social relations prevailing in the particular historical moment in which they live or lived. And as for ‘Man’ in general, that’s even worse — a piece of pure bourgeois ideology, sexist of course, and — unspeakable horror — humanist. And what’s all this about ‘pain and sadness’ inevitably exceeding ‘satisfaction and joy’? Sub­jective individualism! Doesn’t poor, bird-brained Parrot know that ‘pain and sadness’ are historically specific phenomena? When the mode of production is transformed and Communism realized, men and women will abolish ‘pain and sadness’ and live, presumably forever, in ‘satisfaction and joy’. Parrot is just projecting his petty bourgeois ideology on to an isolated fragment from an entirely different ‘signifying system’. After all, we know so little about the lost kingdoms of Sumer: men and women might never have experienced such things as ‘pain’ or ‘sadness’ there. They quite possibly lived for ever, too!

Fine. That’s the easy bit. Exit poor, bedraggled Parrot in a flap with his beak between his wings. But I look back into the face of The Lady of Warka and she moves me still. Do we, on the left, in our ‘definite field’ have a better explanation of the pleasure which I and others derive from this work, of the experience of it as ‘good’? Marx himself was at least aware that here was a problem. He wondered how, if the Greek arts were bound up — as they manifestly were — ‘with certain forms of social development’, they could still afford us artistic pleasure and even, as he saw it, ‘count as a norm and as an unattainable model’. (Marx primarily had literary works in mind: later, I will say more about the problems created by the direct transposition of literary models into discussions of visual aesthetics. Here, I merely wish to signal the difficulty.) But Marx’s explanation of the historical transcendence of works of art is hopelessly unconvincing. He argues that the charm of Greek art lies in the fact that it belongs to ‘the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding’, and that we find pleasure in it much as a man finds joy in the naivete of a child. Marx must have known that this just would not do: the argument survives only in an unpublished draft. Apart from the fact that Greek art is anything but manifestly naive, what Marx says is absurdly general. It does not allow for discrimination between the art of one ancient civilization and another, nor between works of the same civilization. Not all the art of the past seems to me equally good: it does not give me the same amount of pleasure. Am I to suppose that such differentiations are entirely explicable in terms of quantitative variations in the ‘naivety’ effect? The pleasure I derive from The Lady of Warka evidently cannot be wholly accounted for by some vague reference to the joy of what Mary Kelly might call the ‘Post-Partum’ period of human civilization.

There is a long legacy of attempts by Marxists to do better than Marx on this question without lapsing into Parrot-like ‘bourgeois universalism’. One argument insists that what makes a work historically transcendent is the vividness or ‘realism’ of its portrayal of the specific historical moment of its production. I hereby offer a hundred pound reward to anyone who can produce what I judge to be a credible account of The Lady of Warka in these terms! Reference to planar reductionism and the flat, fertile expanses of Sumerian agriculture are not likely to be accepted! What about this sculpture speaks of Sumerian society in 3000 B.C., or there­abouts, rather than any other historical moment, at any other time, in any other place?

There is, however, another line of reasoning which says that although Marx acknowledged that the production of art was historically ‘bound up with certain forms of social development’, he failed to see that so, too, was the consumption of art. Thus Marx did not see that modern admiration for Greek art owed less to some trans-historical essence in the works themselves than to aesthetic ideologies or philosophies prevailing in modern societies and their corresponding institutions.

I am prepared to go a long way with this argument: the high status enjoyed by, say, the Mona Lisa seems to me largely, though not quite entirely, institutionally or ideologi­cally determined. But that residue which I reserve in the phrase ‘not quite’ seems to me much bigger, and of far greater importance, in many other works of art, including The Lady of Warka, which is hardly over-celebrated by art ideologists. I object to the contemporary ideology explanation when it is put forward as a total account, in part because it assumes that the rest of us — i.e. those who do not subscribe to the theory — are all such dumb-bunnies. We may think we are moved by such and such a work, that it has a powerful effect upon us, but oh no! that’s just an illusion: that is simply the prevailing ideology, excreted by contemporary cultural institutions, creeping into us.

I believe that by learning to look, and to see, one can — admittedly within certain limits — penetrate the veil of ideology in which the art of the past is immersed. The Mona Lisa may be a good painting or not; but because one emperor, once, had no clothes does not mean that all emperors, or empresses, everywhere and at all times are necessarily parading themselves naked. Indeed, the point of this excellent little story has always seemed to me to be that courageous, empirical fidelity to experience can, under certain circumstances at least, cut through ideology. Experience is not wholly determined by ideology: it is very often at odds with it, causing constant ruptures and fissures within the ideological ice-floes. And it seems to me that our experience of works of art, of any era, need be no exception to this if we learn to attend to the evidences of our eyes.

Let me give you another example. I often work in the British Museum Reading Room and, when I do so, I enjoy going to have a look at the Parthenon marbles at lunch-time. Now, evidently, these marbles have been torn out of their original physical, social, religious, political and ideological contexts. They have been shattered and eroded, wrenched from a position high on a Greek temple and stuck inside a (relatively) modern museum, where, since the beginning of the last century, they have been subjected to all sorts of imperial, nationalistic and other kinds of institutional and ideological hyping and cultural chauvinism. It would be simply foolish to pretend that all this did not mediate the experience of the works. Such mechanisms should be brought to light, analysed, discussed, and exposed: nonetheless, it is equally important to stress that they are not everything. We have no right to assume that the work itself only exists as a dissolved substance within its variable mediations, that it is inextricable from them.

Indeed, if you get to know the Parthenon frieze, you will begin to discover that some of the sculptors who worked on it were much better than others; you will be able to see this for yourself by using your eyes. Some were just not very good at expressing their experience of, say, doth in stone. They depicted folds in robes or drapery through rigid slots, dug into the marble like someone furrowing the surface of a cheese with a tea-spoon. Others worked their materials in such a way that their representations seem to have lightness, movement, and translucence: the stone breathes and floats for them. All the Parthenon craftsmen originally worked under identical ideological, social, and cultural conditions; the conditions under which their work is displayed in the British Museum may be very different, but they are nonetheless equally uniform. These differentials, however, remain, unaltered by the passage of time, and still discernible to attentive study of the work today.

Such distinctions are neither ‘merely technical’, nor trivial. They touch upon the difference between a good work, and a bad one, between a run-of-the-mill product of a particular tradition — which can be explained in terms of ideology and sociology — and a masterpiece, which cannot. John Berger, easily the best post-war art critic writing in English, recently made a self-criticism of his useful little book, Ways of Seeing. He wrote that ‘the immense theoretical weakness’ of that work was that he did not make clear what relation exists between what he calls ‘the exception’, or genius, and ‘the normative tradition’. This is a question which increasingly preoccupies me. The differences in quality of various sections of the Parthenon frieze can be intuited through empirical experience, through using our eyes: they are impervious to other kinds of analysis. I believe that the discernment of such differences is very much part of what is valuable in the pursuit and experience of art: they touch upon the point at which, in Ernst Fischer’s phrase, art makes manifest its capacity to protest against ideology.

But if neither of the principal groupings of Marxist explanations about pleasure in the art of the past stand up, must we return to Parrot and his bourgeois universalism? There is another way: one which involves the recognition of quality and aesthetic experience from within a materialist Marxist tradition. The great philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, was among those who struggled for this view: although I cannot accept all his aesthetic, let alone his political, formula­tions I have much more respect for him than for those neighing philistines inside the ‘post-structuralist’ corral who are intent upon submerging art into ideology and Consigning aesthetics to oblivion. Marcuse’s last essay, The Aesthetic Dimension, has recently been published in English. In it, he wrote: ‘Marxist aesthetics has yet to ask: What are the qualities of art which transcend the specific social content and form and give art universality?’ That is a question which, through the face of The Lady of Warka, I wish to keep in the forefront of a socialist concern with art. Marcuse has no inhibitions about saying that aesthetics must explain why Greek tragedy and the medieval epic — again his examples are primarily literary — can still be experienced as great or authentic (and for me that is the key word) today, even though they pertain to ancient slave society and feudalism respectively. ‘However correctly one has analysed a poem, play or novel in terms of its social content,’ he writes, ‘the questions as to whether the particular work is good, beautiful and true are still unanswered.’

Perhaps I should make one thing clear: I am not advocating that the social and ideological analysis of art should be abandoned as a futile pursuit. Far from it, I believe that an adequate map of the terrain, and also its economic and social determinants in terms of specific markets and publics for particular kinds of art-practice, is essential. If we do not have such a map how are we to know where ‘the good, true and beautiful’ may be lurking? Thus I readily acknowledge my indebtedness to my friends and colleagues, Andrew Brighton and Nicholas Pearson, whose excellent empirical research is showing us all just how inadequate was the map of contemporary art-practice with which we had been working. Just as a critic can rupture ideology by attending to his experience of the work, so, in the sphere of sociology (or history) of art the researcher can do so, in another way, by finding things out. Thus Brighton and Pearson are bringing our attention to vast tracts of art activity, and also of underlying art-market activity, which no one had bothered to investigate before. This sort of art research is very valuable indeed. There is another brand of so-called ‘left’ art history which, in the words of one of its practitioners, is so worried about not ‘sliding down the slippery unfenced slope of “the empiricism or the irrationality of that’s how it is and of chance” ’ that it never rises from its Polytechnic desk, or lifts its eyes beyond incestuously idealist ruminations about the nature of its own methodology, and its none-too-specific ‘interventions’. I would support Brighton and Pearson’s work over this sort of thing every time: nonetheless, I must insist, and I am sure they would agree, that the drawing up of the map may be a necessary prerequisite to the criticism of art, but it is not, in or of itself, identifiable with such criticism.

I will return to the nature of my critical practice and to the problem of identifying the material basis for aesthetic judgements; but first, I must be clear and explicit about the political position from which I am working. I therefore wish to make absolutely clear in what sense I am working within the Marxist tradition, and what sort of ‘Marxism’ I repudiate, indeed radically oppose myself to.

I want to talk in terms of excruciating simplicity: as I see it, Marx’s work emerged historically as a demand for justice for the oppressed, in particular for the proletariats in advanced, industrial countries. The early Marx had a vision which was in many respects idealist, utopian and humanist, of a form of society in which human potentialities could be fully realized. I am not interested in going back to that vision of the young Marx, retrieving it, and reviving its content as a diagram for the future: the now famous 1844 Manuscripts are a young man’s text, fragmented, disjointed, shot through with residues from Marx’s very early intellectual life and intima­tions of things he was to formulate more precisely, later on. There is much here that won’t stand up today. Nonetheless, I insist that the fact that Marx had such a felt, affective vision of what men and women could become, as against that which they were, tells us something essential about the nature of his project. Marx’s thought, at least as I understand it, developed continuously, with no ‘epistemological break’, out of his conviction that the world could be changed, that men and women could lead happier and more fully human lives in forms of social organization other than those under which they were living.

But Marx was no religious idealist: he knew that this better world had to be realized through the historical process, or not at all. With Engels, he thus developed a method, historical materialism, whose aim was the comprehension of that process in its totality. Marx envisaged that men and women would thus be enabled to act more effectively upon it, and through it, and might thereby succeed in changing it. But, paradoxically, the findings of historical materialism seemed to set limits upon the efficacy of even collective action: the determinative influence of the economy in every aspect of social life was exposed. In contrast to the classical econo­mists, Marx described the historicity of the economy and demonstrated that, broadly speaking, changes in the mode of production produced profound changes in social, political and cultural life. Marx came to describe the economy as a base, or structure, upon which a superstructure was erected consisting of such elements as law, politics, philosophy, religion, art, etc., the specific ideological forms of which were determined by the base.

The base/super structure metaphor — and it was only a metaphor — was at once among the most illuminating of Marx’s insights, and among the most problematic of his formulations. The metaphor, as one might expect if Marx is even approximately right, owes much to the specific historical moment in which it was produced. It is permeated by a characteristically 19th-century mechanism and over-deter- minism. Yet, Marx was surely correct in emphasizing that the processes of physical production had hitherto possessed a causal primacy over other social activities and that, as it has been put, ‘they form a framework for all other practices which all other practices do not form for the economy in the same sense’. Now the elaboration of the exact relations between the economic, political, cultural and ideological orders was recognized as a problem even in the era of ‘classical’ Marxism. When it came to specifics, Marx himself was often contradictory. In one moment, for example, he recognized the ‘universal’ or trans-historical aspect of certain works of art; in another, he reduced art to an ‘ideological’ product of the base. Engels introduced certain significant qualifications into the theory, recognizing the ‘relative autonomy’ of components of the superstructure, and the determinacy of the economy only in the last instance.

Marx also described the division of society into classes whose differing economic interests necessarily led to conflict. But the composition of these classes was not naturally given:

the industrial proletariat, for example, made itself, but only under the conditions determined by a capitalist mode of production. In Marx’s view, the contradictions inherent within this mode of production would lead eventually to the intensification of the struggle between capital and labour, the resolution of which would bring about the establishment of socialism (i.e. the ownership of the means of production by those who produced the wealth) and eventually realize that vision with which he had set out, the idyll of communism.

Now Marx possessed one of the most astonishing intellects in history: it is possible to become almost drunk with the breadth, complexity and range of his thought. His intellec­tual achievement is without parallel. However, it is important to emphasize that Marx left behind, not a system, but a series of giant torsos of an argument which he never completed. Furthermore, as we might expect if he was in any way right, much of his work is permeated with 19th-century ideology. In particular, Marx possessed a teleology characteristic of so much 19th-century bourgeois thought: thus he had a vision of the better world of socialism, and he tended to argue as if what he once called the ‘inexorable laws’ of history were necessarily and inevitably working in that direction. Hence the notorious ‘prophetic’ element in Marxism. Furthermore, Marx often sought to legitimate the method of historical materialism by invoking and over-deploying parallels from the natural sciences — a practice which was to lead to disastrous pseudo-scientific schematizations of his thought among some of his followers. In fact, many of Marx’s predictions and analyses were quite wrong. For example, his political scenario for the immediate future had as its lynch-pin the immiseration of the proletariat in advanced industrial countries: this did not happen. Furthermore, in no such countries anywhere in the world have the working-class revolutions which Marx so confidently envisaged taken place. Monopoly capitalism developed new forms of a far greater resilience than would have seemed possible to Marx. Mean­while, bourgeois economists developed techniques which, when applied by politicians, could at least delay and submerge the manifestation of the critical inherent contradictions within the capitalist system.

Even more problematically, in those predominantly peasant societies in which socialist revolutions did take place, they did not lead to those great advances in human happiness which classical Marxism might have led one to expect. Socialism improbably arose out of the ashes of Czarist Russia; but with it came not so much the dawn of an era of human freedom, as the implementation of a new and vigorous brand of tyrannous oppression and repression. I do not wish ritually to rehearse again here all the horrors of the Soviet State, the lies, systematic perversion of the truth, the gulags, mass murders, concentration camps, the repressive State and Party apparatuses, the secret police, the savage destruction of the peasantry, and the suppression of every impetus towards a ‘fully human condition’. To call all this ‘Stalinism’ is just too easy: it implies — a view Marx would have rejected immediately, of course — that somehow all that was one man’s fault. The point I am making is that the phenomenon we call ‘Stalinism’ is, even today, the central problem for all of us working within the Marxist tradition; even those of us who, like myself, entered that tradition after those successive waves of disillusionment, up to and including 1956, which accompanied the realization of the true character of the Soviet State. Stalinism is not something we can deftly define out of socialism by saying that it does not concern us because we want ‘the real thing’. Marx wanted that, too: but the point is that when the economic base was transformed in Russia, capitalism and feudalism were destroyed, and socialism implemented — there can be no fudging this through talk about ‘State Capitalism’ — the ‘real thing’ diverged hope­lessly from the vision.

Why then, if that is what I think, do I insist upon situating myself within the Marxist tradition? The answer is that I am still committed to a this-worldly struggle for justice for the oppressed, who include, but who are by no means synonymous with, the industrial proletariat. I further consider that ‘Man’, by which I mean men and women as a species, possesses potentialities for social reciprocity which cannot be fully realized under existing social structures, and that it is possible to envisage the realization through the historical process of forms of society in which those potentialities would be more completely fulfilled. I thus share with Marx an insistence upon the need for a theoretical method which attempts to grasp the historical process in the totality of its complex actuality and becoming. Historical materialism seems to me the only method we have which can begin to do this. Its past failures, however, have cautioned me against those who would make of this method, or any purportedly derived from it, a way of getting at absolute, ‘scientific’ truth — or of achieving that ‘total’ view to which it aspires. Further, despite certain questions and reservations, I consider that Marx’s assignment of a primary determinative power to the economy, and his account of the division of society into conflicting classes whose contradictions will demand resolution in history, are basically right. For all these reasons, combined with my unwavering respect for Marx’s formidable intellectual achievement, his open-mindedness, and empirical insights, I consider myself to be practising within the Marxist tradition.

This said, I must quickly add that in my view that tradition in the West has been fractured, even fragmented, by the prism of Stalinism. There is no way in which one can, in good faith, look back upon the texts, theories, and historical and political analyses of Marx, from our present historical moment, and simply pretend that Stalinism is not an issue. There have, however, been a range of responses, some in good faith, and some not; some compatible with one other, others not. Divested of any tranquil confidence in the inevitability and blissful consequences of the achievement of socialism, Marxists in the West now occupy a wide range of world views which lead them into varieties of political alliance throughout the spectrum of the left.

In sharp contrast to what has been, over the last ten years at least, a dominant tendency in the Marxism of many Western intellectuals, I have found myself forming the view that a central flaw within classical Marxism was its lack of any adequate conception of man’s relationship to nature, indeed of man, not as an ideological entity, but as a specific species, limited by a relatively constant, underlying biological condition, dependent upon natural processes and a natural world which he cannot command. This focus emerged during and immediately after a prolonged therapeutic experience of psychoanalysis; a process which limits one’s sense of infantile omnipotence, of the magical changeability of all phenomena through the agency of one’s own wishes, exposes the inade­quacies of the intellect on its own, puts one back in touch with affects, the concreteness of one’s own body, the bodies of others, and the reality of the external world. Psycho­analysis leads one to realize that there is more to life than what goes on in the head. These general shifts in orientation were given theoretical spine and muscle through my reading of a number of contemporary Marxist writers — including Perry Anderson, Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson, and, surprisingly perhaps, most significantly, Sebastiano Timpanaro. (I say surprisingly since, unlike myself, Timpanaro is no friend of psychoanalysis.)

Timpanaro constantly emphasizes that materialism must begin by affirming the ‘priority of nature over “mind”, or if you like, of the physical level over the biological level, and of the biological level over the socio-economic level.’ Marxism, however, was born as an affirmation of the decisive primacy of the socio-economic level over juridical, political and cultural phenomena, and as an affirmation of the historicity of the economy. It emerged as a methodology of human action; its ‘moment of becoming’ was, of course, that of the revolutions of 1848. But it thereby ran the risk of ‘evading or under­estimating that which is passivity and external conditioning in the human condition’. That is why so many of those suffering from infantile omnipotence are attracted to Marxism. Although Marx himself did not ignore or deny physical and biological nature, for him, it constituted ‘more a prehistoric antecedent to human history than a reality which still limits and conditions man.’ With Labriola, Timpanaro is thus led to insist that ‘our dependence on nature, however diminished since prehistoric times, persists amidst our social life’. Thus he writes:

It is certainly true that the development of society changes men’s ways of feeling pain, pleasure and other elementary psycho-physical reactions, and that there is hardly anything that is ‘purely natural’ left in contemporary man, that has not been enriched and remoulded by the social and cultural environment. But the general aspects of the ‘human condition’ still remain, and the specific characteristics introduced into it by the various forms of associated life have not been such as to overthrow them completely. To maintain that, since the ‘biological’ is always presented to us as mediated by the ‘social’, the ‘biological’ is nothing and the ‘social’ is everything, would once again be idealist sophistry.

Timpanaro’s position is not ‘humanist’: he recognizes the validity of polemic against ‘man in general’, in so far as that concept is used to assert the naturalness of such things as private property, or class divisions. But Timpanaro stresses that man as a biological being, endowed with a certain (not unlimited) adaptability to his external environment, and with certain impulses towards activity and the pursuit of happi­ness, subject to old age and death, is not an abstract, or ‘ideological’ construction, nor yet a sort of superseded, pre­historic ancestor to social man, ‘but still exists in each of us and in all probability will still exist in the future’. Certainly, Timpanaro would never speak of ‘Eternal Man’, or ‘Eternal Woman’. Not only does he stress that the species, like any other, is subject to biological evolution, but he draws attention to the probable eventual extinction of the species itself and of the world which it inhabits. Nonetheless, he points out that certain significant aspects of the human condition appear to be very long-lasting indeed : these, as we shall see, are of great importance in any attempt to under­stand our capacity to derive pleasure from the art of the past.

For Timpanaro, while retaining Marx’s division into structure and super-structure, and re-affirming ‘the pre­ponderant part played by the economic structure in deter­mining the major transformations of juridical-political institutions, cultural milieux and forms of collective psychology’, is yet able to write ‘One cannot help but recognize also that there are non-superstructural elements in cultural activities and institutions.’ He goes on to say that this admission does not in any way undercut materialism but, as he puts it, ‘rather calls forth a closer consideration of that biological nature of man which Marxism, and particularly contemporary Marxism, tends to disregard’. The division structure/superstructure was, for Timpanaro, ‘a discovery of immense significance, both as a criterion for explaining social reality, and as a guide to transforming it’. It ‘becomes inadequate, however, when it is taken as an exhaustive classi­fication of reality, as if there was nothing that existed which was not either structure or superstructure.’ Or, as he puts it, ‘It is not only the social relations between men, but also the relations between men and nature that give rise to scientific and philosophical reflection and to artistic expression.’ The point is thus not a revival of Feuerbachian ‘Man’, or of the ideological constructs of bourgeois humanism, it is rather the completion of the projects which they left incomplete: the elaboration, within the perspectives of historical materialism, of a materialist conception of man, and of his relations to nature; a conception which must begin by respecting the concrete achievements and real knowledge realized through the natural sciences — including physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, zoology, geology, physics, chemistry, and astronomy.

‘Man’ in this sense — I can only repeat — is not an abstrac­tion, an ideological construct of the bourgeoisie that can be swept away in the attempt to supersede bourgeois modes of thought. After all, the bourgeoisie did not only begin the discovery of man, the extrication of him from false religious conceptions. As a class it was also the first to begin to acknowledge the specific developmental condition of childhood; to start to recognize the special needs of the child. There are, I know, a few poor souls who argue that therefore children, as such, are nought but the ideological constructs of the bourgeoisie and that ‘under socialism’ childhood will cease to exist once more. (It’s funny how those who argue like this so rarely have children themselves.) But what about spermatazoa? In an even more absolute sense than ‘man’ or ‘childhood’, the concept and the word ‘spermatazoa’ only enters the language with the bourgeoisie: the sperm was only discovered after the invention of the microscope, and became enmeshed in the mystical (or ideological) construct of homunculi. But does anyone really think no such things as spermatozoa existed before the bourgeoisie successfully identified them? Or really think that, with the achievement of socialism, we could abolish not just the concept, but the actuality of sperm, together with the rest of bourgeois ideology? That is exactly what certain ‘Marxists’ are asking us to believe in respect of ‘Man’.

To some of you, my emphasis on man as a biological being may seem like plugging the self-evident, a question of commonsense. But its very common-sense character is cited by one grouping within Marxism as ‘proof’ of the fact that it is mere ideology. I am referring to the Althusserians and their tendentious legacy of derivative factions and fellow-travellers.

‘Now that one cannot win anyone’s ear unless one translates the most commonplace things into structuralist language,’ writes Timpanaro, ‘the task of Marxists appears to have become one of proving that Marxism is the best of all possible structuralisms.’ Althusserianism, despite Althusser’s coquettish insistence that he merely flirted with the language of structuralism, is a structuralism. And, if there can be said to be any common perspective amongst the gamut of structuralists from Lacan to Levi-Strauss, from Foucault to Althusser, it lies in their resistance to the placing of ‘man’ as the origin of social practice, their onslaught against any idea of ‘man’. For Althusser, there is no such thing as the individual as such: ‘each mode of production produces its own mode of individuality in accordance with its specific character.’ What he has to offer is a profoundly anti­materialist, de-humanized, anti-historicist, anti-empiricist philosophical system which retains certain trappings of Marxist terminology.

It is not the fact that Althusser has revised Marx which worries me, although I believe many of his ‘readings’ of Marx’s texts have been carried out in bad faith; it is his end- product, which Edward Thompson, in his dazzling critique of Althusser, describes as ‘a sealed system within which concepts endlessly circulate, recognize and interrogate each other, and the intensity of its repetitious introversial life is mistaken for “science”.’ Meanwhile, Althusser’s theory banishes all human agency, and human subjects from the historical process, which, for Althusser, has no subject.

Far be it from me to initiate the uninitiated into this esoteric, academicist cult: it represents the inverse of every­thing which I find worth preserving in Marx’s work. According to Althusser, that vision of a transformed world which I characterized as essential to Marx’s project must be expunged from Marxism altogether: he speaks of the episte- mological break, an alleged sudden leap from ideology to ‘science’ within Marx, reputedly characterized by the rejection of humanism. Althusser goes on to paint a picture of the Mode of Production determining every aspect of the lives of men and women — in the last instance, of course — through the medium of ideology, which, in Althusser’s work, undergoes a mystical process of transubstantiation, thereby achieving material existence. ‘Human societies’, Althusser maintains, ‘secrete ideology as the very element and atmos­phere indispensable to their historical respiration and life.’ But, for him, ideology is not just ‘false consciousness’: it is the ‘lived’ relation between men and their world. Now, if Althusser was merely saying that the knowledge men and women have of their world is always partial, continuously subject to development and modification, in which the material conditions of their lives play a great part, then I would heartily agree. However, he turns this partial knowledge, ‘ideology’, into an hypostasized — that is, a personalized — ‘transcendental subject, which, by inter­pellating individuals, constitutes them as subjects’. In other words, human subjects, men and women, appear not as ‘essences’, as in bourgeois humanism, the great heresy for an Althusserian, but as mere effects, or shadows of the great subject, out there, of ideology as secreted by the Mode of Production. In Althusser, it is not God who makes ‘man’ in his own image, but Ideology-and-the-Mode-of-Production, IMP which functions in his system exactly, but exactly, as if it were God.

In Althusser, all the essential qualities of men and women — the result of their specific biological conditions — are alienated from them, and attributed to the great IMP. We are all somehow immersed, dissolved even, into this allegedly material secretion of ideology, even if we don’t realize it. Empirical knowledge is, according to Althusser, worse than useless as a means of escape. Experience, for him, is but a manifestation of the effects of Ideology upon us. Only through the quasi-magical process of Theoretical Practice — which Thompson rightly sees as the rigor mortis of Marxism setting in, and which I would characterize as a sort of mystical communion of Ideology with itself, and not, of course, with the world — can one hope to rise above the ideological mire and achieve pure, transcendent, ‘Scientific’ truth. Thus — if Althusser was right the little boy on the edge of the crowd could never, ever, have seen that the emperor had no clothes; nor can you look out of the window and say, ‘It is a nice day’, until you have acted upon mere metereology with Theoretical Practice; nor, of course, can I look at those Parthenon frieze panels and say, ‘That one is good.’

No doubt I am lucky: I was inoculated, for life, against Althusser because I was brought up under the shadow of Karl Barth — the greatest theologian of the 20th century. (If you really must resort to this sort of system, then make for Barth, not Althusser. The breadth and scope of the twelve volumes of Barth’s Church Dogmatics is infinitely more subtle than Althusser’s tawdry texts.) So many of the arguments, however, are the same. Barth put God — Father, Son and Holy Ghost — as his hypostasized ‘Subject’ — who of course, also ‘interpellates’ us — where Althusser puts the great IMP. For Barth, too, God was wholly transcendent, unknowable, utterly Other, and as Althusser says of Ideology in General, without a history — i.e., the Subject, par excellence. Barth despises men and women, too: for him, they are immersed in sin, blindness, and delusion which they are unable to see, or see through, since it is their lived relation to the world, by the very fact of being men and women, born in original sin. Barth despises experience, hence his polemic with Brunner against Natural Theology — the belief that you can see the evidences of God, or ‘The Truth’ by scrutiny of Nature. For Barth, Redemption was only to be found by scrutiny of ‘The Word of God’, the Biblical texts, which he fetishized throughout his life, making judicious use of the new ‘scientific’ techniques of Form Criticism to establish the ‘correct’ readings. The systems, the arguments, and much of the methodology are pretty much the same. Althusserianism is a theology. It has nothing to do with materialism, and less to do with the struggle for material justice and equity in this world.

Christianity began as an eschatological movement; believers expected the end of the world, the Parousia, or Second Coming, and the establishment of the Kingdom of God in history. This did not happen. Pauline Christology was the ideological attempt to reconcile early Christians to their disappointment; to deflect their focus of attention from this- wordly history to heaven, through the medium of complex, abstract texts and concepts. The process was accompanied, inevitably, by institutionalization and the growth of a priestly caste, which became ever more remote from the popular roots of Christianity.

Engels, time and time again, compared the 19th-century socialist movement, in Europe, with primitive Christianity. Marxism emerged out of the popular expectation of history-transforming revolution, which did not come. Althusserianism is the Pauline Christology of Western Marxism. It is the attempt to reconcile revolutionaries to the indefinite delay of the Parousia in such a way that they do not lose the Faith. ‘The Truth’ this time, however, is to be found not so much in the monasteries and seminaries, as within the cloistered enclaves of academia. As Thompson puts it ‘Althusserian theory . . . allows the aspirant academic to engage in a harmless revolutionary psycho-drama, while at the same time pursuing a reputable and conventional intellectual career’ — or, I might add, artistic career, vide Burgin, Kelly, etc. It is, however, a total betrayal of historical materialism — to which I am committed.

Of course, like all religious groupings, Althusserianism has produced its splinter sects, many of which question Saint Louis Althusser’s total banishment of the human subject. Even the most psychotic among us sometimes get hints that we exist as a limited, physical organism, subject to birth, bodily existence and death. This faint glimmering perception of real people has led to a sort of gnostic carnival of Late Althusserianism — a sort of re-insertion into the argument of persons who are not really persons at all. This, of course, is where Lacan comes in. Lacan, blessed and sanctified by Saint Louis himself — in one of the latter’s most ignorant and preposterous essays — is a some-time psychoanalyst who has concocted a ‘radically anti-humanist’ subject, i.e. a sort of bodiless ghost, wholly ‘implicated in signifying practices’. Lacan’s subject is — in his own words: ‘. . . de-centred, constituted by a structure that has no “centre” either, except in the imaginary misrecognition of the “ego”, i.e. in the ideological formations in which it “recognizes” itself.’ You may think you were conceived in flesh and blood, and born of your mother’s womb; but in fact, you are a mere side-effect, literally, of IMP. In the last instance, of course. Lacan and his acolytes are as indifferent to the psycho-biological continuity of the species as Althusser himself. Thus Julia Kristeva trumps up a subject which ‘unlike the free or self-determining unified individual of humanist thought’ is nought but an over-determined, complex, ever-changing nexus of contra­dictions produced ‘by the action of social institutions and signifying practices’. Not a trace here of flesh, bones, perceptual organs, instincts, penises, wombs, vaginas, or stomachs. Just ‘signifying practices’!

Roger Scruton was correct in describing Lacan’s works as fictions, ‘rambling from theme to theme and from symbol to symbol with little connecting thread other than the all-pervasive “I” of paranoia’. Timpanaro has hinted at the way in which Althusser banishes the subject from the historical process to replace it with one subject, Louis Althusser himself (whose shadow, of course IMP is). Lacan’s later work is no more demanding of serious attention than, say, Ron Hubbard’s scientological dianetics or the writings of Helena Blavatsky. Lacan constructs the ‘self’ upon an infinitely labile model, which reproduces its elements, without constraint, like a language. He is entirely lacking in any materialist conception of men and women as physical organisms.

In Britain, however, there is an indigenous tradition of psycho-analysis — the so-called ‘object relations school’, extending from Suttie to Rycroft — which takes full cognizance of biological ‘Man’, as Timpanaro describes him.The theory of the Self in such writers as Bowlby and Winnicott — who significantly draw upon such disciplines as ethology and paediatrics, rather than structural linguistics — is infinitely superior, and infinitely less ‘ideological’ than that to be found in Lacan. It is a sign of the rabid idealism of the Left that their work is either not read at all or despised. Charles Rycroft, the most distinguished surviving represen­tative of this school, has written, ‘the statement that psycho­analysis is a theory of meaning is incomplete and misleading unless one qualifies it by saying that it is a biological theory of meaning.’ Rycroft, rightly, goes on to say that psychoanalysis interprets human behaviour not in terms of entities external to it — such as IMP — but that it ‘regards the self as a psycho-biological entity which is always striving for self- realization and self-fulfilment’.

There are many Lacanian-Althusserians who forget that in order to become Heavy-Weight Champion of the World, it is not enough to be oppressed, or to ‘live’ the ideology of competitive capitalism. You also need to have big biceps and to lack large mammary glands. In many, many human endeavours constitutional elements, though never everything, are indubitably of decisive, determinative significance. Let me introduce a highly personal note. I suffer from a chronic rheumatic condition, ankylosing spondylitis, among the determinants of which is a genetic factor. The illness is 300 times more common in people who inherit a certain white cell blood group, HLA B27, than among those who do not. A side-effect of this can be sudden, painful inflammation of the irises of the eye. This has happened to me twice, the last time just a few weeks ago. It caused me to reflect not just upon the particularity of visual experience — of which more in a moment — but also upon the fatuousness, stupidity and insensitivity of those who argue that those elements of existence which are determined by ‘biology’ or nature, rather than ‘IMP’ or whatever, are trivial.

The elimination of the psycho-biological subject from Althusserian theory inevitably has inhuman implications. In their wrong-headed book, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject, Rosalind Coward and John Ellis write:

Reference to the notion of ‘subject’ creates the very problem of language this book is dealing with. Since the term refers both to an individual in sociality, and more generally, to the space necessitated by ideological meanings, we have chosen to designate the subject with the pronoun ‘it’.

There we have it! No more people, only things. Coward and Ellis are full of praise for the way in which Lacanian theory is ‘grounded in materialism’, because it denies ‘man’ and recognizes that ‘the conscious subject is constructed in a certain position in relation to the signifying chain.’ Thus we are told that the ‘ultimate effect’ of Lacan’s work is ‘a complete undermining of a unified and consistent subject, the assumption on which all bourgeois ideology is founded.’ And so, in this farcical world of topsy-turvy mysticism, the term materialism emerges as the exact inversion of its classical usage: it means here nothing more or less than the denial of the biological and physical levels, of the person as a physical entity, limited (and to a degree determined) by the finiteness of the body, the genetic constitution and the inevitability of death.

One practitioner who has fallen prey to this tendency recently endeavoured to argue with me that the pronoun T referred to nothing more than an ideological construct. An art historian who rants about signifying practices told me that, in her view, breast-feeding was unnecessary because ‘milk-filled plastic sacks’ were every bit as good. Naturally, if you deny any validity to the notion of the individual as a psycho-biological entity, you will end up saying such things. But I am not interested even in engaging with those who have such an idealist concept of the self. I turn, with relief, to the British object-relations tradition of psychoanalysis which begins with the recognition of the individual as an integral being, who, although he or she must immediately enter into social relations from the moment of birth in order to survive, possesses a physical separateness from, as well as a depen­dency upon, others. As Marcuse has noted, ‘Solidarity would be on weak grounds were it not rooted in the instinctual structure of individuals.’ Or, as I would want to put it, the continuing potential of the human species for socialism may have its remote biological, i.e. material roots, in the necessity of a relatively prolonged period of social dependency for the infant, if he or she is to survive.

The denial of the subject in Althusserian thought would be alternately pathetic and hilarious, were its implications not so serious. To cite Marx tells us nothing about the truth, or otherwise, of a concept. Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out to these Marxists that Marx and Engels never ditched the concept of ‘man’, least of all did they eliminate the idea of human agency. ‘It is men who make history on the basis of previous conditions.’ Or, as Sartre was to put it later, there is a space within which we can make something of that which has been made of us. The only words I would wish to add to Marx’s formulation are ‘and women’. But E.P. Thompson has drawn attention to the hysterical fury which Marx’s formulation evokes in Etienne Balibar, Althusser’s High Priest, and collaborator. Thus Balibar comments on the phrase, ‘the concept men . . . constitutes a real point where the utterance slips away towards the regions of philosophical or commonplace ideology.’ (Balibar wants to say that not just ‘man’, but also ‘men’, don’t really exist.) Balibar continues, ‘The “obviousness”, the “transparency” of the word “men” (here charged with carnal opacity) and its anodyne appearance are the most dangerous of the traps I am trying to avoid. I shall not be satisfied until I have . . . eliminated it as a foreign body.’

Carnal opacity! Let’s savour that phrase for a moment. Thompson points to its puritanism, its religious loathing of the flesh. Marx was absolutely correct to charge men with ‘carnal opacity’. We do, indeed exist with fleshly bodies, driven by hunger, and the vicissitudes and urgencies of the sexual instincts. (Why do Marxists always have so little to say about those, except on the eccentric fringes of the tradition.)

We exist, in feeling, fear, hope, greed and sensuality, and it is precisely that ‘carnal opacity’ of our material existence which the Althusserians want to wipe out. And as Thompson so rightly comments:

If we think about men as the trtiger (or mere bearers) of structures — or of their actions as ‘unjustified disturbance symptoms’ — then the thought will guide the act. As those lofty theoretical practitioners, the daleks, used to say, when confronted by ‘men’: ‘Exterminate!’

And this brings me back to the nature of Marxism and the centrality of Stalinism for all those who claim to be working within the Marxist tradition. For Thompson argues, in my view entirely convincingly, that although Althusserianism presents itself as anti-Stalinism, this is ‘a gigantic confidence trick’. For Althusser is only doing in theory what Stalin had already done in practice.

In the same moment that Stalinism emitted ‘humanist’ rhetoric, it occluded the human faculties as part of its necessary mode of respiration. Its very breath stank (and still stinks) of inhumanity, because it has found a way of regarding people as the bearers of structures. . . and history as a process without a subject ... It is only in our own time that Stalinism has been given its true, rigorous and totally coherent theoretical expression. This is the Althusserian orrery ... So far from being a ‘post Stalinist generation’, the Althusserians and those who share their premises and idealist modes, are working hard, every day, on the theoretical production-line of Stalinist ideology.

To some of you, this may all be academic. Stalin is, after all, firmly within his grave. But it is not just a question of theory, of attitudes to the past. In this decade, we have seen another successful socialist revolution — that in Cambodia — where, to use Balibar’s unhappy phrase — almost a third of a nation was ‘eliminated ... as a foreign body’. What happened in Cambodia was Absolute Stalinism, in practice. Thompson does not seem to me to be over-stepping the mark when he recalls, ‘with anxiety, that some of the leading cadres of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia received their training in “Marxism” in Paris of the 1960s’.

Let me summarize all this: I am struggling for a position within the Marxist tradition which is humanist, in so far as it recognizes men and women as psycho-biological entities; utopian, in so far as it is rooted in the conviction that the world need not be the way it is, or the way it has been, and that men and women can live more happily than they do at present by ordering their social lives differently; empiricist, in that, within certain limits, it recognizes the validity of immediate experience; moralist, in that I consider certain refusals of infringements against the person to be absolutely right, and not just class interests in disguise, e.g. the refusal of torture; economist, in that I consider that, over a wide sphere of social and cultural life, given the qualifications I have already outlined, the economy possesses a determinative primacy; historicist, in that I affirm the validity, indeed the necessity, of the historical materialist recovery of the past; and aestheticist, in that I do not consider aesthetic responses to be merely emanations of bourgeois ideology. My position is not that of a wet, liberal refusal of theory: it is rather the result of my interrogation of history. I have engaged with these theories, and I am rejecting them — as I see it, in the name of the struggle for socialism. Nonetheless, every point in the position I have just outlined breaches a cardinal sin in the Althusserian breviary. Edward Thompson has declared that ‘Libertarian Communism and the socialist and Labour movement in general can have no business with theoretical practice except to expose it and to drive it out.’ I find myself in strong sympathy with this view, although not yet quite able to endorse it. I am still sentimental enough to cling until the eleventh hour to what is probably no more than a fantasy of unity.

I have raised certain questions about the Marxist approach to art; I have clarified my view of ideology and politics. I wish to end by making clear how all this affects my aesthetics and my critical practice. Let us return to The Lady of Warka. Certainly, what Parrot wrote about it was tinged with the ideology of bourgeois spiritual idealism. I admit that. But it was a more materialist account than any offered by Marxists who deny the psycho-biological continuity of civilized ‘Man’ altogether.

The Althusserian art-historian, Nicos Hadjinicolau, is forced to explain ‘aesthetic effect’ as ‘none other than the pleasure felt by the observer when he recognizes himself in a picture’s visual ideology’. Such a view of art, as Brighton has argued in his cogent critique of Hadjinicolau, excludes the viewer’s capacity to experience the work, and the work’s capacity to act upon him. The pleasure to be derived from art is reduced to a narcissistic mirroring process, in which all the work can do is to reflect back to the viewer some aspect of his historically specific illusions. But if ideology is as historically specific as the Althusserians suggest, it is hard to see what I could recognize in a work produced in Sumeria in the fourth millenia B.C. ‘Eternal Man’ may be an ideologically loaded construct; but, demystified, it points in the direction of a much more materialist account than that which we can derive from Althusser, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, Balibar, Hadjini­colau, Coward, Ellis, Tagg, Burgin, Griselda Pollock, Kelly, Screen Ed., or Tel Quel.

Marcuse, you will remember, claimed that the fact that a work truly represents the interests or the outlook of the proletariat or of the bourgeoisie does not yet make it an authentic work of art. Marcuse feels that the universality of art cannot be grounded in the world, or the world-outlook, of a particular class. Art, he says, envisions a ‘concrete, universal humanity, Menschlichkeit, which no particular class can incorporate, not even the proletariat’.This Menschlichkeit is, you might think, ‘Eternal Man’ transposed to a Marxist framework. Unlike the bourgeois aestheticians, Marcuse stresses not transcendence into the ethereal realms of spirituality, but ‘the metabolism between the human being and nature’, which, he says, ‘Marxist theory has the least justification to ignore’ or to denounce ‘as a regressive ideological conception’.

Marcuse’s view is reminiscent of the one I expressed earlier: not only the social relations between men, but also the relations between men and nature give rise to artistic expression. For example, as Timpanaro writes:

. . . love, the brevity and frailty of human existence, the contrast between the smallness and weakness of man and the infinity of the cosmos, are expressed in literary works in very different ways in various historically determinate societies, but still not in such different ways that all references to such constant experiences of the human condition as the sexual instinct, the debility produced by age (with its psychological repercussions), the fear of one’s own death and sorrow at the death of other’s, is lost.

But Raymond Williams takes us even further than this. He says:

... it is a fact about classical Marxism that it neglected to its great cost, not only the basic human physical conditions which Timpanaro emphasizes in his reconsideration of materialism, but also the emotional conditions which make up so large a part of all direct human relationship and practice.

In my view, these ‘relative constants’, deriving from man’s continuing embeddedness in nature, are of the greatest importance in the experience of many works of art.

Rothko once wrote that he was interested only in ‘expressing basic human emotions’. He added, ‘the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate with those basic human emotions.’ Predictably, Rothko is attacked in a recent article by two Marxist art-historians both for his allegedly ‘a- historical’ utterances, and for the ahistorical vacuousness of his pictures. But I think Rothko was right — in theory and practice. The reason his work transcends the shabby ideology and vacuity of American colour-field painting, whose socio­economic determinants I have described elsewhere, is that, using these unpromising conventions, he does indeed reach through to significant aspects of the underlying ‘human condition’ by finding convincing representations for basic emotions. Similarly, Vermeer seems to have done much the same — although his painting refers not just to emotional life, but to certain ‘relative constants’ in the possibilities of human encounter with light, space and time. Again, Vermeer used the most ‘ideologically’ loaded of conventions — those determined by the Dutch, petit-bourgeois picture-market in genre painting. He was enmeshed within the ‘signifying practices’ of the class to which he belonged. Today, none of that matters very much to those of us who admire his great paintings. The point is that Vermeer ‘ruptures’ the ideology of his time, and of ours, by finding forms which speak vividly of potentialities inherent in those aspects of the life of ‘Man’, as a biological species, which do not change greatly from one socio-economic situation to another.

With both these artists, however, it is important to emphasize that the historically transcendent was not achieved by a denial of the culturally and historically specific, but rather by a working through of it. Here, too, we have an answer to an implicit problem for all Marxist criticism. As a theory of historical development, Marxism has always found it difficult to account for the fact that art is not subject to continuous or consistent development. The Lady of Warka is one of the oldest existing sculptures: it is also among the best. ‘Greatness’ and ‘quality’ in art must therefore derive from a relationship with aspects of human life which are, relatively speaking, very long-lasting indeed.

This is why Marcuse seems to me to be right when he says: A work of art is authentic or true not by virtue of its content (i.e. the ‘correct’ representation of social conditions) nor by its ‘pure’ form, but by the content having become form. . . Aesthetic form, autonomy, and truth are interrelated. Each is a socio-historical phenomenon, and each transcends the socio- historical arena.

If I understand him correctly, Marcuse’s defence of the autonomy of aesthetic form in the name of art’s own dimension of truth, protest and promise, does not imply a hermetic separation from exploration of the continuous potentialities of man’s underlying biological condition, but rather points towards an immersion in them as an implicit affirmation of the possibility of Menschlichkeit, as against the reality of a class-divided world. Or, as he puts it, ‘The autonomy of art contains the categorical imperative: “things must change”.’ Elsewhere, I too have spoken of the way in which great and authentic art, whatever its subject matter, constitutes a ‘moment of becoming’ which speaks of a possible historical future now.

Here, however, I wish to introduce what is perhaps the single most significant idea that I have learned from an Althusserian critic — namely Pierre Macherey. He argues that the aesthetic product is, like any other, the result of the application of a means of labour to transform a raw material. Unfortunately, because of his relativistic extremism, Macherey cannot usefully elaborate this concept. But Williams, recognizing the validity of biological ‘Man’ is able to do so. He writes:

The deepest significance of a relatively unchanging biological condition is probably to be found in some of the basic material processes of the making of art: in the significance of rhythms in music and dance and language or of shapes and colours in sculpture and painting . .. What matters here — and it is a very significant amendment of orthodox Marxist thinking about art — is that art work is itself, before everything, material process; and that, although differentially, the material process of the production of art includes certain biological processes, especially those relating to body movements and to the voice, which are not a mere substratum but are at times the most powerful elements of the work.

This passage is crucial. Most discussions of Marxist aesthetics take literature as their model: indeed, much of the sort of Althusserian left writing on art which I am attacking is a direct transposition of arguments about literature into the domain of the visual arts. However, I am maintaining that if we attend closely, in a materialist fashion, to the material practices of drawing, painting, and sculpture, we will discover that the arguments from literature are not valid for these practices, precisely because the biological processes (whose importance the Althusserian cannot admit) are much more important in them. It is not just that you do not have to study life-drawing or anatomy in order to become a good writer. A major difference between literary practice and drawing is that the word dog has a more opaque relationship to a dog than does a drawing of a dog. But the sculpture of The Lady of Warka is — to use Saint Louis’ own phrase about art — ‘bathed in ideology’ to nothing like the same degree as any work of literature, precisely because of its much deeper dependence, at the level of what it expresses and the way it expresses it, on relatively constant, underlying, biological elements of human life. Again, it is not just that in the entire history of sculpture, from the time of the Sumerians to that of Rodin, there has not been one significant work which is not either a representation of a man, a woman or an animal, whereas texts have been written on many varieties of purely abstract subject. It is also that in its material processes, sculpture is much, much more intimately linked to the biological and physical levels of existence than are, say, literature or philosophy.

Painting, of course, is in an intermediate position — some­where between literature and sculpture; the significance of immediately biological processes and representations is greater than in the former, less than in the latter.

In my view, this recognition that the different arts are material processes in which the underlying biological processes are of varying significance casts quite a different light on the now all too familiar and often hysterical attack by Althusserians and structuralists on painting and sculpture as ‘bourgeois’ forms which must be smashed, superseded, destroyed, or otherwise annihilated. It was Burgin, I think, who dismissed painting as anachronistic daubing and smearing with coloured shit. But my point is that painting, drawing and sculpture, although they are always the bearers of ideological elements, and acquire significant aspects of their particular forms through socio-economic influences, are, as material practices, no more reducible to ideology than are childhood, spermatazoa, or, above all, ‘man’. The Althusser- ian-Structuralist mode of discourse on painting is about the ideological elements within painting, not about painting as such — as a material practice. We might well pause to ask why in all their multitudinous utterances upon art, Althusserians never speak of song or of dance. It is not just that the trans- historical character of these particular material practices — whatever their specific forms — is self-evident. (Who, after all, would want to march forward into a world where song and dance had been wiped out as ‘bourgeois’ art forms, except perhaps a few King Street die-hards?) But in these arts the material substance upon which the performer — or psycho- biological existent subject — works is that of his or her own bodily being; precisely that which, if you are an adherent of Althusserian theology, you wish to reduce to a mere ghost of no determinative significance.

Indeed, Marcuse has said that the rejection of the individual as a bourgeois concept recalls and presages certain fascist undertakings. The attack upon such material practices as drawing, painting and sculpture not only echoes those undertakings; it is also suspiciously reminiscent of that theoretical project to eliminate ‘Man’ as a psycho-biological entity, under the guise of an assault on bourgeois ideology, which characterizes Althusserian theory and Stalinist practice, and which I have already described at length. ‘This notion of theory,’ writes Thompson, ‘is like a blight that has settled on the mind. The empirical senses are occluded, the moral and aesthetic organs are repressed, the curiosity is sedated, all the “manifest” evidence of life or art is distrusted as “ideology”.’ Thus, inevitably, when those blighted by this theory or its derivatives turn to making works of art, they can themselves produce only art which is nothing but ideology.

In ‘Fine Art after Modernism’ I discussed in detail my conception of the historical growth of the Fine Art tradition and of the way in which it was shaped and contained by the institutional and professional structures of the bourgeoisie. I have talked about the development of a Mega-Visual tradition in the era of Monopoly Capitalism, and about the way in which this greatly changed the social function of the professional Fine Artist. I took the view, which has also been argued by Kristeller, and more eloquently by Raymond Williams, that the concept of ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) as we use it today was historically specific, i.e. ideological. While that still seems to me to be true — and I unequivocally re­affirm it today — it is perhaps the case that I did not make it sufficiently dear in the past that the material processes of drawing, painting, and sculpture were not, in this respect, identifiable with ‘Art’. They have a material continuity which extends back into the earliest social formations. That continuity is now threatened by the encroachments of the Mega-Visual tradition. Indeed, E.P. Thompson draws attention to the way in which so much Althusserian idealism is not so much the inverse of bourgeois ideology, but rather an immediate reflection of its academic modes. Similarly, in the art world, the case against painting and sculpture is not unique to the left. What Victor Burgin advocates is also what Monopoly Capitalism is bringing about in reality. Burgin’s expressed hostility to ‘privileged’ media can be compared with the arguments of a specifically anti-Marxist sociologist, Robert Taylor; while his compositional devices are those of a Mega-Visual advertising man. Meanwhile, it is as well to remember that Burgin is not some outsider who has, as it were, been allowed into the extremities of the Fine Art garden-party by mistake. He is now at the very centre of the stage, deeply imbedded within the art institutions, prominen­tly featured in two out of the three Hayward Annuals and in the Hayward photography show. He has held a succession of academic appointments and fellowships in visual arts schools. If there is any merit in his own argument, all this would not be possible unless the prevailing ideology favoured the destruction of those specific material practices to which he opposes himself: painting, drawing and sculpture.

At a recent ‘State of British Art’ conference, I made out my defence of the Fine Art tradition. Griselda Pollock then announced from the floor that she wanted to see the apparatus of art practice ‘uprooted, root and branch’. She must be pleased with the job Margaret Thatcher is doing, with, it would seem, a little bit of help in both theory and practice from her structuralist friends. Meanwhile, I continue to defend the Fine Art tradition, not for the ideological myths embedded and perpetuated within it, not on behalf of those economic forces subtending it, and certainly not for those ideologists who have recently invaded it and manipulated its weaknesses, but rather in the name of these specific material practices: painting, drawing and sculpture. I am defending these practices not for their own sake, but on the grounds that the imaginative vision of men and women realizable through them — what Marcuse calls the aesthetic dimension which speaks of a changed future, or that which I have called ‘moments of becoming’ — are not realizable in the same way either through words, or through mechanically made images, which imply quite a different relation to those underlying biological elements and to the world alike.

I do not only wish, however, to conserve drawing, painting, and sculpture as such, but further to see retained, revived and developed certain specific aspects of the bourgeois achieve­ment within these practices. Some of my earlier texts unfortunately tended to imply that because certain techni­ques and conventions had arisen in the process of elaborating a bourgeois world-view through painting, they were necessarily wholly ‘ideological’ and of no value except in the service of the optic of that class. In stressing that the relation­ship of a work of art to history (and I did not mean art history) was decisive, I tended to underestimate the capacity of certain elements within the bourgeois Fine Art tradition to serve as means of approaching what Timpanaro called non- superstructural areas of reality.

Now these are complex problems which I will be developing and exploring elsewhere. But, broadly, my attitude to certain elements in the bourgeois pictorial aesthetic is (roughly) comparable to Timpanaro’s attitude towards the achievements of the natural sciences. Let me give one example. I am convinced that the theory and practice of expression as it developed within the Western Fine Art tradition is not reducible to ideology, but, on the contrary, gives many fruitful indications of where we might be looking for the material bases of significant aspects of pictorial and sculptural aesthetics.

I have already said something about this in my discussions of the painters Bomberg and Hoyland. The point is sufficiently significant to bear repeating here. In the Renaissance, a theory of expression emerged based upon the empirical study of anatomy. Alberti, one of its earliest theorists, believed that a good painting functioned by evoking emotions in the viewer through the expressiveness of its subjects. The ‘scientific’, or material basis of painting was thus rooted in the study of physiognomy and musculature. These were not sufficient for good expression: a brilliant anatomical painter might fail to call forth the emotional response in his viewers. Nonetheless, within this tradition of expression, there was no way round anatomy. In general, it remains true that as Western artists moved away from the anatomical base, as they came to prefer style to the scalpel, painting fell into Mannerism, where the painter’s primary preoccupation seems to be with his own devices and conventions, rather than with the representation of expression as learned from empirical experience. Inevitably, ideology then subsumed the search for truth.

By the end of the 19th century, the old science of expression was beginning to break up, or, to be more accurate (with the exception of certain pockets and enclaves such as the Slade in Britain), it had shifted out of the Fine Art arena and was being pursued by scientists like Darwin, author of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Artists were increasingly preoccupied with a new theory of expression — whose rudimentary ‘moment of becoming’ is, as a matter of fact, discernible even in High Renaissance anatomical expression. Expression came to refer more and more to what the artist expressed through his work, rather than to the expressiveness of his or her subjects. Indeed, the artist became, in a new sense, the subject of all his paintings, and the relevance of the old, ‘objective’, anatomical science of expression withered.

However, like the old, the new theory of expression was also ultimately rooted in the body, though in this case in the body of the artist himself. In Abstract Expressionism — and I am referring not only to the New York movement, but also its precursors and parallels elsewhere — the body of the artist is expressed through such phenomena as scale, rhythm, and simulation of somatic process. (This is quite obviously true of a painter like Pollock.) But again, as in classical expression, physiological depiction was not pursued for its own sake — even when it was skilfully done. Rothko might not have been able to render to us the physiognomy of Moses, Venus, or Laocoon — but he could, through the new expression, vividly introduce us to the face of his own despair. (But just as abstract expression was present as a ‘moment of becoming’ within High Renaissance anatomical expression — and as a significant element in much Romantic painting — so High Renaissance anatomical expression is present as a critical residue within much abstract expression. It is perfectly possible to talk about the anatomy of De Kooning, the drawing of Newman, the physiognomy of Rothko.) But just as the Renaissance science of expression had tumbled into mannerism, so too did the new abstract expression. Arguably, it was even more prone to do so because its guarantor was not so much the ‘objective’ discoveries of observation and the dissecting room, but rather the authenticity of the artist, his truth to lived experience. Similarly, the development of ‘Modernism’ saw the efflorescence of a Crocean, idealist, notion of ‘expression’ — which paralleled the re-entry of idealism into the physical sciences at the beginning of the century — which sought to detach expression decisively from any relationship to the body, or material practice, and to locate its source in some spiritual domain. Now I do not think that we, as socialists involved in cultural practices, will get far by clinging to the Crocean idealist concept of expression or its derivatives. I do, however, feel that we could advance beyond the present impasse in Fine Art practices by re-examining the full gamut of expression which roots itself in experience of and through the body. Here, for example, we might find many answers to such problems as the historical ‘transcendence’ of the expression of the Lady of Warka; the science of expression allows us to identify one way in which the art of the past, and of other cultures, can ‘speak to us’ without invoking eternal essences or any such nonsense. (A grimace is also a transformation of material.) But this is merely to point in the direction of my own future research.

My defence of the Fine Art tradition is not aestheticist, but part of that defence of ‘man’ against both the structures of capitalism and the reductions of resurgent Stalinism in the theorisations of the left. I would like to end with a final quote from Edward Thompson: ‘The homeland of Marxist theory remains where it has always been, the real human object, in all its manifestations (past and present) . . . ’ Thus my defence of drawing, painting and sculpture is my contribution to the defence of that ‘homeland of Marxist theory . . . the real human object,’ and my contribution to the struggle for what admittedly seems to me at present a remote possibility, the realization through the historical process of a society in which men and women, as biological beings necessarily entering into social life, can live as fully and as happily as is possible within those limits which nature places upon us.

MODERN ART: Overweening Treachery, and Suchlike

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)

MODERN ART: Goodbye to all that!

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

MODERN ART: Against Internationalism

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)

MODERN ART: Where Was The Art Of The Seventies?

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

Where Was The Art Of The Seventies?

by Peter Fuller, 1980

Future art historians will look back on the 1970s as the time when modernism breathed its last. Two experiences I had in the closing weeks of the decade underline this. The first was my visit to the Post- Impressionist exhibition at the Royal Academy. This made me recall how ‘modern art’ arrived belatedly in Britain when Roger Fry organized his famous exhibition, ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ at the Grafton Gallery in 1910. Historically, Post-Impressionism was the ‘moment of becoming’ of modernism. But for me it was also that in a more personal sense. As an adolescent, I first became interested in modern art through reproductions of Post-Impressionist paintings. At Burlington House I found that, unlike myself, my first loves had not begun to age and wilt. I felt exhilarated. How good the Cezannes, Van Goghs, and Gauguins looked — especially that great Gauguin, Contesbarbares, which glows and beckons from the depths of its mysterious purple suffusions. I felt again all the excitement of my first discovery of the painting of that moment when modernism first discovered itself. I was overwhelmed by a sense of promise.

But I also found myself wondering. The Post-Impres­sionists did not share a common ‘style’, nor did they see themselves as belonging to a coherent movement. Even so, the best works in the exhibition had something significant in common. I tried to define what it was. As opposed to the official or salon artists of their day, I thought, these painters were asserting the right to imagine the world other than the way it was, or, as Roger Fry himself put it, they ‘do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality.’

The promise with which a Cezanne, Gauguin, or Van Gogh is saturated springs from apparently technical, formal, or ‘aesthetic’ factors : the way in which colours are combined, or the material reworking of the picture space. For example, in the exhibition there is a magnificent late Cezanne — one of those in which he begins to offer a new view of man in nature. But Cezanne only realized this vision through the way in which he refused orthodox perspective, broke up the traditional picture space, and re-ordered it into an elaborate structuring of coloured planes. I am not, of course, saying that the formal or plastic qualities of a Cezanne are the only ones that count. Rather, in this Cezanne, content has become form. It makes no sense to separate the two.

Paul Cezanne

Cezanne seemed to exemplify what I think Marcuse meant when he wrote that the critical function of art, its contribution to the struggle for liberation, resided solely in aesthetic form. ‘The truth of art,’ Marcuse declared, ‘lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality (i.e. of those who established it) to define what is real.’ For Marcuse, ‘The autonomy of art contains the categorical imperative : “things must change”.’ I am sure that it is because he expressed this imperative through the materiality of his painted forms that Cezanne exults me.

And now for the second of my fin de decade experiences. In December, I was invited to sit on a panel at an Artists’ Union meeting. Afterwards, in the pub, I found myself surrounded by conceptual artists, ‘political’ artists, and someone who kept on about art practice and the ‘new media’. Like myself, they were almost all of the left : but I could not help feeling intense discomfort. This was accentuated when a man wearing a hat and an ear-ring (presumably in homage to that low charlatan, Joseph Beuys) handed me a copy of his new ‘avant-garde’ magazine, P.S. I opened it. The lead article was head-lined, ‘Mutation through Auto Surgery’. It recounted the true story of an unfortunate man who, troubled by his sexual drives, had cut open his own belly with surgical instruments and almost succeeded in excising his adrenal glands.

The P.S. article was clarifying. It vividly demonstrated how the great promise in the origins of modernism had reduced itself to the pornography of despair. It made me recall how, over the last ten years as an art critic, I have been invited to attend to all manner of desperate phenomena ranging from a man seated in a bath of bull’s blood, to used sanitary towels, amateurish philosophic speculation, stretched gin bottles, an infant’s soiled nappy liners, brick stacks, and grey monochromes — not to mention expanses of unworked pigment and matter posing as painting or sculpture respectively — and to consider all this as ‘Art’. Whether I accepted such invitations, or refused them, the end result was the same : I was called a negative critic. But that P. S. article confirmed my feelings about the correlation between formlessness and hopelessness. The gross reduction and widespread renunciation of the expressive, material possibili­ties of painting, sculpture and drawing by many late modernist artists has involved the loss of the potentiality for aesthetic transformation which these media afford. To quote from Marcuse once more: ‘Renunciation of the aesthetic form is abdication of responsibility. It deprives art of the very form in which it can create that other reality within the established one — the cosmos of hope.’

I began writing about art as the 1960s were running out. It seemed then that every fatuous dilettante who had been thrown into prominence during the previous ten years was being deified in full-scale retrospectives or elaborate survey exhibitions in the major art institutions. At this time, the Tate gave retrospectives to Lichtenstein, Hamilton who went on to paint flower pictures besmirched with turds and Andrex toilet tissue because, he said, he had tried everything else — minimalism, Oldenburg and Warhol. At the Hayward I saw Caro, kinetics, *Pop Art Redefined’, Riley, i.e. ‘Op’ art, and Stella retrospectives. At the Whitechapel, Hockney, then the same age as I am today, was celebrated like an old master. There was ’60s sculpture at the ICA, and in Bristol you could have seen a full-scale retrospective for fairy painter, Peter Blake, whose ability as an artist is as concrete as his garden gnomes.

Contrast all this institutional celebration of new British and American art with what is happening, or rather not happening, ten years on. In the closing days of Norman Reid’s administration, it seemed that the Tate was becoming a hermetically sealed, brick bunker after the last stand in the battle of late modernism had been fought and lost : it was almost defunct as an exhibition space for immediately contemporary art. At the Hayward recently one has been able to see ‘Outside Art’, by amateurs, eccentrics and the insane, and a jamboree of nostalgia dredged up from the thirties. For whatever reason not one artist emerged and made any significant cultural impact within the last ten years. At the end of the seventies, the institutions have not been able to identify any current artists or tendencies they consider worth a second look, let alone worth full canonization.

But, if there was a difference in climate between the ‘art world’ of the sixties and that of the seventies there was also, sadly, a continuity in the development of late modernist art itself. I want to focus on this by looking at the work of an American artist who is symptomatic of the ’60s: Andy Warhol. Warhol, you may remember, was a sometime commercial artist who surfaced in the reaction against an exhausted abstract expressionism. Between 1962 and 1964, he produced a series of 2,000 ‘art objects’ in his ‘Factory’. I say he produced: his ‘paintings’ however were made through repeated application of commercially manufactured silk- screens to canvas. Some paint was added later — usually by Warhol’s assistants. Subject matter was pilfered from commercial media, or what I call ‘the mega-visual tradition’; e.g. transposed news photographs, glamour shots of stars, can labels, dollar bills, etc.

How did the art institutions justify giving so much attention to this sort of thing? Well, when Warhol had his retrospective at the Tate in 1971, Richard Morphet, who is still on the staff there, argued at great length that Warhol’s work was just like ‘all major art’. In the catalogue, he went on, and on and on about the fact that these works contain some paint, i.e. about what he calls ‘the reality of paint itself as a deposit on the surface’ — as if this automatically put Warhol on a par with Titian. ‘A major effect of the experience of looking at (Warhol’s) paintings is an unusually immediate awareness of the two-dimensional facts of their painted surfaces.’ We may recall that the paint was put there by assistants. This did not stop Morphet acclaiming Warhol as ‘the sensitive master of a wide variety of surface incident’.

Although Morphet recognized ‘the immensely important operation’ in Warhol’s work of ‘passivity, detachment and chance’, he yet managed to detect (or so he thought) a flickering residue of artistic imagination in the way the things were made. About one work, Marilyn Monroe’s Lips of 1962, Morphet wrote:

To depict Marilyn’s lips 168 times in 49 square feet is a more remarkable innovation than may first appear. Requiring selection, masking, processing, enlargement, transposition and application, in conjunction with decisions on canvas size, placing, colour and handling, it means that the finished painting is a complex and calculated artefact, which is not only unique, but strikingly different from any that another individual might have produced.

Thus Morphet sought to rehabilitate this vacuous poseur for the ‘High Art’ tradition. (En passant, some years later Morphet distinguished himself again in a 5,000 word article in The Burlington defending Andre’s notorious brick stack: he praised its ‘limpid clarity’ and called it a positive statement of ‘general relevance to modern society’.)

But what did left critics say about Warhol? Were they exposing the mystification that surrounded his work? With a few exceptions, unfortunately not. Let me explain. During the sixties attacks on the ‘unique’ or ‘privileged’ art object and the ‘traditional media’ (i.e. painting and sculpture) became the vogue. For example, in 1968 the French critic, Michel Ragon — I could have picked on scores of others — wrote, ‘the artist is a man of the past because he is prejudiced in favour of the unique work, of the artificial scarcity of his product so as to increase the price; he leans toward outmoded techniques.’ Ragon called the artist ‘an avatar of the artisan class’, and claimed that soon, ‘he will be the only artisan in a world that will finally have achieved its industrial revolution.’ Artists were, he felt, counter-revolutionaries and ‘anti­technologists’. The future, however, belonged to automation ‘which alone can reduce the hours of work and thus release the worker from his oppressed condition giving him access to culture and genuine leisure’. So, out with all ‘objects of aesthetic consumption’, not just the ‘armchair’ art of Matisse, but even Guernica too, and in with an art which escaped ‘from the limitations of the easel painting, from being a mere wall adornment’.

This sort of talk informed the left apologetics for Warhol. For example, in 1970, Rainer Crone, a Marxist, published a monograph describing Warhol as ‘the most important living artist in North America’ and praising — a phrase to remember — his ‘anaesthetic revolutionary practice’. Crone wrote that ‘Warhol was the first to create something more than traditional “fine art” for the edification of a few.’ He claimed that he did it ‘by combining the easel painting with a realistic prefabricated visual content, thus providing us with a new critical understanding of the easel painting.’ Crone saw Warhol’s creativity as limited to the selection of subjects but praised his ‘suppression of personalized expression’ in favour of what he calls, ‘a socially meaningful conception of the artwork’.

Thus the art institutions were saying, ‘Warhol is all right because this is art. Look, real paint! Even a dash of imagination.’ And a vociferous sector of the art-left was saying, ‘Warhol is all right because this isn’t like art at all.’ I accept neither of these arguments. Warhol was a vandal. The key renunciation he made was that of his expressive relationship to his materials, by which I mean both the paint itself and his representational conventions. The way in which his ‘paintings’ were made precluded the possibility of there being any realized, expressive correlation between the imaginative vision of the artist and the concrete working of his forms in paint. His pictures might just as well have been made by anyone else, and indeed they often were. (Ironically, given Crone’s claims, although Warhol thus shattered the possibility of aesthetic authenticity, market authenticity remained unaffected. A ‘genuine’ Warhol, whatever that means, fetches much more than a ‘fake’.) But Warhol’s real crime is that he threw away what Marcuse called the power of art to break the monopoly of established reality. In his hands, or rather out of them, painting came close to being a mere reflection of the prevailing ideology and the dominant mode of production.

His assault upon ‘personalized expression’ was not the initiation of a new revolutionary practice : he was rather the harbinger of what I set out by calling the pornography of despair. Anyone who doubts this should look, if he can stand it, at the magazine Interview, which Warhol has been publishing in the 1970s. In its chic-right punkishness, it surpasses even P. S. for sheer nastiness. But I have dwelt so long on Warhol and the responses to him because they epitomize the dual tragedy of the art of the last two decades. Mainstream, late modernist, institutional art was relin­quishing its specific material practices — the skills of painting, sculpture, and drawing — and thereby, it would seem, the capacity to create imaginative, ideologically- transcendent forms. Instead of resisting and exposing this progressive impoverishment, the art-left was forever seeking rationalizations for it.

The destruction of imaginative expression is even more manifest in abstract art than in representational. Elsewhere, I have written about the heroic but largely unsuccessful attempts of the classical generation of abstract expressionists to find a new means of painterly expression, rooted in the body of the artist as subject rather than in perceived anatomy (as in Renaissance art) or in the anatomy of perception (as in, say, Impressionism). The search for a way through from Abstract Expressionism’s magnificent failure was occluded by the rise of anaesthetic dogmas and practices.

In 1962, in an essay called ‘After Abstract Expressionism’ Clement Greenberg, the most powerful critic of the sixties, wrote, ‘it has been established . . . that the irreducibility of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conventions or norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness.’ He held that ‘the observance of merely these two norms is enough to create an object which can be experienced as a picture.’ Thus, he claimed, ‘a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture — though not necessarily a successful one.’ He maintained that this reduction expanded rather than contracted the possibilities of the pictorial: all sorts of ‘visual incidents and items’ that used to belong wholly to the realm of the aesthetically meaningless now lent themselves to being experienced pictorially.

Greenberg has been much criticized of late for his aesthetic conservatism. However, my quarrel with Greenberg is that he conceded far too much to a pseudo-historicist art ‘radicalism’. It is true that Greenberg always insisted on the importance of ‘aesthetic consistency’ which, he argued, showed itself ‘only in results and never in methods or means’. Nonetheless, in practice he preferred painters who were in the process of renouncing their constitutive expressive means: Pollock, who dripped paint off sticks, rather than De Kooning, and later painters who used spray guns (Olitski), stained the canvas (Frankenthaler), or poured pigment out of buckets (Louis). All these artists had a residue of aesthetic transformation of materials in their practice (as Greenberg had in his theories); but they were well on the way to the dumb automatism of Warhol and minimalism.

Indeed, Greenberg showed comparable indifference to the imaginative, expressive work of the artist. He had little respect for the latter’s creative integrity and would enter deeply into the lives and studies of his proteges effectively to instruct them as to what the next step in the art-historical process would be. If recent painting has an author or subject for Greenberg it is much more the art-historical process itself, rather than the individual artist, who emerges in his theory as the mere effect of a subject outside himself — art history. Greenberg describes, though he claims never to have prescribed, modernism as engaged upon a quest for the ‘essence’ of painting which he sees in purely physicalist terms as ‘the ineluctable flatness of the support’. I believe that his diminution of the importance of the imaginative, material process of expression was a significant factor in the reduction of art towards ideology. The difference between an Olitski and a Pink Camay soap advertisement is discernible, though hardly significant.

Greenberg believed himself to be defending the poten­tialities of painting as a medium: but his physicalist definition, while it allows in the category of the pictorial, cricket-pitches, table-tops, carpets and tiles, excludes the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (which is not flat). Thus, despite all his protestations, I would insist that Greenberg helped to open the floodgates for what was to come, i.e. the dissolution of the medium within the modernist tradition. For myself, as you will see, I insist that any definition of a picture must contain reference to the fact that it is not just a thing (although of course it is necessarily that) but consists of materials, including pictorial conventions, which have been expressively worked by an imaginative human subject.

The central contradiction in Greenberg’s project was that he clung to a conception of the autonomy of aesthetic experience which was at odds with his modernist, stylistic historicizing. Many of his followers rejected the aesthetic element in his work and kept the rest. William Rubin of MOMA was behind the fabrication of Frank Stella, a fully ‘automatist’ painter, at least in the 1960s. ‘I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the “old values” in painting’, Stella told Rubin, ‘the “humanistic” values that they always find on the canvas.’ Meanwhile, Stella professed himself committed to the presumably inhuman possibilities of ‘modular repetition’, i.e. stripes. Sort of Warhol without the faces.

Meanwhile back in London, Caro was importing parallel ideas into sculpture. His ‘radical abstraction’ dehumanized the medium by rejecting all anthropomorphic reference. He also ‘dematerialized’ it by deploying steel elements, painted so they appeared weightless, as lines and surfaces in space rather than as masses or volumes. Caro abandoned traditional expressive techniques of sculpture in favour of the placement of preconstituted elements joined by welds. As Warhol had ‘picked-up’ images and techniques from the mass media, so Caro, working in three dimensions, turned to industrial production for I-beams, tank-tops, and other prefabricated components. Elsewhere, I have shown how Caro’s work belongs to the culture of the early 1960s : he emerged in 1963, the year of Harold Wilson’s ‘white-heat of the technological revolution’ speech, and of the publication of Honest to God, which attacked the anthropomorphic conception of the deity, and sought to render him ‘radically abstract’ by bringing him off his pedestal and constituting him as ‘the ground of our being’. Caro’s Warholesque ‘suppression of personalized expression’ made it hard for him to resist the ideology with which he was saturated.

Anthony Caro

But Caro is not as dumb as Warhol. I doubt whether in the long run he will be remembered as having made a serious contribution to sculpture, but his best pieces, like Orangerie, seem aesthetically successful in a way which differs from that possible through mimetic sculpture. Michael Fried is surely right to suggest that in such works Caro has so transformed his materials that they are expressive of certain experiences of being in the body — like the best abstract painting. These, then, are Caro’s ‘humanist’ rather than his ‘formalist’ sculptures. But the achievements and failures of Caro’s practice are one thing : his pedagogy is another. His influence has been disastrous upon two generations of sculptors.

Take those of Caro’s pupils and followers known as Stockwell Depot sculptors. Peter Hide, the most prominent, simply welds together chunks of matter (steel), comparing what he does with the ‘freedom’ of growth. Where then are the resistances, conventional and material, with which Hide struggles to create form? Hide has abandoned expression in theory and practice. I do not think that, in any meaningful sense, he can be said to be making sculpture at all. From Hide, it is but a short step to heaping up stuff in its natural conformations and calling that sculpture too. And that, of course, is what Barry Flanagan, another of Caro’s pupils, did throughout the 1970s in his exhibitions of sand, wood, hessian, rope, sticks, etc. in heaps, piles, stacks and bundles.

Caro has claimed it is not his fault if people take his view that ‘sculpture can be anything’ so literally as to call walking and breathing sculpture. But this is as if Greenberg was trying to claim that he could not be held responsible if people chose to call merely stretched or tacked-up canvases pictures. Caro’s reductionist position on expression, combined with his emphasis upon ‘the onward of art’, was inevitably the immediate precursor of the view that only the material existence of the sculpture as object mattered. And if, of course, sculpture and painting are just ‘stuff’ in the world, then why bother with the stuff at all? Why not walking, breathing, or cutting out your adrenal glands? Physicalists like Greenberg and Caro are inevitably fathers of the total idealists, the conceptualists who abandon the medium altogether.

Flanagan was also a prominent exhibitor in a large-scale exhibition, held at the ICA in 1969, called, ‘When Attitudes Become Form’, and sub-titled ‘Live in your head’. Interestingly, he chose to exhibit, among other things, pieces of unstretched canvas propped up against the wall with sticks. This was the coming-out party for the ‘non-art’ names of the 1970s : it was the first time I saw work by Andre, Beuys — the felt, fat, dead hares, and political parties man — Bochner, Burgin, Dibbets, Haacke, Kosuth, Serra (walls of black pitch) and so forth.

The work ranged from loosely folded pieces of cloth, to documentation about earthworks, mathematical calculations, cartography, pseudo-sociological surveys. All the tiresome ballyhoo of ‘Post-Object’, ‘Idea Art’, ‘Art Povera’ and ‘Conceptual Art’. For example, one artist had sent a plastic box by post to an undeliverable address. When this was returned he wrapped it again, and sent it to another such address. And so on, and so forth. On the wall was a sheet of paper stating that the last package he got back, ‘all registered mail receipts, and a map join with this statement to form the system of documentation that completes this work.’ This sort of untransformed, petit-bourgeois, bureaucratic practice was acclaimed as somehow ‘radical’. In the catalogue, Flarald Szeemann claimed, ‘the medium no longer seems important . . . The activity of the artist has become the dominant theme and content.’ These artists, he said, aspired ‘to freedom from the object’; while Charles Flarrison wrote of ‘a rejection of the notion of form as a specific and other identity to be imposed upon material’.

By 1970, Donald Karshan was introducing a major exhibition of conceptual art in New York with the words: In this end of the twentieth century we now know that art does indeed exist as an idea. And we know that quality exists in the thinking of the artist, not in the object he employs — if he employs an object at all. We begin to understand that painting and sculpture are simply unreal in the coming age of computers and instant travel.

Meanwhile, in a 1971 essay, ‘The Education of the Un-Artist’, Allan Kaprow praised those who ‘operate outside the pale of the art establishment, that is, in their heads or in the daily or natural domain.’ Unfortunately, however, the ‘Un-Artist’ proliferated within the art institutions as well. In Britain, conceptual art became the seventies orthodoxy, that which was proclaimed in Studio International and Arts Council galleries. A big promotion of all this was ‘The New Art’ at the Hayward in 1972. The Tate, rising to the occasion yet again, wheeled out another of its resident, anaesthetic clowns, Anne Seymour, who wrote in the catalogue that all these conceptualists had in common an ability to ‘look reality in the eye’. But, she added:

. . . reality doesn’t have to be a nude lady of uncertain age sitting on a kitchen chair. It can also be a Balinese ‘monkey dance’, a piano tuner, running seven miles a day for seven days, or seeing your feet at eye level. It can mean that the artist can work in 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. The artist, in other words, need not bother about form or aesthetic transformation. He can just do his own thing. And that’s official. By such logic one might as well recommend that National Health doctors should be freed from the ‘discomforts’ of a medical training they don’t appreciate . . .

One such new style British ‘artist’ was Victor Burgin, one of the few who emerged to make a name and a career for himself in the 1970s. Burgin is not an eccentric, or an outsider. His slick and empty work has been included in two out of three official Hayward Annuals: he even gets in on the photography shows. The abysmal Burgin is, in fact, a salon artist, a ubiquitous Bouguereau of our time.

But Burgin helps us to answer the question, ‘Where was the art of the 1970s?’ In 1969, he stapled a ‘path’ to the floor of a London gallery. The ‘path’ consisted of 21 ‘modular units’ (of course) each of which was a full-size photograph of the section of floor to which it was attached. Burgin justified this with a theory of ‘Situational Aesthetics’ arguing that recent attitudes to materials in art were based on awareness of ‘the interdependence of all substances within the ecosystem of earth’. The artist, Burgin claimed, was ceasing to see himself as a ‘creator of new material forms’, and might as well subtract materials from the environment as put them there. ‘As art is being seen increasingly in terms of behaviour,’ Burgin wrote, ‘so materials are being seen in terms simply of quantity rather than quality.’ Naturally, holding such views, Burgin heaped scorn on painting and sculpture which he described as ‘the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud’, and the ‘chipping apart of rocks and the sticking together of pipes’, respectively: these material practices he described as ‘arbitrary and fetishistic restrictions’ imposed ‘in the name of timeless aesthetic values’.

Burgin’s piece can thus be seen as the negative of, say, an Andre tile or brick piece : the latter is just untransformed stuff, legitimized by ideology. Burgin’s photographs declared the presence of the absence of the stuff. Late modernist art thenceforth became either nothing at all — I knew of seven painters working in London in the 1970s who made nothing but grey monochromes — or ideology, tout court, divorced from even the semblance of material practice. The late modernism of the 1970s thus disappears into an anaesthetic black-hole, or, to use a less conceptually suspicious analogy, up its own arse.

You may remember Burgin’s 1977 piece at the Hayward Annual. He decked a room with examples of the same printed poster which showed a chic advertising photograph of a glamorous model and a jet-set man. Not even Warhol ever stole from the prevailing ideology of the mega-visual tradition quite as blatantly as that. So how did they justify putting this on a gallery wall. The photograph was sandwiched between the slogans, ‘What does possession mean to you?’ and ‘7% of our population own 84% of our wealth’. Here we have Warhol, less the residual materiality of the paint and that ever-so-imperceptible trace of imagination, plus an added extra ingredient. Political content! For some of the art-left — but not, I hasten to add, for me — that made Burgin a pillar of virtue.

Burgin was just a ring-leader of a tendency that dominated the official, so-called ‘avant-garde’ in Britain in the seventies. A surfeit of space and attention was given to such practitioners as Art Language for interminable verbal obfuscations about matters on which a first-year philosophy student could put them right; Gilbert and George — tedious poseurs, yet the Tate bought a video tape of them getting drunk; Stephen Willatts, author of sub-sociological schemes, like ‘The Artist as Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour’ and — you’ll enjoy this one — ‘The Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs’; Mary Kelly, with her saddeningly forensic presentation of faecal stains on her child’s nappy liners and hocus-pocus rationalizations about her obsessional neurotic condition copied from Lacan’s theories about the ‘de-centred subject’. But the list is interminable. It includes APG, Hilliard, McClean, Simon Read, Stezaker, and Tremlett. All are in effect delivering up anaesthetic pieces of structured ideology.

If you think I have exaggerated the importance of this tendency, you have obviously, like many, been just too bored to attend to the art of the 1970s. Over the last ten years, such artists have consistently been promoted as the ‘avant-garde’, the way forward for art in Britain. After numerous Arts Council and British Council sponsored shows, the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris organized a survey looking back over the British art of the 1970s, ‘Un Certain Art Anglais,’. .. and there they all were again. If I have been a negative critic, I have had good reason for being so.

It would be wrong to imply that, even within late modernism itself, there was no fight back against concep­tualism. By the middle of the decade painters and sculptors were protesting against their eclipse. However, developments in conceptualism had, as we have seen, been foreshadowed in much of the work of the late 1950s and 1960s. The defences of painting and sculpture thus tended to be made by those who had in fact been involved in the ‘physicalist’ reductions of them. For example, in 1974, Andrew Forge organized a major survey exhibition of British painting at the Hayward Gallery : he wrote, ‘What faces painting (and sculpture too) ... is a compound of antagonism and indifference.’ But he went on to define painting as ‘coloured flat surfaces’, with no reference to expressive or aesthetic transformation of materials. Predic­tably, many of the paintings by new artists exhibited in this Hayward exhibition, and elsewhere during the decade were just that: coloured, flat surfaces. They deserved all the inattention they got.

William Tucker

The following year, 1975, William Tucker attempted to do the same for sculpture at the Hayward. He subsequently explained that his exhibition, ‘The Condition of Sculpture’, was devised in the context of ‘a general hostility in the art world to sculpture as physical and substantial, as “thing”.’ But it was a tedious spectacle: room after room was filled with placements of welded I-beam, expanses of steel plate, with, in effect, ‘things’. Predictably, Tucker, too, produced a physicalist definition of sculpture: sweeping aside the fact that for all but the last few years of its history, longer than that of civilization itself, ‘sculpture has manifested itself in the form of human or animal imagery’, Tucker insisted that the image was not primary. ‘It is through the rendering of the human form,’ he wrote, ‘and of drapery . . . that we are made aware of the underlying condition of gravity.’ Thus he drew the ‘fundamental limits’ of sculpture below the expressive image, defining them as ‘subjection to gravity’ and ‘revelation through light’. These, he said, constituted sculpture’s ‘primary condition’ which holds not merely for our time and place but for any time and place. If these limits were attended to, Tucker said, sculpture would be seen to ‘advance and prosper’. But, again, his definition is not of a sculpture at all : it applies to any damn thing which exists in the world, and can be seen — a cup, a table, a corpse, a heap of sand, a human body, a few pieces of aluminium tubing, fitted together a la Nigel Hall. Tucker complained, ‘I have found it more or less impossible, to persuade students at St. Martin’s, up until a year or two ago to actually make anything at all. They have been so busy taking photographs, digging holes, or cavorting about in the nude.’ But, like Caro, he entirely failed to see how his own reductionist view of sculpture was the inevitable instigator of this. After all, I should think it is more fun cavorting in the nude than fitting those wretched sticks of piping together.

Now it is true that, in the latter part of the decade, there were significant stirrings in the traditional media. I will say something about these: but I have accused late modernism of relinquishing the expressive potentialities of painting and sculpture. I now want to explain what I mean by ‘expression’ and why it is worth preserving. Well, I mean something both physical and affective: facial expression provides a good analogy. An expression is a transformation of the visible musculature of the face in a way which reveals inward emotion; this may produce affective responses in others, who may be moved, or alternatively experience our expression as inauthentic. Expression is intimately involved with the emotional and bodily basis of human being: expressions of suffering, rage, and ecstasy are, for example, similar in every society. But historically variable social conventions power­fully inflect expression too. A Geisha girl may greet us: but she does not greet us as we greet each other. Similarly, expression in art involves a transformation of materials according to inner dictates in ways which are intended to have an effect upon others. Expression in art, too, has much to do with the culture within which it is realized; and yet when it is successful it does not seem to be culture-bound. It touches upon areas of experience that have a relative constancy about them. As a socialist, I defend painting and sculpture for their particular expressive potentialities which, I believe, enable them to participate in the construction of what Marcuse called ‘the cosmos of hope’ in a way that, say, a photograph just cannot. But expression cannot be realized without an imaginative human subject who acts upon and significantly transforms the materials (physical and conventional) cf a specific medium to produce a concrete work of art. Late modernism thus jettisoned the constituent elements of expression. I want to look at them more closely, to see how they combine together.

Take first the imaginative human subject, or artist. In some quarters, today, the very concept of a human subject is under attack. Now we live in a society which, like any other, is in large part determined by the underlying structure and movement of the economy which is determinative (though not in any simple or unmediated way) over wide areas of social, institutional, political, intellectual and cultural life. The way we think, structure our feelings, and relate to one another is thus in many respects historically specific, or ideological. Some commentators have gone on from this to say that ideology is everything. They claim it constitutes our ‘lived relation’ to the world : we do not so much think as ‘are thought’; we do not act, but ‘are acted’ by a structure outside ourselves whose effects we become. Much late modernist art reflects this sort of thinking. I have described how Warhol’s practice and Greenberg’s aesthetics gave but a nominal significance to the artist as creative subject. Similarly, conceptual artist, Marie Yates, echoes these fashionable views when she declares, ‘there is no practice except by and in ideology’, and claims that she has finally rid herself of ‘romantic idealism’ and come to acknowledge ‘the fiction of the unity of one’s work or the individual as origin of such’.

‘Bourgeois individualism’ was one thing: but this assault upon creative individuality is quite another. It belongs, I think, to the ideology of monopoly capitalism. Certainly, late modernism progressively shunted value in art away from the creative artist into the historicist process, dissolving it into the movement of a continuum of styles and technologies, a flux of ideologies. If it were true that the value of art was nothing but an ideologically specific phenomenon, then the great art of the past would appear as alien and opaque to us. We could not begin to enjoy it without a complete reconstruction of the conditions under which it was produced. But manifestly this is not the case. Through its authentic expression the greatest art of the past posits a human subject, and reveals a human practice, which tears through the veils of ideology to speak of ‘relatively constant’ elements in human experience. It affirms that we are not mere effects of an alien structure, that we can, as Sartre once put it, make something of that which has been made of us.

There is nothing mysterious about the individuality to which authentic art bears witness. We are certainly shaped by ideology; but we are also immersed in the natural and physical worlds. We exist as psycho-biological entities: as well as entering into social life, each of us lives out a biological destiny, comprised of such things as birth, growth, love, reproduction, ageing and death. Of course, we experience these things through social mediations : but these are not so transforming that it is impossible to speak of an ‘underlying human condition’ common to all who possess human being. This condition is constituted not just by basic physical characteristics that have remained effectively unchanged since the beginnings of human civilization, but also by such common sentiments as pain, fear, sorrow, hope, love, affection, and mourning for the loss of others. It also contains certain, as yet historically unrealized potentialities, such as the potentiality for social life itself. Great art, authentic art, makes use of its necessarily ideologically-determined pictorial conventions to dip down into this rich terrain of relative constancy and constant potentiality.

Late modernism and its left apologists deny this : but the best Marxists have long recognized it. I have learned much from the work of Christopher Caudwell, a brilliant British writer who died in 1937, aged 29, fighting with the International Brigade in Spain. Caudwell saw that ‘great art — art which performs a wide and deep feat of integration — has something universal, something timeless and enduring from age to age.’ Caudwell tried to explain this, saying: ‘This timlessness we now see to be the timelessness of the instincts, the unchanging secret face of the genotype which persists beneath all the rich superstructure of civilization.’ Marcuse, too, saw that ‘art envisions a concrete universal humanity, Menschlichkeit, which no particular class can incorporate, not even the proletariat, Marx’s “universal class”. And Max Raphael, a great Marxist scholar, saw in paleolithic art ‘a symbol of our future freedom’: for him, the great art of the past was a constant reminder that ‘our present subjection to forces other than nature is purely transitory.’ Authentic expression then, by its very nature, protests against ideology, and refutes the view that the human subject is constituted wholly within ideology.

A vital element in both ‘artistic expression’ and this underlying human condition is imagination: this is our capacity to conceive of things other than the way they are. Like the potentiality for fully social life itself, the faculty of imagination is rooted in the long period of attachment and dependency which characterizes the infant-mother relation­ship in our species. The infant cannot adapt immediately to the world like a new-born foal: he lacks the motor-power even to seek out the mother’s breast at the moment he feels hungry. Imagination envelops the infant’s experience as ‘reality’ constrains that of the foal. In later life imagination manifests many ‘infantile’ features: a certain receptivity, a ‘negative capability’, a renunciation of rational mental process, and a putting of reality in brackets. But imaginative withdrawal also implies richer and more fully human action when one, as it were, returns to the world. Marx knew this very well. In Capital he describes imagination as that which distinguishes the labour of men from that of animals like bees, ants or beavers. A man is able to conceive of the goal of his labour before he embarks upon realizing it.

Under present modes of production, however this capacity to work freely upon materials according to our imagination is severely limited. The assembly line or office worker with his ‘modular units’ and mail receipts is engaged in something more like the work of an ant. In these circumstances imagination becomes split off from future action: it tends to be reduced to mere ‘fancy’, which can be locked into the ‘other realities’ offered by such ideological systems as advertising, science-fiction, or religion. The left has often (and rightly) protested against this last stage in the process : but it has rarely given full weight to the true power of creative imagination. Marx called imagination ‘that great faculty so largely contributing to the elevation of mankind’. But Marcuse is entirely correct to relate the reduction of art to ideology in much later Marxist aesthetics to what he calls ‘a devaluation of the entire realm of subjectivity, a devaluation not only of the subject as ego cogito, the rational subject, but also of inwardness, emotions and imagination.’ Regrettably, the art-left has been no exception. But authentic expression can challenge this eclipse and occlusion of the imagination.

The artist can resist the reduction of our dreams to commercial fantasies, and the banalization of our hopes for a better world into a preference for one brand of soft drink rather than another. He can offer a ‘moment of becoming’ in his work which, as it were, realizes an affective instance of that future as an imaginative image now. Caudwell once wrote:

The poem adapts the heart to a new purpose without changing the eternal desires of men’s hearts. It does so by projecting man into a world of phantasy which is superior to his present reality precisely because it is a world of superior reality — a world of more important reality not yet realized, whose realization demands the very poetry which phantastically anticipates it. Authentically imaginative painting and sculpture can do the same.

But, and this is important, imagination cannot be equated with expression : this would be to fall into the idealist error of Croce who identified art not with some physical, public object but rather with a spiritual act. He held that expression was synonymous with intuition; I am saying that expression can only be realized in and through material. In this respect it is more like work than reverie. Let me draw a parallel from imaginative writing. Raymond Williams has recently stressed the crucial difference between ‘the conception as it moves in the mind’ (whether of a character, the outline of an idea, the perception of a place, or the sense of an action) and what he calls its ‘quite material realization in the words’. Williams says that this realization in the words takes place through a complex process which writers themselves rarely fully understand: it is, he adds, a material process.

Unlike ideas, written ideas, written characters, written actions, etc., are not free. The writer has no choice but to engage with the resources of a specific language. Such resources, Williams argues, are at once ‘enabling and resistant’. Elsewhere, Williams stresses that the stuff upon which the writer works — language — has ‘a very deep material bond’ with the body. He says that communication theories which concentrate ‘on the passing of messages and information’ often miss this. ‘Many poems’, he writes, ‘many kinds of writing, indeed a lot of everyday speech communicate what is in effect life rhythm and the interaction of these life rhythms is probably a very important part of the material process of writing and reading.’ He adds, ‘from a materialist point of view this is at least the direction in which we should look for the foundation of categories that we could if we wish call aesthetic.’

I entirely agree with these observations: but^how much more true these points are of painting and sculpture. Here the matter upon which the artist works consists not just of historically determined pictorial conventions and techniques, like the ‘specific language’ of the writer; but also of definite, physically existent substances — paints, a supporting surface, marble, or bronze — in bodily struggle with which the artist’s expression is realized. Let me stick to painting for a moment. We can say that if we except late modernism, then in Western art at least both these elements of the painter’s materials have themselves involved a definite, and ‘very deep material bond’ with the body. For example, from the Renaissance until the late 19th century, the ‘language’ of paintings was based primarily on the artist’s grasp of perceived, or objective, anatomy: the bodies of others. It was supposed that expression was realized through the accuracy with which the expressiveness of the subject of the painting — Mona Lisa, Venus, Saturn, Griinewald’s Christ, Louis XIV or whatever — was made manifest. The model in Leonardo’s expressive theory was literally physiognomy.

In the late 19th century this began to change through a process by which the subject of the creative process, the artist, became increasingly the subject of the picture, too. American abstract expressionism — especially Pollock — can be seen as an attempt to base a whole system of material expression entirely on the realization of the artist’s ‘life rhythms’ in matter, i.e. paint. I have talked about the historical determinants of this development elsewhere : the point I want to make here is that we have a continuity of expressive practice which is rooted in the human body, whether that is conceived predominantly ‘objectively’ or ‘subjectively’. (We can learn something about expression with a scalpel; and something else by exploring its informing emotions on an analytic couch.) But once we become aware of this continuity, we realize how much ‘abstract expressionism’ there was in works produced according to the canons of classical expression; and how much objective anatomy there is in much abstract painting. I’m not just talking about De Kooning’s women: it makes perfect sense to me to talk of the physiognomy of Rothko.

The fact that a picture has been made by a human being with a body and range of emotions — ‘an underlying human condition’ — not dissimilar from our own is central to the experience of aesthetic effect. I could go on about this : here, I just want to say that in life even before we have words, we express and experience emotion through touch. A caress, kiss, punch, or smack are all physical gestures. The language of emotion — ‘touching’, ‘moving’, ‘uplifting’, ‘transporting’, etc. — reflects this. The affective communication in painting, too, flows from such things as the range of qualitative nuance in the painter’s touch, the imprint of which is visible in the way he has worked his materials. Since we possess similar bodies, and a similar emotional range, we can respond if he is successful in his expression, and we in our receptive attention. But, of course, it is not just a question of touch: scale, com­binations of shapes and colours, the handling of line, and the affective evocations of certain forms of spatial organization even when conventionally determined — can also aspire to be imaginatively expressive of aspects of that rich communality of bodily existence, and its potentialities, which can never be wholly occluded by mere ideology however pervasive it may be.

I think Max Raphael had something like this in mind when he wrote, ‘art is an ever-renewed creative act, the active dialogue between spirit and matter; the work of art holds man’s creative powers in a crystalline suspension from which it can again be transformed into living energies.’

I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere that ‘Art’ is a historically specific concept, one which only came into being with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Art in this sense may indeed be disintegrating under late monopoly capitalism, which has given rise to a mega-visual tradition, characterized by mechanical means of producing and reproducing images. But, you see, the ‘arts’ with a small ‘a’ — including painting, sculpture, and drawing — are not just ideology. They are specific, material practices, with specific, material expressive potentialities — which have not been superseded by technological advance. The art of the 1960s devalued the imaginative, bodily and expressive potentialities of the artist as a creative, human subject. In focusing upon the physical existence of the art-work in isolation, the late modernism of the 1960s produced works that were alienated from men and women; those damn ‘modular units’, mere things. The art of the 1970s went further, abandoning tradition and stuff. Expression had been destroyed. Art revealed itself in the conceptualism of the 1970s as naked ideology.

The art-left, tragically, has endorsed this development. Ragon, you will remember, saw the artist as ‘a man of the past,’ an ‘avatar’, the only artisan in a world that was finally achieving its industrial revolution. Crone praised Warhol’s destruction of ‘personalized expression’. Burgin heaps scorn on the notion of ‘autonomous creativity’ as ‘fetishistic and anti-technical’. The art historian, Nicos Hadjinicolau, a theorist of a similar kind to Burgin, has even gone so far as to say there is no such thing as ‘an artist’s style’. ‘Pictures produced by one person,’ he writes, ‘are not centred on him. The fact that they may have been produced by the same artist does not link them together or at least not in any way that is important for art history.’ Thus, Hadjinicolau says he has ‘refused even the idea of aesthetic value in art history’. For him, ‘the essence of every picture lies in its visual ideology’.

Now these commentators think they are radicals, hard- headed socialists, producing a devastating critique of ‘bourgeois’ Fine Art. But I think what they are in fact doing merely theorises that ideologically-blinded way of looking characteristic of late monopoly capitalism. They talk about paintings as if these were advertisements : the static visual form, par excellence, of monopoly capitalism which has long since superseded entrepreneurial or ‘bourgeois’ capitalism. In the advertising image, ‘artist’s style’ has indeed been eliminated, since the image is corporately conceived and mechanically reproduced. The advertisement lacks any stamp of individuality. In it, the imaginative faculty is prostituted, and aesthetic effect reduced to a redundant contingency. The advertisement is constituted wholly within ideology: for I know that if it fills me with intimations of mortality, it is only to convince me to consume a low tar cigarette, or to purchase Elixir Vitamin Extra compound. Thus, the pity of it is that these so-called critiques of bourgeois art emerge again and again as ways of looking through monopoly capitalist spectacles.

But the expressive potentialities of these media — painting, drawing, and sculpture — (indeed of the arts, with a small ‘a’, in general) — were never the peculiar possession of the bourgeoisie. They have histories which long ante-date, and one hopes will long survive, the bourgeois era. William Morris, another Marxist thinker for whom I have the greatest respect, knew this very well. True, he criticized the Fine Art tradition much as I am now criticizing the Mega-Visual tradition : but he defended the arts, with a small ‘a’, as ‘Man’s expression of his joy in labour’. And, today, of course, it is the Fine Art tradition which has become the only possible conserver of the arts in this sense.‘The Commercialist,’ wrote Morris, ‘sees that in the great mass of civilized human labour there is no pretence to art, and thinks that this is natural, inevitable, and on the whole desirable. The Socialist, on the contrary, sees in this obvious lack of art a disease peculiar to modern civilization and hurtful to humanity.’ The pity of it is that many socialists — including many socialist artists and art critics — have declared themselves in this matter as being on the side of ‘The Commercialist’. But on this point, we can be clear and categorical. Let me quote just one more time from Marcuse: ‘Against all fetishism of the productive forces, against the continued enslavement of individuals by the objective conditions (which remain those of domination), art represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions : the freedom and happiness of the individual.’ The expressive potentialities of painting, sculpture and drawing need then to be defended, not just from those threats coming from without, but against the reductionists within — those vandals like Warhol, Caro, Burgin and their followers, whose activities have deprived us of realized moments of hope.

I said earlier that there were stirrings in British painting and sculpture in the latter part of the decade which indicated that some artists are struggling towards a revitalization of what I have been calling the material expressive process. This is not easy: at the moment there are no ‘given’ pictorial conventions which are valid for anything other than small, particular publics. The artist lacks immediate access to the ‘enabling’ yet ‘resistant’ resources of a given language. And then, of course, the artist is bedevilled by the not unrelated problem of the crisis in his social function. Neither prelates, princes, nor wealthy manufacturers presently have much need of painters or sculptors. The great corporations of monopoly capitalism have their own mega-visual media. The State is desperately uncertain about what it wants artists to do, for whom. These are problems I have discussed before and no . doubt will do so again. But I want to end by pointing towards some individuals and tendencies who, in their practice, are struggling to transcend these difficulties, to embed, to use Max Raphael’s phrase again, their creative power in ‘a crystalline suspension’ from which it can again be transformed into living energies.

In the late 1970s, this problem was approached, as one might expect, from both ends of the expressive continuum. Some artists attempted to revitalize abstract art, to move away from the ‘modular units’ of minimalism towards ways of working their forms and materials which were affectively significant, again. The first I saw of this sort of work was Stephen Buckley’s. Buckley’s early pictures were violent, technically and as images : he used techniques like tearing, stitching, scorching, and stuffing the picture surface, yet his works remained paintings. I felt that he was wrenching every possible device and convention of painting in such a way as to force it to be expressive again. I was impressed by those early works, — which I saw as ‘analogues of the body’ — and I do not retract what I said about them. But today, I am perhaps more aware of their weaknesses rather than their successes. Buckley was a bit like a bricoleur — a man who uses a table- top, a piece of sacking, an old hack-saw blade, or whatever to do a reasonable job patching things up. But the bricoleur, by his very nature, cannot create something new. He is trapped, as Levi-Strauss once said, by the ‘constitutive sets’ from which his elements came. The ‘constitutive set’ for Buckley was late modernism itself. There was no way it could give back to him the skills of drawing and touch, which he lacked. The non-painting techniques that he imported meant that, in the end, his works tended to lack that aesthetic unity which is essential to the capacity of art to evoke that other reality within the existing one.

Still, Buckley remains for me much better than the chic- punk artists who followed in his wake — those who seized on this process of expressionist bricolage of modernist conventions and, within two years, turned it into a decadent mannerism. The majority of pictures in the ‘Style in the Seventies’ exhibition — the title is the give-away — were like those fashion models you see in glossy magazines with gold- plated razor-blade brooches and green and red hair, done by Vidal Sassoon, of course. But Artscribe is not so elegant as Vogue. Still, even within this unpromising milieu, some painters have emerged who do not seem to me to be all bad. Perhaps the best British abstract picture of the 1970s was painted by an artist who emerged in the 1960s — John Hoyland. But this was an exceptional work for this painter.

Within abstract art, I feel that what is happening in sculpture is presently more significant than painting. The work of the Wimbledon sculptors — Glynn Williams, Ken Turnell and Lee Grandjean — impresses me. They seem to be fighting out of the pall of formalism and dead matter which stood in for sculpture for so much of the 1970s. Turnell, in particular, may be on the verge of a new and vigorous way of handling the human figure.

In effect, his work connects with that of those artists who have been trying to work from the other end of the expressive continuum: that of immediately representational pictorial ‘languages’, their revival and replenishment. Early in the decade, ‘photo-realism’ posed a similar reduction within representational art to that which ‘modular units’ presented in abstraction. Photo-realists took a given image, a photograph, and merely transposed it from a mega-visual medium into paint, allowing precious little scope for imaginative conception, painterly handling, or aesthetic transformation. Their work is effectively without expression in the sense I have defined it. Around the middle of the decade, Kitaj, however, began to argue vociferously for the retention of the old representational conventions, rooted in human anatomy, as part of the ‘material’ upon and through which the artist works to realize his expression. I did not fully appreciate the significance of the ‘Human Clay’ exhibition when it was mounted at the Hayward in 1976 : this was in part because there is an element of militant anti­abstractionism in Kitaj’s polemic, which draws lines which would exclude some of the most significant of post-war painters, like Rothko and Natkin. There are good non- representational artists; and there are presently some representational painters around whose cultish affectation has led them to produce works almost (but not quite) as bad as those in ‘Style of the Seventies’. Still, I am sure that in my 1976 reaction to Kitaj, there was more than a trace of that over-historicist, false radicalism of the art-left. I remember that I accused him of trying to revive 19th century bourgeois pictorial conventions. So I, too, was then slipping into that denial of the existent human subject which I have today criticized so much in others. I was talking as if 20th century man was not made of human clay too! The proof of a painting, in any event, is always in the looking. And I should say straight away that Kitaj has made what I regard as one of the very best British paintings of the last decade. I am talking about If not, not, which was shown in Bristol in the recent ‘Narrative Painting’ show. This is an extremely complex picture whose effect comes from numerous different elements — nuances of colour, blending of different modes of spatial and perspectival organization, the skilful drawing of the figures, even the literary allusions and references. But all these devices, and all this matter, has been brought under the artist’s imaginative control: he has imposed a convincing aesthetic unity upon his materials. He has created, in form, and in content, what Fry said the best Post-Impressionists achieved. This is not ‘a pale reflex of actual appearance’ — but it arouses the ‘conviction of a new and definite reality’. No doubt, some will say it is dreamy, escapist, or utopian. Christopher Caudwell once said :

. . . the illusion of dream has this biological value, that by experimenting ideally with possible realities and attitudes towards them it paves the way for such changes in reality. Dream prepares the way for action; man must first dream before he can do it. It is true that the realization of our dream is never the same as the dream; it looks different and it feels different. Yet it also has something in common with our desire, and its realization was only possible because dream went before and lured us on, as the harvest festival made possible the harvest.

The best painting — from Poussin to Cezanne — has often been a form of materially realized social dreaming. And we should not allow our social dreams to be monopolized and banalized by those who want to sell Vodka and bath salts . ..

I could go on about the art that I have found exceptional and worthwhile. I would like to have said something about Ken Kiff’s marvellous psychoanalytic paintings — so close to my own sensibilities. But I cannot end without saying how Kitaj’s polemics, and the parallel sociological research of my colleague Andrew Brighton, have raised the question as to whether the most significant painting of the 1970s was not made far away from the late modernist corral. The Royal Academy Summer show may be largely a wasteland: it is rather less of a wasteland than, say, the average mixed late modernist show. The painting of Peter Greenham and Richard Eurich is certainly, from my perspective, among the most considerable of the decade. Yet I wonder how many art students have even heard their names, let alone seen their pictures.

Certainly, the most exciting thing about the withering of late modernism in recent years has been the bringing into view again the work of a great, and I believe still much neglected tradition in British painting, founded by Bomberg in the latter part of his life. Bomberg, disillusioned with the modernism in whose birth he had participated, spent the latter part of his life searching for ‘the spirit in the mass’, or, as I would put it, finding the physical means to record his imaginative encounters with real objects, real persons. In effect, he sought to maximize both aspects of the expressive continuum: the ‘subjective’ physical handling of materials; the ‘objective’ empirical, perceptual observation of things in the world. The recent show of his late works at the Whitechapel was a revelation. And to think that we ignored this, while lapping up the garbage of late modernism that wafted over from America. I say ‘we’ ignored . . . Some of Bomberg’s disciples kept not only his methods, but his spirit, his imaginative grasp of the world alive. I am thinking particularly of Dennis Creffield, Frank Auerbach, and Leon Kossoff. Kossoff, in particular, painted some of the best works of the 1970s. I have written, at length, elsewhere about his great painting based on figures outside Kilburn underground station, which combines the most violent expressionism with the most cautious, restraining, empirical accuracy — almost Pollock and Coldstream in the same picture. It is one of the few real masterpieces of the decade ...

David Bomberg

But you can see why these things have been so little known and talked about, say in the art press, if you consider what David Sylvester wrote about those late Bombergs. He said:

. . . stylistically, Bomberg’s late work was backward-looking, added little or nothing to the language of art that had not been there 50 years before. If it is, as I believe, the finest English painting of its time, only its intrinsic qualities make it so : in terms of the history of art it’s a footnote.

I have tried to show that the over-historicizing of aesthetics is bound to lead to this kind of foolish judgement. Those of you who are still bound up in ‘the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud’ should take courage. You may be producing only footnotes to art history : but there is a chance that your work is among the finest of its time. As for the art- historical text itself ... I should not worry too much about that : it leads only into the pornography of despair.