A NEW MAGAZINE on modern British art with a strongly held point of view is to be welcomed, and we looked forward to the first issue of Modern Painters with pleasurable anticipation.* Peter Fuller has been a distinguished con-tributor to the review pages of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE in recent years, and though we have not always agreed with his neo-Ruskinian criteria for quality in art, we have welcomed the opportunity to give him a regular forum. Certain of his views, however, when penned from his new editorial chair, have taken on a disturbing rhetoric. 

The essence of Fuller's argument is that the public institutions of modern art in Britain have in recent decades neglected the best in British modern art for 'tacky com-mercialism and American fashion'. Nicholas Serota, the director designate of the Tate, is castigated for mounting exhibitions at the Whitechapel of Morley, Andre and Schnabel - which cancel out plus points earned for shows of David Smith, Epstein and late Leger - and is deemed to be unworthy of his new post. The South Bank Centre (Arts Council) is likewise condemned for putting on a retrospective of Gilbert and George, while turning down 'a major exhibition of post-war British and Australian landscape painting and sculpture' proposed by Fuller himself. The Hayward Gallery exhibitions of Rodin, Renoir and Lucian Freud are given the Fuller seal of approval, but cannot erase the Arts Council's error of espousing work which 'by-passes the realm of taste and aesthetic value'. 

All's fair in love and polemic, and Peter Fuller is not the first English critic to find it necessary to blast all he dislikes in order to promote his own 'Great Tradition' (the Leavisite overtones are not fortuitous). But the disturbingly jingoistic tone of Fuller's rhetoric, and his willingness to rewrite history to support his points, should not pass un-challenged. When he writes that 'contemporary art in this country is, by and large, administrated [sic] by those who feel no particular affection for this nation or its people', the reader cannot help but be reminded of other, more explosive debates. 

Fuller tells us that 'the last great Renaissance of British art occurred with the neo-Romantic revival of the late 1930s and 1940s, when Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, John Piper produced some of their best work'. Under the guidance of enlightened figures such as Kenneth Clark - a true patron, confident in his own taste - the war-time Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts and its peace-time successors, the Arts Council, promoted the best in contemporary art. 'The enthusiasm of the public knew no bounds'. Now, we may agree that war-time conditions were indeed productive of fruitful state patronage, which the Arts Council has, regrettably, been unwilling or unable to take on since the 1950s. It is also true that Kenneth Clark stepped in privately to support Lucian Freud at a crucial moment in 1950 (see p.293). But we have been recently reminded by Richard Cork of the War Artists' Committee's philistine treatment of David Bomberg - an artist whose search for the spiritual in nature places him in Fuller's Great Tradition (see p.305). When Bomberg appealed directly to Kenneth Clark's patronage in 1937, Clark - as he had every right to do - expressed a personal disliking for the artist's work. Nor should we forget that when Lucian Freud changed his style in the 1960s Clark commended his courage, but lost interest in his art. Taste and Distaste walk hand in hand. Even bearing in mind the usefully elastic meaning of 'the public', the claim that its enthusiasm for the work of Moore, Sutherland, and Nicholson in the thirties and forties 'knew no bounds' is somewhat startling. The same disingenuous appeal to non-existent popular sentiment is found in Fuller's use of the viewing figures for the Renoir and Rodin exhibitions at the Hayward - as against those for Gilbert and George last year - in support of his view that a mass audience exists for the best of contemporary art, if only our cultural commissars would choose wisely. It is worth reminding ourselves that Rodin and Renoir were born in 1840 and 1841 respectively, Gilbert and George almost exactly a century later, in 1943 and 1942. What would the attendance figures have been for an exhibition of Rodin or Renoir in London in 1887? 

Fuller suggests that the public institutions of this country responsible for showing contemporary art are indiscrim-inately international in focus. This is both untrue and misguided: there should be more recent foreign art on view, not less. The great centres for creation in the past have nearly always been international in complexion - from seventeenth-century Rome to nineteenth-century Paris to twentieth-century New York. Young artists need the stimulus and refreshment of exposure to art beyond their own parish - as amply demonstrated by the work of those in Fuller's own pantheon. The limitations of parochialism nearly always outweigh its advantages; Fuller's cordon sanitaire around British artists would have, if implemented, a disastrous effect on the art of this country. 

The variety of points of view to be found in the first number of Modern Painters is glossed with a misleadingly unifying coat of editorial varnish. It is curious, for instance, to see the Prince of Wales's penultimate attack on modern architecture - launched from a bastion defending 'Britain's historic classical tradition' (to quote the Editorial) - enlisted behind the Ruskinian banner. Grateful as we must be to the Prince for saving us from the 'carbuncle' at the National Gallery, his recipe for restoring Paternoster Square beside St Paul's with buildings in 'soft red brick and white stone', with 'the ornament and detail of classical architecture' smacks of Ghastly Good Taste. Well-mannered toy-town fagades should not be confused with good architecture. As Roger Fry pointed out in a superb, neglected essay, Architectural heresies of a painter, published in 1920, quality in architecture is to do with three-dimensional sculptural geometry, not with 'the art of dressing buildings according to the fashion'. 'The cozy corner in one form or another marks most of our building', wrote Fry of the English love for meaningless detail. Perhaps the only thing that unifies post-modernist desire for classical ornament with post-modernist yearning for neo-romanticism is nostalgia. Let us not retreat to the cosy corner in the name of national tradition.