Fullard George

George Fullard

Born in 1923, Fullard came from a politically active mining family in Sheffield. His father was a Communist Party member, blacklisted after organising a pit deputies’ strike at the Nunnery Colliery, who also wrote plays for Sheffield Left Theatre Club.

Fullard became active in the Young Communist League in the late 1930s and early 40s whilst he was at the Sheffield College of Art. After serving two years in a tank regiment and receiving near fatal injuries at Monte Cassino in 1944 he went to the Royal College of Art in Ambleside.  

At some point in the post-war period, it is likely that he did not resume formal membership of the Communist Party but remained generally in touch. It appears that he felt that he could contribute more through his artistic work as an independent sculptor, working in the humanist, figurative and ‘realist’ tradition.

Fullard’s work ranges from “modelled figures made in the Cold War period” to “idiosyncratic and unusual war assemblages of the 1960s through to the late enigmatic sculptures concerned with the sea”.

He was very much involved with John Berger’s circle throughout the 1950s and had some connections with the Communist Party Artists Group’s journal `Realism’, which ran to six issues between 1955 and 1956.

In the late 1950s, he was part of an informal discussion group, which was attended by various intellectuals, including Randall Swingler, Professor J D Bernal (see separate entries), and others.

Fullard was Head of Sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art when he died in 1973. 

Source: Gillian Whiteley, CHN letter and "Assembling the Absurd: The Sculpture of George Fullard”