Seeing through Fuller

Nicholas Penny

• Theoria: Art and the Absence of Grace by Peter Fuller
  Chatto, 260 pp, £15.00, November 1988, ISBN 0 7011 2942 5
• Seeing through Berger by Peter Fuller
  Claridge, 176 pp, £8.95, November 1988, ISBN 1 870626 75 3
• Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain. Vol. IX: Since the Second World War edited by Boris Ford
  Cambridge, 369 pp, £19.50, November 1988, ISBN 0 521 32765 2
• Ruskin’s Myths by Dinah Birch
  Oxford, 212 pp, £22.50, August 1988, ISBN 0 19 812872 X
• The Sun is God: Painting, Literature and Mythology in the 19th Century edited by J.B. Bullen
  Oxford, 230 pp, £27.50, March 1989, ISBN 0 19 812884 3
• Artisans and Architects: The Ruskinian Tradition in Architectural Thought by Mark Swenarton
  Macmillan, 239 pp, £35.00, February 1989, ISBN 0 333 46460 5

It has been respectable for some while now to admit to being bored by the huge, flat, ‘pure’ abstracts on the white walls of the museums of modern art. And yet non-representational paintings on a fairly large scale seem still to be what art students are most encouraged to make. Critics now incline to applaud in them evidence of a strenously physical relationship with paint. Thus Mali Morris, Lucy Ellmann tells us, works ‘with acrylic on unstretched canvas on the floor ... pulling gobs of paint a little way or densely caking colour on, with rough or gentle strokes. The paint sometimes seems to have flitted across, barely swooping low enough to make contact, where at other times it has been rubbed on in quick gestural jerks.’ The voyeuristic excitement here is reminiscent of the awestruck white man watching tribal ritual: magically, the paint itself becomes an agent. Associating art with primitive magic remains, intentionally or not, a common form of approbation with critics – as popular perhaps as what has become the routine detection of the manner in which art makes a statement about art.