Sculptor. Born in Sheffield, Fullard became a student at Sheffield College of Arts and Crafts in 1937. He served in a tank regiment from 1942, sustaining severe injuries in the battles for Monte Cassino in Italy and, following his discharge from the army as an invalid, took up a place at the Royal College of Art in January 1945. Gillian Whiteley has argued for the centrality of the biographical in understanding and interpreting Fullard’s work and has referred to the artist’s frequent observation that he was ‘sculpting his own auto-biography’. Fullard’s disposition towards social realism supports such a view. His work frequently refers to his own childhood and to the social and physical environment in which he grew up. Fullard’s father was a communist miner and the artist himself was active within the youth wing of the Communist Party until his enlistment in 1942. After demobilisation, Fullard did not rejoin the Communist Party but remained, nevertheless, politically committed throughout his life. This commitment took the form of an espousal of social realism, an approach that was highly unfashionable in the 1950s when, according to John Berger, dealers thought the work of artists such as Fullard to be ‘too large and too sordid’, and critics considered it to be characterised by a preoccupation with ‘contemporary violence and a love of ugliness’. Fullard’s artistic commitments were, however, complex. He espoused a broad-based realism, founded upon his life experience, but also mediated by his engagement with particular artists. He spent three months in Paris in 1947, when he became deeply influenced by Rodin and Picasso, but also came into contact with the work of Jean Dubuffet and Art Brut. This latter connection may have influenced Fullard’s own representation of himself as a ‘fastidious primitive’, a conception Peter Murray suggests captures the paradoxical aspect of his work. His style was very expressive, but also evident is a humorous and absurdist element. Fullard’s recognition of his own past, of social class, of childhood, and of his experience of war, gave shape to his artistic ‘vocabulary’, according to Whiteley, but his ambivalence towards that past was also very significant: ‘He was a metropolitan artist not a localist and, whilst remaining emphatically rooted in his own biography he could always ironise his past with panache and urbanity’.
Until the late 1950s Fullard modelled figures largely in plaster, clay, concrete and bronze. Later he used other materials and turned towards collage, his assemblages being constructed from various objects and mixed media. Fullard’s first significant exhibition was in 1956, a contribution to ‘Looking Forward’ at the South London Gallery at the invitation of John Berger. In 1957 several works – including Walking Man – were exhibited at ‘Looking at People’, which toured to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts Moscow. Fullard’s first solo exhibition was at the Woodstock Gallery, London, in 1958. In 1959 he embarked upon a new stage in his career, producing his assemblages and war sculptures. He was appointed Head of Sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art in 1963, began to receive international critical recognition, and showed his work at a very successful exhibition at the Marlborough New Gallery, London, in 1964. After 1965 Fullard began to produce sculptures about the sea, a theme that would dominate his work until his death in 1973. He rarely exhibited during this last period of his life.
Four of his sculptures have been publicly sited in Sheffield: Mother and Child (1956), Running Woman (1957), and Angry Woman (1958), all cast in bronze in 1985 and erected in the forecourt to the Upper Chapel, Cathedral Church of St Mary; and Walking Man (1957), cast in bronze in 1974, and now outside the Winter Gardens, Surrey Street.
Bibliography: J. Berger, ‘Social Realism and the Young’, The New Statesman and Nation, 30 July 1955 (vol. 50, no. 1273), pp. 133–34; J. Berger, ‘George Fullard’, The New Statesman and Nation, 6 September 1958 (vol. 56, no. 1434), p. 274; P. Murray, George Fullard: A Fastidious Primitive, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 1997; D. White and E. Norman, Public Sculpture of Sheffield and South Yorkshire, Liverpool, 2015, pp. xxii, 177–79, 211; G. Whitely, Assembling the Absurd; The Sculpture of George Fullard, London, 1998.
Darcy White, 2017; updated, Terry Cavanagh, August 2024