July 1985
Peter Fuller belongs to the first generation whose experience was shaped by the ideals of the Welfare State. His generation has been profoundly influenced by the altruism of the National Health Service and the meritocracy of Higher Education, and he has confirmed his commitment to these values in the eighteen years he has spent writing about contemporary art. He believes that Public Patronage of Art is a crucial part of the Welfare State and that it has enabled some great art to be made but he has also been deeply saddened by the abuse of Public Patronage by fashionable international interests.
In the early 1970s he became interested in how Public Patronage could be encouraged to support those artists whose work expressed the shared experiences of birth, life and death. His encouragement of these values was understood as a criticism of the ‘Establishment’ of Public Patronage, and it worked to the advantage of hidden forces which were soon to threaten the social consensus for the Welfare State. This was not what Fuller intended: he simply wanted to remind the ‘Establishment’ of their social responsibility to the men and women whose deprivation and suffering in the Depression and Second World War brought about the enlightenment of 1945.
Public Patronage of the Arts was announced by Churchill’s wartime National Coalition Government before the 1945 General consensus foundation on which the whole edifice of the Welfare State was built. As Ruskin had argued a century earlier, art is the index of a society’s moral health. Inevitably Public Patronage of Art was also the subject of the first successful attack, in 1976, on the ‘waste of taxpayer’s money’, which in retrospect can be seen to herald monetarist economics. Fuller agreed that the work produced by the American sculptor Carl Andre had no relevance to the aesthetic interests of the majority of visitors to the Tate Gallery, but for him the tragedy was the failure of Public Patronage to withstand the pressure exerted by a powerful international network of avant garde art dealers.
He was more interested in The Human Clay, a beautiful exhibition of British drawings organised later the same year for the Arts Council by the American artist, long resident in London, R B Kitaj. That exhibition is an important influence on Rocks & Flesh. Another influence is Towards Another Picture, which I organised with Andrew Brighton in Nottingham in 1977, in which we hung popular, traditional, political and avant garde paintings side by side according to their meaning and social content. This led to the Crisis in British Art Debate at the ICA which consolidated the collaboration between Brighton and Fuller, and brought about a rare period of responsible and intelligent art criticism. Their contribution has not been recognised, partly because their ideas were simplified crudely by more fashionable names, and because the sincerity of their debate distracted them from believing that a regrouping of the international dealer network could again hoodwink the decision process in Public Patronage.
Yet that is exactly what happened at the beginning of the 1980s with The New Spirit in Painting. Andre was replaced by Schnabel - the artists were expendable but exactly the same international network of dealers, collectors, critics and curators remained in firm control. Exactly the same interest group that persuaded the Tate to buy Andre’s Bricks went on to persuade them to give Schnabel’s ‘Bad Art’ a prestigious exhibition. The influence of this network on the Public Patronage of Art in Britain has grown enormously in the last five years, and the crucial fact in their favour has been the formation of the Saatchi Collection. As the Advertising Agency employed by the Conservative Party the Saatchi’s played a leading role in popularising the idea of ‘the waste of taxpayer’s money’ in Public Sector spending on the Welfare State, including Public Patronage of the Arts.
Peter Fuller has consistently, and with vitriol, condemned all the manifestations of New Art at the same time as he has written with sympathy and insight about the artists included in this exhibition. The negative part of his argument has been applauded but the positive part has been ridiculed as ‘a return to Victorian values’ and the ‘young fogey’ branch of art criticism. He finds himself in the curious position of being misunderstood by Artscribe for the right reasons and understood by The Salisbury Review for the wrong reasons.
He is in fact a conservative in art and a radical in politics. This is a position which I recognise from my historical research as the fundamental idea which brought about the enormous popularity of the arts during the Second World War and led to the development of Public Patronage as part of the Welfare State. It is the logical position for artists, critics and curators to hold if they are committed to Public Patronage. The reverse of the coin is ‘radical’ art and conservative politics as represented at the moment by the New Art. It is the logical position for artists, dealers, critics and collectors committed to free enterprise. Curators who wish to follow them should indeed be encouraged to follow them and get the hell out of the Public Sector.
These arguments are important because as history shows, a change in the major source of patronage brings about a long term change in the purpose and content of a work of art. Eventually it will also affect the formal language an artist uses and the understanding of what he or she sees and how it can be depicted.
One of the major influences on the kind of art produced in recent years has been the one-man exhibition. This is a form adopted by the Public Sector from the Private Sector, but it is deeply destructive to the production of good art. The commercial gallery needs annual one-man exhibitions to draw attention to their chosen stable of artists and to establish their star status. Artists able to take the intolerable pressure of annual one-man shows end up producing endless variations on a fashionable, saleable theme. There should be no need for Public Galleries to work as part of the commercial star system. They have the privilege of public funds to provide a humane context which takes account of the ten or more years an artist may need, after leaving college, to slowly develop a visual language able to express the human condition experienced by their contemporaries. The duty of a Public Gallery is to create the conditions for artists which enable and encourage them to produce their best possible work and to show that to the public. Mixed exhibitions are therefore the logical form of exhibitions in the public sector. The curator should not aspire to the role of kingmaker but to that of a caretaker or house keeper.
Another idea implicit in this exhibition, which points to the unnecessary baggage Public Galleries have carried over from commercial interests, is the division between the 19th and 20th Century. This division was brought about in Europe in the 1950s through the adoption of the American idea of Museums of Modern Art. In this country the division is personified by the Historic Collection at the National Gallery and the Modern Collection at the Tate. This divides us from the tradition of European art, and provides a false and exclusively modernist account of art history which distorts the model on which contemporary practice is based.
This exhibition places Kossoff alongside Ruskin to assert what Peter Fuller has termed the transcendental value of art, that is, to communicate honestly and openly across historical and cultural divisions. Rocks & Flesh is a celebration of human experience of birth, childhood, love, parenthood, old age and death, the world in which these experiences take place and the beliefs which sustain us.
