The Journey by Peter Fuller, 1990

I am aware that this sounds arrogant and, no doubt, discourteous to the artists concerned, but then serious criticism is often that way. And, after all, such criticism itself springs out of a ‘journey’. As it happens, I agree with Gilbert, one of the contributors to Oscar Wilde’s famous dialogue on, ‘The Critic as Artist’. Gilbert argues that higher criticism is ‘the record of one’s sole’. He goes on to describe it as ‘the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind’. - Read more

 

Aesthetics & State Of Patronage

The recent history of art has posed – or perhaps has seemed to pose – a new set of problems for those concerned with aesthetic evaluation. Considerable prominence has been given to ‘Works of Art’ of a kind which has not previously been seen: that is, works which apparently embody no imaginative (or indeed physical) transformation of materials; no sense of belonging to any of the particular arts – like painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving, or whatever; no sense of tradition, nor of skill. Such works possess no identifiable aesthetic qualities, and offer no aesthetic experience. - Read more

 

 

Cecil Collins

I have been haunted by Cecil Collins’s painting, Wounded Angel, ever since I first saw it in an exhibition of his work in Plymouth in 1983.  The picture is included in the artist’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery.  The foreground is filled with the figure of an angel lying like an injured dragon-fly in front of a sumptuous purple mountain, which reaches up towards an orange sky.  On the horizon, a burning sun slowly rises.  As always with Collins, the quality of the painting itself is impeccable. - Read more

Rocks & Flesh by Peter Fuller

It is now almost a year since Lynda Morris came over to our cottage in Stowlangtoft, Suffolk, and invited me to make an exhibition for the Norwich School of Art Gallery, to coincide with this year’s Norwich Triennial Festival. Lynda gave me virtually carte blanche to select any show I wished within the physical and financial limitations of the Gallery. For some time, I had been thinking about the possibility of putting together an exhibition of British drawing, and so I had no hesitation about accepting her offer. Read more

Peter Fuller Pegwell Bay May 1989

Peter Fuller: Four Letters from Uxbridge Road by Peter Fuller & Michael Haslam

In the autumn of 1965, Peter Fuller and myself were two freshmen enrolled at the small, traditionalist Cambridge College of Peterhouse, to take the English Tripos. Quite quickly we recognised each other as a pair of misfits, for quite different reasons. I came from a Northern English Grammar School in a heavily polluted industrial area, and, fiercely left-wing, was reacting against what I felt was the ignorant, supercilious complacency of higher-class Cambridge. Peter was a fascinating, but clearly disturbed and damaged, product of a Southern English private (i.e. Public School) education. He was part of what had outraged him. I formed friendships outside the college with likeminded, largely Northern, left-wing, grammar-school, jazz-loving students, into all of the modernist arts. Peter kept contact with one or two fellow Old Epsomians. His tastes seemed fixed in the decadent 1890s. Swinburne was his particular hero. In college, we spent a lot of time together. Our relationship was rivalrous, and while not actually sexual, was certainly erotically charged. In later years this perhaps manifested most clearly in the interest we took in each other’s women-friends. By the time we had both read our Freud, we were highly conscious of this aspect. In our student days, I was perhaps the dominant one, capable of inflicting the mild humiliations and subtle cruelties he sometimes seemed to be asking for. This wobbly balance was to change.Read more

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