We wish that we could be as sanguine about Modern Painters, the well-known English art quarterly founded in 1987 by the late Peter Fuller. Mr. Fuller, who died suddenly in 1990, was a man of extraordinary energy and unstoppable passions. A robustly polemical ex-Marxist, he started Modern Painters to promulgate the Ruskinian aesthetic principles he had lately embraced and to oppose the headlong progress of vulgarization in the British art world. Modern Painters, he wrote in an editorial for the first issue, “will seek to uphold the critical imagination and the pursuit of quality in art.” Mr. Fuller was particularly severe about those institutions —increasingly, the dominant institutions— of modern art that  

promote a tacky preference for the novel and fashionable, exemplified in the taste of the Saatchis, the patrons of New Art, successive Turner Prize juries, and journals like Artscribe Inter ...

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 16 May 1998, on page 3
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