Cecil Collins/Peter Fuller Barbican interview.pdf (original) (raw)

Peter Fuller, the Celtic midwife and some [other] Northern critics of Southern art

The Legacies of Bernard Smith: Essays on Australian Art, History and Cultural Politics, 2016

First published as a foreword to Peter Fuller’s The Australian Scapegoat: Towards an Antipodean Aesthetic (1986), Some Northern Critics of Southern Art is Bernard Smith's personalised account of his encounters with British and American critics who visited Australia in the post-war period. Sir Kenneth Clark was a ‘genius spotter’ who appropriated Nolan and, like Saint Francis, used him to prop-up the ‘waning vigour of British art.’ Clement Greenberg, who Smith invited to Australia to give the inaugural Power Lecture in Contemporary Art in 1968, preferred figurative ‘Antipodean painting’ to the ‘second-hand’ work of Australian colour-field painters. Bryan Robertson, described elsewhere by Smith as ‘Chief Celtic midwife to our London Australiana’, looked to America for salvation and in doing so, led British art into provinciality. But Peter Fuller alone had the ‘determination to work out a fully-fledged aesthetic for himself’. ‘As I read Fuller’, Smith wrote, ‘I gain the impression frequently that I am traversing my own past’. In his contribution to The Legacies of Bernard Smith, Simon Pierse explores correspondences between Fuller’s aesthetic philosophy and Smith’s own, especially Fuller’s ‘radical critique of late modernism’. Pierse proposes that ‘the trans-national implications’ of the 1959 Antipodean exhibition are confirmed and exonerated in Fuller’s criticism of reductive and anti-human late modernism with its implied kenosis, or ‘emptying out’ of content and feeling.