Fuller, Peter

Fuller, Peter (1947–1990). British art critic, born in Damascus, the son of a doctor. After graduating in English from Cambridge University in 1968, he began working for City Press, New Society, and other journals in London, and for the rest of his life he earned his living as a writer. At Cambridge he had been influenced by Marxist ideas, and in art criticism he was initially a follower of John Berger. However, he gradually abandoned Marxism, and in 1980 he published Seeing Berger (reissued in 1988 with the title Seeing Through Berger), a riposte to his former mentor's highly influential book and television series Ways of Seeing: ‘He argued that Berger's book tended to reduce art works to little more than documents of unequal power relations, or commodities to be sold and resold at ever higher prices. For Fuller this now seemed a violently reductive way of treating art and aesthetics. Surely, a great work of art had an intrinsic aesthetic value over and above its commercial or ideological value’ ( John McDonald, introduction to Peter Fuller's Modern Painters: Reflections on British Art, 1993). His views became increasingly conservative, and in 1988 he founded the journal Modern Painters to champion traditional values. The following year he was appointed art critic of the Sunday Telegraph, one of the most right-wing of British newspapers. Although his outlook had changed greatly over the years, his bellicose personality had not, and he became the most controversial British critic of his time; to his admirers he was a bold, plain-speaking champion of time-honoured values and common sense, and to his detractors he was a short-sighted philistine. He died in a car crash. ‘Modern Painters: A Memorial Exhibition for Peter Fuller’ was shown at the City Art Gallery, Manchester, in 1991. Apart from works on art, Fuller wrote an autobiography, Marches Past (1986), and he was co-author with John Halliday of The Psychology of Gambling (1974) (early in his life he had been a compulsive gambler).