Airbrushed from Art History: Peter Fuller

Since seeing the stunning Sutherland exhibition at Modern Art Oxford I've been re-reading material on the Neo-Romantics. This has meant that I have also been re-reading Peter Fuller's art criticism. Fuller championed the work of the Neo-Romantics, while also being able to see shortcomings in their work, because:

"... for all these artists, the pursuit of landscape was always something more than the quest for phenomena, or the appearances of natural and human forms. They were intent upon a transfiguration
of what they saw: often they laid claim to a religious or spiritual vision ..."

Fuller described the journey on which his art criticism had embarked in an autobiographical response to the exhibition entitled The Journey:

"I developed an even deeper sympathy for the romantic, the Gothic, and the spiritual dimensions of art ...

It seemed to me that no ‘materialist’ culture – certainly not the ‘modernism’ so celebrated by Clement Greenberg – had ever remotely approached the aesthetic glories of these churches [the great Gothic cathedrals and the medieval parish churches of Sussex]; and I was very much aware of the fact that their splendours, and their intimacies, were dependent upon a faith which I could not share and which was not shared even by contemporary Christians ...

When, in the early 1980s, I wrote the essays, later gathered together in Images of God, I felt that I was being tremendously daring and even perverse in reviving the idea that aesthetic experience was greatly diminished if it became divorced from the idea of the spiritual. What I responded to in Ruskin, above all else, was the distinction he made between ‘aesthesis’ and ‘theoria’, the former being a merely sensuous response to beauty, the latter what he described as a response to beauty with ‘our whole moral being’. My book, theoria, was an attempt to rehabilitate ‘theoria’ over and above mere ‘aesthesis’; I also tried to communicate my feeling that the spiritual dimensions of art had been preserved, in a very special way, within the British traditions. No one recognised this better that the great French poet and critic, Charles Baudelaire, who, as I have often remarked before, say in 1859 that British painters were ‘enthusiastic representatives of the imagination and of the most precious faculties of the soul’.

In my critical writing, I came to emphasise how British artists appeared to have faced up to the aesthetic consequences brought about by the spiritual dilemmas of the modern age. In particular, I became interested in the links between ‘natural theology’ and the triumphs of British landscape painting. I am still convinced that there is a close correlation between British ‘higher landscape’ and those beliefs about nature as divine handiwork which were held with a peculiar vividness and immediacy in Britain.

The experience of the ‘the long-withdrawing roar’ of ‘the Sea of Faith’ and the exposure of the naked shingles of the world’ created a great crisis for art, as for every other dimension of cultural life. The best British artists of the twentieth century, however, faced up to that spiritual crisis: I interpreted the work of David Bomberg, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland as differing responses to the phenomenon of Dover Beach. I argued that all these artists were imperfectly modern, and that this imperfection was a source of their strength. Unlike true modernists, they did not deny the spiritual and aesthetic calamity brought about by the ever present weight of God’s absence; none the less they did not merely tease ‘aesthesis’ but struggled to appeal to ‘theoria’, regardless."

Such views seem to have little place in the contemporary art world and, as Jonathan Jones has written, "this fierce defender of figurative painting and enemy of the avant garde has now been almost erased from the history of British art. His legacy has been reduced to the career of his protegee Sister Wendy Beckett and the annual Peter Fuller Lecture ... Even Modern Painters, the magazine he founded in 1987, officially abandoned his editorial policy ... to become broadly sympathetic to conceptual art ... Fuller has disappeared from the story of British art because that story has been mythicised and thinned out."

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Sam Phillips - Reflecting Light.