8 words about Lichtenstein

I've just come across a text Sylvester wrote about Roy Lichtenstein in 1997 (soon after the artist's death, I believe), which prefaced a slim volume containing his two interviews with the Pop artist (from 1966 and 1997). I wanted to write something quickly about the last sentence, because it's one of those instances where I'm reminded again what I like most about Sylvester. To put it in context, it concludes a paragraph discussing Lichtenstein's 'constant tentativeness'. I'll give the final few sentences:

With Pop Art, where, as Lichtenstein says, "before you start painting the painting, you know exactly what it's going to look like", it might be supposed that the artist, before he starts painting any painting, knows exactly what he's trying to do. But Lichtenstein did not know exactly what he was trying to do- for all the acuity of his intelligence- did not quite know what he was aiming to achieve in terms of form, was far from being sure what his attitude was towards his subject matter. He says that Cubism was the main source of his style. Among the Cubists, Gleizes and Metzinger knew exactly what they were trying to do. Braque and Picasso were working in the dark. It probably always is like that in art.

What I like about it is how Sylvester demonstrates such precision and conciseness but doesn't get carried away by it. For argument's sake, imagine that by some miracle I'd managed to write the sentences above, bar the last. At that point, I would be feeling so pleased with myself for having written the sentences 'Among the Cubists...in the dark' that I'd be thinking 'now for the final flourish', the same way I sign my name with an ostentatious swipe at the end. I can imagine myself, or many other lesser writers for that matter, concluding with either 'That's how art is' or 'That's how it goes'.
What I definitely wouldn't do is put two adverbs together- 'probably always'? Anyone who does that isn't putting style first. I expect Sylvester could've come up with something more emphatic and elegant, even by just leaving out 'probably', which would fit better in a sense. But like Lichtenstein, he wasn't certain. Even as he puts his case so persuasively, he doesn't preclude the chance someone will come back with a counter-example. He doesn't try to dazzle you with his style, even if he nonetheless does.
 

not writing

The inverse of looking at Sylvester's writings is the shape of all the things he didn't write about. I started thinking about this when looking at the contents of his selected essays, About Modern Art and considering the decisions made to arrive at that selection. Very few writings about British artists, for example (as with the Tate Modern show he was working on at the end of his life, and which opened posthumously).
I started listing all the artists who were significant to Sylvester at one point or another in his career but were absent from the final selection- Freud, Nolan, Paolozzi, Laurens, Richier, etc. And of course the compilation of About Modern Art is significant as a combined verdict on the artists Sylvester wrote about, and his opinion of his own writing on them. I don't doubt, for instance, that he would have refuted any suggestion that the selection was purely based on either the quality of the artists, or the quality of his writing.
But at this moment, having stumbled upon an unpublished declaration from him that 'Velasquez is the greatest painter' (as Francis Bacon would surely have agreed), the more interesting question is: why did a critic of Sylvester's calibre write so little about Velasquez and the old masters he admired so much? In the preface to About Modern Art he expresses regret over this 'silence' on so many subjects- antiquities, pre-nineteenth century art, modern architecture.
Since critics make a living from giving their opinions, it's unsurprising that many are willing to hold forth on any given subject. Listening to the New York Times' Roberta Smith at Tate Britain recently, I was deeply impressed but her commitment and pragmatism to the metier of the critic. Among my list of quotes from the event is something about

'cyclical pain + enforced amnesia of criticism, always the next deadline > continual redemption'

although some of those words should perhaps be attributed to Adrian Searle of the Guardian, who was in the audience and spoke in relation to this.
Sylvester spent a decade or so writing regular criticism for weekly magazines and was no doubt familiar with the pain of quick and partial judgments. For one type of critic, this pain is alleviated by the continual cycle of constant redemption (the old canard about try-fail-try again-fail better might apply). And certainly the abiding impression left by Smith's talk recently was how inevitable she made her work sound. When the questions from the audience included a couple of familiar concerns about the method behind her work, she brushed them aside effortlessly. (The most memorable moment was when she answered a question about the criticism's relation to market forces with an eloquent pause which said all she needed to. What she subsequently said was merely a reiteration). But Sylvester wrote that working for the New Statesman 'was by its nature using me up'. Entropy set it. Over time the writing got harder, not easier, and while he continued to write regularly (particularly in the 1990s), it tended to focus in on a select group of artists whose work he knew well. He turned down invitations to write about artists whose work he knew inside out if he had nothing new to add, and wrote that it could take him twenty years to find something to say about an artist. In many cases that day never came.
Certainly, one way of considering the critic is someone who can turn their hand to anything, and Sylvester's radio broadcasts show that he could perform admirably in a Front Row/Culture Show setting for a time, although again over time his pauses became longer, and he became increasingly resistant to the quick-draw sport of TV and radio panels. I've been told that for Sylvester, taking everything equally seriously was a way of coping with the world, but if so that didn't cause him to think he could write about everything.
Some people would see that as a weakness, but I see it as Sylvester's recognition of his abilities and place in the world which is deeply serious and reasonable. I can't imagine the frustration it must have caused him not to have written a remarkable essay about Velasquez or Michelangelo, and to have reconciled all of those fragmentary affirmations found throughout his writings. But he seemingliy preferred to regret the things he hadn't written to those he had.

Koons

Living in London, I've not seen the major Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney, but I've felt the reverberations. Every few days, I'd notice another review, many of which were very positive. Jerry Saltz was as good as always, but I was more interested in a couple of very negative reviews, by Jed Perl and Travis Diehl. This was because they seemed to share one belief: that you can damn Koons' art without really saying anything about it as art. There is next to nothing in either piece about responding to Koons' art in any particularity, no sense of anything beyond a disgusted flick through the catalogue. And in a sense, maybe it's not needed. Koons' art is about as well-known as it gets, and Diehl certainly takes the position that it's up to the essayists in the exhibition catalogue (who he takes to task one by one) to convince him that Koons is worth all the fuss. At this juncture, the combination of David-facing-Goliath pluck and Emperor's New Clothes certainty seems as good as any, and the conclusions don't surprise me. What I think deserves a mention, however, is their open hostility whenever the matter of engaging with Koons' art as art objects arises.

Take Diehl disregarding neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's essay on Koons and our fascination with shiny surfaces. Without having read the essay, I thought the passage quoted sounded like a promising approach to what happens when we look at Koons' work. But no, 'although his [Damasio's] essay may have something to say about the nature of creative activity, it adds little to our thinking about Koons'. But Perl is much stronger in disregarding individual responses to Koons' art. For instance:


"In the very first paragraph of his catalog introduction, Scott Rothkopf quotes the late Robert Rosenblum, a distinguished student of nineteenth-century neoclassicism who doubled as a critic of contemporary art, declaring in 1993 that “Koons is certainly the artist who has most upset and rejuvenated my seeing and thinking in the last decade.” Later in the Whitney catalog, the art historian Alexander Nagel recalls his first encounter with Koons’s work—the “Banality” series at the Sonnabend Gallery in 1988—and explains that it “made me a little sick, even as I felt an almost irresistible invitation to submit to it.”
I would have hoped that by now everybody agreed that not all unease is equal. Why should we imagine that because once upon a time certain gallerygoers were troubled by something that they later came to admire, then it follows that anything that troubles a gallerygoer is necessarily worthy of admiration? Just because it makes you sick doesn’t mean that it’s any good. I am not saying that either Rosenblum or Nagel, both scholars widely admired for their erudition, would take this view. But there is no doubt in my mind that Koons is alert to a tendency on the part of the art audience to submit—to submit to something (to anything) that exerts a certain discomfiting power. This is the S&M of the contemporary art world, with the audience angling for an opportunity to grovel at the feet of the superstar."


So Rosenblum and Nagel (who is also treated condescendingly by Diehl for his catalogue essay) are basically shot down for trying to articulate something specific, and it seems to me that, while being terribly polite about it, Perl is saying that they have been duped by someone with a grasp of what people want, as if Koons were the porn baron of the art world. All of this is pretty exciting, because it really invites questions about our responses to artworks and where the meaning lies. The passages I've quoted both touch on the question of how much our feelings about these works should be interrogated or even trusted- how much in doing so we would be simply participating in 'the S&M of the contemporary art world'.

But of course there is a Sylvester connection here, as Sylvester interviewed Koons twice 2000 (the interview was published in Sylvester's Interviews with American Artists). Naturally, for a critic whose writing on art spans from World War II up to the start of the 21st century, Sylvester saw many changes in the art world, and his enthusiasm for Koons surprised me at first. This from a man who learnt about sculpture from watching Moore and Giacometti at work! The author of a perhaps the most famous series of artist interviews ever (with Francis Bacon) wanting to interview Jeff Koons?! (In fact, as Perl reminds us, the curator Norman Rosenthal has just completed a book of interviews with Koons 'in which the artist at moments imagines himself a sort of philosophe of the twelve-step program'.) But Sylvester, who had interviewed Duchamp, had co-authored the Magritte catalogue raisonné, knew what he thought. Reading a review of Interviews with American Artists somewhere, I distinctly remember how, in a generally very positive article about the book, the author picked up on Sylvester's comment to Koons that 'The chocolate-chip cookies [in Hair] are a very erotic image or an alternative to a very erotic image' was a sign of how the interviews became a little ridiculous in places, or something to that effect.

 

But actually, reading Sylvester's interview after these 'conservative harangues' (to take one of James Elkins' seven categories of art criticism) it was comments like these that I enjoyed most. Sylvester wrote that one of the most important things about an interview was that the interviewer shouldn't be afraid to look silly, and it's his engagement with the works rather than an idea of the works which is what sets him apart. Not that I'm a particular fan of Koons' work (although I thought his Bear and Policeman stood out a mile from most of the work in the lacklustre 'The Human Factor' exhibition at the Hayward Gallery recently), but if he is to be critiqued, it ought to be more specific than the sort of criticism that takes him as a symbol of all the art world's ills.

 

But I did enjoy the question of 'acceptance' which comes up in Diehl's review (he uses the word fourteen times) and which does seem to relate to something more widely. Because Sylvester had written early on about the acceptance, the democracy of vision in Rembrandt and Cézanne. This, you could say feeds into Pop Art and its exponents looking to use the most striking visual material around them and in Lichtenstein's words 'to accept its environment, which is not good or bad, but different'. Now for Diehl, 'acceptance' is synonymous with 'uncritical', it means that Koons work short-circuits criticism by implicitly mocking its refusal to accept. This is the language of self-help books. But I think there must be more to it than this. Look up how many senses of the word there are in a good dictionary. I particularly like the duality of accepting in an active sense (I accept your invitation) and in a more resigned sense (I accept your criticism was valid). If there is something to be said about Koons and acceptance, I think it lies somewhere in this strange double meaning.

Sylvester, Agee, Bacall

The payoff of the eye-shredding microfilm research I've been doing to research Sylvester's extensive and little-documented broadcasting career, is that it has turned up some wonderful cameos. By chance, I've just come across one of these: a tribute to James Agee's film criticism from 1959. As his first example of Agee's criticism, he quotes from Agee's reviews of Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. I use the plural because Agee wrote for both Time and the Nation. In the tributes to Bacall over the last couple of days, many have quoted from one of these reviews, depending on the writer's purpose. To convey the dazzling impact of Bacall's debut, the Time review gets quoted, usually from either the beginning or end of this paragraph (see the Boston Globe or the Express :

'Lauren Bacall has cinema personality to burn and she burns both ends against an unusually little middle. Her personality is compounded partly of percolated Davis, Garbo, West, Dietrich, Harlow and Glenda Farrell, but more than enough of it is completely new to the screen. She has a javelinlike vitality, a born dancer's eloquence in movement, a fierce female shrewdness and a special sweet-sourness. With those faculties, plus a stone-crushing self-confidence...she manages to get across the toughest girl a piously regenerate Hollywood has dreamed of in a long, long while'.

Other websites like the New York Times and the Telegraph chose to quote from the Nation review instead:

'Whether you like the film will depend I believe almost entirely on whether you like Miss Bacall. I am no  judge. I can hardly look at her, much less listen to her- she has a voice like a chorus by Kid Ory- without getting caught in a dilemma between a low whistle and a belly laugh. It has been years since I have seen such amusing pseudo-toughness on the screen'.

The point for Sylvester is that Agee was writing for two publications with different audiences and different requirements:

'In The Nation he was writing for a small, intelligent left-ish audience who, he could assume, shared his values and standards. In Time he was writing for the American people at large, and couldn't take as much for granted...In The Nation, Agee is more expansive, less glittering, more relaxed than in his unsigned piece in Time: he takes the reader into his confidence, he writes about himself: this is his column. In Time he is the brilliant journalist, in The Nation, the evocative, ruminative essayist'.

I haven't quoted from Agee to the extent that Sylvester did, but the difference is still clear, both in style and in judgement. Compare, for example 'the toughest girl...' with 'pseudo-toughness'. And there is a strange echo of Sylvester's point in the obituaries of Bacall, in whether they chose to quote from the safety of the Time review or to risk selecting from the more nuanced Nation piece.


This piece is relevant to me is because Sylvester was in the same situation. At around this time he was writing for various different publications, in the US as well as the UK, and making broadcasts across the Third Programme, Home Service and Light Programme (occasional film reviews on 'Woman's Hour'). I'm often asked, and often ask myself, how much of a difference this made to his writing, and I think this broadcast on Agee is proof that he was very much concerned with the question of readership. It would have been more obvious to just talk about how brilliant Agee was, regardless of who he was writing for, but Sylvester deliberately distinguishes between the outlets Agee was writing for, as if I were to make the same distinction in Sylvester's own work.

The second extract Sylvester chooses to discuss is Agee on Buster Keaton. The quotation is long, again, the length of quotation that goes beyond its illustrative requirement and starts to seem like Sylvester was enjoying the words so much that he didn't want to stop. This is just part of it:

'No other comedian could do as much with the dead pan. He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things: a one-track mind near the track's end of pure insanity' mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances: how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood. Everything that he was and did bore out this rigid face and played laughs against it. When he moved his eyes, it was like seeing them move in a statue. His short-legged body was all sudden, machinelike angles, governed by a daft aplomb. When he swept a semaphorelike arm to point, you could almost hear the electrical impulse in the signal block. When he ran from a cop his transitions from accelerating walk to easy jogtrot to brisk canter to headlong gallop to flogged-piston sprint- always floating, above this frenzy, the untroubled, untouchable face- were as distinct and as soberly in order as an automatic gearshift'.

Sylvester chose this extract to show that as a critic Agee stays on the surface- he doesn't try to establish general principles about cinema, but 'he was a supremely sensitive reactor'. In a reliably brilliant review for Hyperallergic recently, Barry Schwabsky begins:

'I have a habit, when reading a good book of poetry, of looking for the places where the poet seems to be reflecting on his or her own sense of what poetry is'.

I'm a bit like that with Sylvester's broadcasting. In these hundreds of programmes which aren't about art, what I'm hoping for is something that, however obliquely, is going to illuminate the art criticism which I'm primarily focused on. And that's what I get from Sylvester's conclusions about Agee. 'He doesn't try, as Warshow does, to work out general principles about the nature of our experience of the movies. He evokes, he translates the images on the screen into verbal images'. I don't think it would be right to say Sylvester identifies with Agee, and certainly not that he is identifying himself in opposition to him. But he does, at least, show he has formed these categories. Sometimes Sylvester produces verbal images, sometimes he seems to have some general principles, but it's useful to think he was aware of himself drifting between those two poles.

Sylvester and Hamilton

One of the puzzling lacunae in Sylvester's criticism of the 50s and early 60s is the lack of references to Richard Hamilton. For one thing, Hamilton was one of the first artists Sylvester met on the West End drinking circle which provided him with so much of his education:

'We met in 1941, when I was seventeen and he was nineteen and, having done two years at the Royal Academy Schools, was working as a jig and tool draughtsman [...] The place where we met was not one of those Soho pubs- known as the Swiss and the French- which a lot of artists used at the time but a nearby club, the Nightlight, located in a basement in Little Newport Street, which stocked sloe gin and had cabaret in which performers such as Vida Hope and Peter Ustinov appeared. Richard was often there, accompanied by an older woman called Inge [Osterly] who looked every inch an Inge. They invited me one evening to a flat off Baker Street and Richard showed me a portfolio of etchings [...]'

This passage is taken from the long introduction which Sylvester wrote for the major Hamilton exhibition at the d'Offay gallery in 1991, but after that early acquaintance, he features little during Sylvester's work in the 1950s. And it's not as if they weren't moving in the same circles- both were closely affiliated with the ICA in the early fifties. Sylvester was on the exhibitions committee before resigning in 1952, later claiming it was because the meetings were so boring. He also helped organise exhibitions there such as 1952's 'Recent Trends in Realist Painting'. Indeed, four works by Hamilton were included in the 1953 ICA exhibition 'Young Painters' for which Sylvester was on the hanging committee and wrote the introduction.

But after that there is very little. Sylvester didn't review most of the key exhibitions Hamilton was involved with in the 1950s, such as 'Growth and Form' and 'Man, Machine and Motion' (which he recalled as 'remarkable' in the d'Offay text). He did comment upon another celebrated ICA exhibition, 'Parallel of Life and Art' at the time, but criticised the 'inconsequentiality' of the display, and described it as 'an exhibition whose meaning and purpose seem as obscure and muddled as its title'. This and other more indirect comments scattered throughout his criticism in that decade show a wariness about the Independent Group's approach to mass-media and new forms of exhibition making.

In an article about artist's statements in 1961, Hamilton was singled out (alongside Auerbach and Denny) as demonstrating in their writings 'that artists get their information not from reading books but from conversations in bars. Most of them write, that is to say, with an embarrassing lack of historical perspective' (Hamilton was taken to task for claiming 'affirmation propounded as an avante [sic] garde aesthetic is rare').

Sylvester did review one of Hamilton's 50s exhibitions at length, 'an Exhibit' (recently revived again upstairs at the ICA), which he wrote about enthusiastically in a review 'which I think I wrote for the New Statesman' which was not published at the time (I wish I knew why) but which appeared in Modern Painters following the death of Victor Pasmore in 1998, as a tribute to the artist (I wrote a little more about that review here. But then the 'kind of earthly paradise' of 'an Exhibit' was an entirely different proposition to 'This is Tomorrow' or 'Man, Machine and Motion'. Sylvester's affirmation for this most classical of Hamilton's ventures only reinforces, perhaps his distance from most Independent Group projects at the time.

But I'm not trying to show that Sylvester was slow to catch onto Hamilton. Rather, without having done the necessary research, I'm pondering how visible Hamilton's own work was at the time. Without a one-man show to his name between 1955 and 1964 (when he showed the 'tabular paintings' as a group at the Hanover Gallery), I wonder how widely-known his work was outside the IG (and of course Hamilton and his associates were prolific writers anyway). Sylvester at least illustrated Hamilton's work and described him as a 'committedly Pop artist' in his well-known Sunday Times Magazine article 'Art in a Coke Climate' in 1964, but even there, he receives no further comment in an article dominated by artists such as Lichtenstein and Johns. In the long bibliography in the catalogue for the recent Tate Modern show, hardly anything before 1964 is listed, apart from writing by Independent Group associates. My idle question is simply whether Sylvester's silence on Hamilton at the time was one of active avoidance or simply, as with Lucian Freud during the same period, part of a critical consensus.

Steinberg on Picasso

I've been reading Leo Steinberg's Other Criteria, Steinberg being one of Sylvester's acknowledged heroes amongst art writers. Steinberg's book covers several of Sylvester's favoured artists- Pollock, de Kooning, Rodin (who Sylvester greatly admired even if he hardly wrote a word about), Johns. The centrepiece of the book, however, is the three articles on Picasso- short pieces on 'sleepwatchers' and skulls in his work, followed by the wonderful long essay 'The Algerian Women and Picasso At Large'.
I'm interested by Sylvester's developing attitude towards Picasso, as he was initially perplexed by much of Picasso's late work. Looking back, he recalled that he 'started being hostile to Picasso in print in 1948', and that while reviewing Matisse in 1953 he 'made a resolve that my career as a critic was to be dedicated above all [...] to establishing that Matisse was a greater artist than Picasso'. Visting the show of Matisse papiers découpés at Tate Modern I wonder what he would've thought of it.
Steinberg's essay has drawn my attention to two rather obvious things, but ones which, given Sylvester's early enthusiasms, I'm surprised he didn't reflect upon in his writing of the time. Firstly, how Picasso, like Francis Bacon, didn't just focus his attention upon the figure, but often seemed to disregard everything beyond it: 'One can look at a hundred Picasso paintings of seated figures with conflated faces; the near-neutral backgrounds suggest that the artist does not consider backgrounds important. To a modern esthetic concerned with the "field," this can look like an obsolete academic attitude'.
This is one reason why, with the emphasis Sylvester placed upon representations of the human body in the fifties (not just Bacon but also Giacometti, de Kooning and Dubuffet) Picasso might've appealed to him more on that basis than was the case.
Another is the multiple perspectives of Picasso's wartime still-lives and most abstract drawings such as his Study for L'Aubade (May 5, 1942) which Steinberg describes thus:

'It is a controlled grid of multiple spatial directives. The lines moving in parallels define intersecting space lanes- like star trails, directions for indoor galaxies. But each single line also converges somewhere with another- the sets of convergences being programmed to convey vanishing points to dispersed destinations. A counterpoint, then, of two merging themes- indoor space lanes and lines of sight, criss-crossing in a kind of charted ubiquity. It is this space, with its invertible depths and its linear events generated by optical capabilities, which ideally enfolds Picasso's simultaneity images. It is a space inside a cat's cradle, every tensor in readiness for instant transfer; a contractile, expansive, collapsible space'.

Compare this with Sylvester's early writing on Klee and the similarities with the restless, all-over quality he writes about in Klee's late paintings is striking. Given Sylvester's friendship with Picasso's dealer Kahnweiler it's fair to assume he must've known Picasso's work reasonably well, and he certainly wrote about it often enough. I suspect the variety of Picasso's work might've been an issue. Syvlester identified Picasso as a great sculptor early on, but took some time to see, as he did after the 1960 Tate exhibition, that unlike a painter of masterpieces such as Matisse, Picasso's greatness lay in the spaces between the works.

Victor Pasmore on 'Square Motif, Blue and Gold: The Eclipse' (1950)

Victor Pasmore, having been a founder member of the Euston Road School in 1937, had long been considered a latter-day Impressionist when he abruptly started producing abstract paintings in 1948. His work was the source of lively debate throughout the fifties, at first resulting from his turn to abstraction, and then through giving up painting in favour of three-dimensional constructions.
In 1950 Pasmore painted Square Motif, Blue and Gold: The Eclipse, which was purchased by the Tate the following year. Soon after the purchase of that painting he was interviewed by David Sylvester for the BBC Third Programme. In this interview, Sylvester prompted Pasmore to talk about the thinking behind this work:


Sylvester: ...Let's take the picture in the Tate, Square Motif in blue and gold: The Eclipse. It's obviously divided into land and sky, even though the land consists of distinct squares, triangles and circles. And in the sky there's a green sun with a red circle round it and spirals radiating from it.

Pasmore: This picture started simply with coloured squares and triangles etc. The desire to divide the canvas into two halves, top and bottom, immediately imposed the idea of a landscape. And from this point I became, as it were, language-minded in relation to the picture.

Sylvester: Do you mean that from then on you were trying to invent an ideal landscape, like Claude's?

Pasmore: Oh no. Once a feeling like this is established, it gets into one's brush and is then objectified on the canvas without any recourse to direct representation at all. I believe that there's the construction of matter and the construction of thought, the quality of form and the quality of feeling are somehow intimately related. The operations of the mind and the emotions are in their own way, an analogy of material forces. We see squares, and that makes us think not only of squares, but in squares. In the same way we speak of warm and cool colours, calm lines, voluptuous forms. With regard to my picture in question, I had no intention, at the start, of painting a landscape, let alone an eclipse of the sun. The red ring round this circle is solely the result of the necessity of giving life to the colour...when it came to giving the picture a title for catalogue purposes, this red ring suggested the idea of an eclipse.

Ten Modern Artists

 

I've been reading the scripts for Sylvester's television series Ten Modern Artists (1964) and declare myself pleasantly surprised. Even for someone as invested in Sylvester's work as me, I saw the list and thought I knew pretty much what to expect. The artists are, of course, familiar enough: MATISSE-PICASSO- MONDRIAN- BRANCUSI- KLEE- BONNARD-SOUTINE- GIACOMETTI- POLLOCK- DE KOONING. And given the educational format of the programmes, and the tedium induced by many more recent television documentaries about the modern masters, I did wonder whether this series would end up as much more than Sylvester on autopilot.

 

In fact, the series is extremely clever. In the episode on Bonnard, Sylvester remarks that 'nothing about his work is what it seems to be', and that Bonnard's subject matter is a disguise, a veil drawn over what his paintings are about. I felt like the same thing was going on with these programmes. In part they are inevitably biographical lectures, but Sylvester's skill lies in using the format (and I can imagine him having to tread carefully to get the series commissioned) to make broader points about 20th century sculpture. The programme on Brancusi is a case in point. The Romanian, for Sylvester, 'streamlined sculpture', revolutionising the art form by choosing not to compromise himself by taking a job as an assistant to Rodin. Putting form before movement, taking a DIY attitude to sculpture, belief in truth to materials, these things all mark Brancusi out as a key figure.

But then the programme changes tack, and turns into a programme about Henry Moore. That wasn't in the title. And not only that, but Sylvester seems pretty sure that Moore is, if not as revolutionary as Brancusi, ultimately more interesting:

'Moore’s art is not only more complex than Brancusi’s: it is more dramatic and more robust, less refined and less perfect. It probably lacks the absolute authority of Brancusi’s greatest images, but I feel it has a greater richness of meaning. Because Moore is a less pure but more fertile kind of artist than Brancusi, it’s not surprising that his work is much more various in style'.

Reading the script, I realized something that hadn't come across in any of Sylvester's written work: that Brancusi's perfectionism and independence might have been limitations. Perhaps there is no greater endorsement of Moore's work in Sylvester's mature work than the implication here that the British sculptor was able to combine Brancusi's innovations with a professionalism and willingness to adapt (often underrated in artists), and thereby create a more wide-ranging art. Let's not forget, a previous programme was about Picasso, in whom Sylvester admired the inexhaustible range which made him the 'quintessential' modern artist. Picasso stated in About Modern Art (1st ed. 1996) that the big question of modern art was that of Matisse versus Picasso, and after initially favouring Matisse Sylvester came down on Picasso's side. In the Brancusi programme I can sense some of the same issues, such as the impact and perfection of an artist's very finest works (Brancusi and Matisse would be favoured in this sense) judged against the range and depth of the body of work. In this series Sylvester seems to suggest that for the twentieth century the latter criteria are more telling. He was to find Picasso's inexhaustible variations on a theme and Moore's vast output of public sculpture more relevant in the end than the interminable quest for perfection, I think.
This is no doubt a gross simplification of all four of those artists and Sylvester never makes this explicit, but what is certain is that he plays off Brancusi against Moore, and Matisse against Picasso, and in this series I always feel that the individual artists are being discussed in a way that stands for characteristics which could be applied in larger contexts.
 

I won't go through all of the programmes here, but to give further examples, the Bonnard programme is a wonderful demonstration of how the Frenchman was absolutely contemporary in his understanding of the subject-content division, which Sylvester spent so many column inches on in the 1950s, in the face of those who were adamant a painting was about the subject depicted.

My other favourite is the final programme on De Kooning, which most clearly addresses Sylvester's continued belief in the power of figuration. Much of the programme is taken up with De Kooning's  

Woman paintings, which are compared with nudes by Bacon, de Stael and Giacometti to assert the continuing relevance of the theme. Sylvester had, of course featured abstract artists in Mondrian, Klee and Pollock, but in concluding his series with De Kooning, Sylvester concludes with his final vindication of figuration. Indeed, his portrayal of De Kooning as the maverick Abstract-Expressionist reminds me of the prodigal son, or the former Communists such as Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler who renounced the Party in The God That Failed (1949). Anyone wondering why there was no programme on Bacon will see that, by putting Bacon's Crouching Nude (1960) in this final programme, he is bringing the Irish painter into the same category of faith in the figure in an age of abstraction. And Sylvester certainly thought Pollock a greater artist than Bacon, but he is unequivocal about his own position on the figuration-abstraction debate, as he returns once more to Bonnard:

'I would say that figuration in art is likely to go further than abstraction. This is not because there’s any special virtue in figuration for its own sake. It’s because figuration offers a resistance. It creates a tension. It makes the work exist on two contradictory levels at once, as in this drawing by Bonnard where the marks have their own life as a dance on paper but also a precise statement of another kind of life'.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Léger



 

 

 

The recent sale of Léger's Deux Figures et une Fleur (1949) reminded me of an article by Sylvester illustrated by a similar work. The article, titled 'The Plight of Paris' (1952) was written to demonstrate Sylvester's thesis about the decline of French art, and the lack of heirs to the generation of Léger and his peers.

 

 

 

Three years later, in 1955, Sylvester published a brief article in The Times titled 'End of the Streamlined Era in Painting and Sculpture'. As usual in The Times, the by-line simply read 'from a correspondent'. In that article, Sylvester states that 'rough surfaces [Bacon, Giacometti] have taken the place of smooth ones [Léger]'. The art of the fifties was jagged, unfinished-looking (unfinishable?) where that of the previous generation aspired to perfection.
Léger died fifteen days after the article was published. Sylvester had known the artist well and visited him frequently when living in Paris in the late 1940s. He later stated that Léger was one of 'the greatest human beings' he had known, and that the artist felt undervalued in comparison with Picasso and Braque. 'Of course he was', said Sylvester, but he noted that Léger would probably be pretty happy with his current reputation. That was in the early 1990s, and I think it's still true.

Art criticism in 'The Listener', 1951-2

Having spent a lot of time looking at visual arts contributions to publications such as The Listener and New Statesman in the fifties, I've been puzzled by a minor grammatical point in the secondary literature. This is the tendency to write 'Sylvester was art critic for The Listener' or 'Berger was art critic for the New Statesman', etc. Actually, Sylvester himself did the same, in the first person, and with capital letters ('I was Art Critic of the New Statesman'). This isn't incorrect- he worked for the paper, writing art criticism. But what I mean to say, in an annoyingly indirect way, is that it might be useful for us to start using the indefinite an art critic, to flag up the fact that The Listener and the New Statesman, at least, never seemed to be using just one art critic.
                I decided to actually list who was writing for The Listener in what I knew to be a transitional period, between late 1951 and early 1952. For the few years prior to that, Wyndham Lewis had been writing art criticism for the paper, totalling around seventy articles I think. In early 1951 he had to stop reviewing exhibitions as he was afflicted by blindness. David Sylvester started writing regularly for the paper in 1952, and was averaging around twenty articles a year for the paper in the mid 1950s. This is still less than an article a fortnight, however, and since The Listener seldom went a week without at least one article which it categorised under 'art' in its contents, there were of course other hands involved.
                So the 1951-2 period was chosen to see what happened in the interim between Lewis resigning and Sylvester writing regularly. From July 1951 to June 1952 thirty-seven writers appeared in the art section. There were also five weeks when there was no writing on art, just a page of picture s from recent exhibitions. There is, on the other hand, a distinction which is implicit in referring to the 'art critic' that this isn't just someone who writes about art for the paper, but who does something more specific. In other words, by saying 'art critic' for The Listener we probably mean 'the person who writes the regular column called 'Round the London Galleries''. In that case, we can narrow it down a bit more. There were twelve of these columns in this period, written by:

Eric Newton (5)
Quentin Bell (4)
David Sylvester (2)
Patrick Heron (1)

So we could accept this was a transitional period in which two well-travelled senior critics filled the gap before Sylvester started writing regularly, and leave it at that. But I think there are a couple more observations to make on this period. The first is that the remaining contributions can be split into a handful of categories:

Artists/Practitioners: Graham Sutherland, Peter Rose Pulham, Walter Gropius etc
Art Historians: Pevsner, Anthony Blunt, John Pope-Hennessy, Edgar Wind etc
Critics: Herbert Read, Bell, Newton, Sylvester etc.

Apart from throwing up a few interesting articles I probably wouldn't have seen otherwise, this made me wonder: if the art critic is the person writing 'Round the London Galleries', and another critic writes criticism for The Listener, are they not also 'art critic' in some sense? Particularly if they have a history of writing 'Round the London Galleries'? I suppose it comes down to regularity, but I suspect that if I were to extrapolate this across the decade, I would find Newton and Bell writing a decent amount number of articles for the paper, even though neither of them seem to be thought of as Listener writers. But then again everyone seems to think of Sylvester as a New Statesman writer first and a Listener writer secondly, if at all, even though his connection with the latter was at least as strong.
       The other thing to say is that a number of these pieces originated as Third Programme scripted talks, which even if it doesn't forfeit their claim to be considered as 'art criticism', perhaps means that they are thought of as transcribed talks rather than as art criticism in the sense of something that the 'art critic of The Listener' would produce. I hope to do some work on the connection between the Third Programme and The Listener in future. For now, all I mean to say is that there was a lot more going on in these arts pages than we might think from being told that Lewis/Sylvester was the paper's art critic.

From Klee to 'An Exhibit'

Was Paul Klee the godfather of installation art? David Sylvester seemed to imply as much. He had been writing about Klee since seeing an exhibition of his work in Paris  at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in February 1948, publishing an article in response to the exhibition in New York ‘abstract-expressionist periodical’ Tiger’s Eye later that year after it was rejected by several London journals. ‘Absorbed into a symposium on the Sublime, sandwiched between contributions from Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman’, Sylvester’s ‘Auguries of Experience’ (it’s a William Blake reference) described a Klee painting as something you don’t just look at, but journey through:

‘A Renaissance picture is a scene set before your eyes. A Klee is a landscape through which you journey. Of the first you are a spectator, in the second you are a participant. One moves you to exaltation, the other to communion.’

This was not, in fact, a question of physical movement so much as a visual journey:

‘With a Klee, the relationship between the picture and yourself is reciprocal; you touch a loose rock with your foot, it falls from under you and you are left dangling in space.’

The essential point was that Klee employed what Sylvester termed ‘afocalism’, the absence of a focal point which gave Klee’s late pictures a maze-like quality. Sylvester's objection to Calder's mobiles was in fact that in moving themselves, they removed the exploratory incentive from the viewer:

'the full solution does not lie in making the work of art move, but in compelling the spectator to believe that he is moving about in the work of art- be it a sculpture by Giacometti or a picture by Klee'. (1951)

Sylvester began his selected essays, About Modern Art with two texts about Klee (‘Auguries of Experience’ and ‘Paul Klee. La Période de Berne’ published in Les Temps Modernes in 1951’) which itself demonstrates his continued regard for them as his most important early writings. And in the decade following the 1948 Klee exhibition, he kept finding ways in which Klee’s legacy manifested itself. Firstly in young British sculptors like Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull of whom he wrote in 1950 that they were:

‘perhaps the most notable exponents, among the youngest generation of European artists, of the new method of composition informing the later paintings of Klee and Masson among others (including Victor Pasmore), and the group sculptures of Alberto Giacometti.’

Then, finally coming around to the significance of Pollock and his fellow abstract-Expressionists after the landmark show of American art at the Tate in 1956 (when Sylvester recycled a passage about Klee as equally useful with regards to Pollock). But most unexpectedly he wrote in a review of 1957’s Hamilton/Pasmore/Alloway collaboration An Exhibit at the ICA that:

‘modern art tends increasingly to make the spectator not so much a distant observer as a participant in the work, a necessary agent in the completion of the work […] it is partly in order to achieve this that painters since Klee have tended towards the deliberate elimination of the focal point, and ‘an Exhibit’ is organised as freely and meanderingly as a Klee, and to the same purpose’.

The review from which this comes was written in response was written at the time of An Exhibit’s first showing but not published until 1998 when it appeared in Modern Painters in homage to Pasmore, who had recently died. Sylvester applauds An Exhibit, and at the same time sees it as a natural continuation in three dimensions of what Klee was doing in two. Fortunately for a short time this year both Tate Modern's Klee exhibition and the ICA's reconstruction of An Exhibit were on simultaneously, so it was possible to check, and I could see the resemblance!

Sylvester's Catalogue Texts

David Sylvester wrote catalogue texts for at least twenty-five commercial galleries (in addition to many more for public galleries). A quick look at the galleries shows a couple of things:

- Sylvester probably wrote for most of the London galleries open in the 1950s and early 1960s.
- In most cases he only wrote one preface for each gallery.

There are three major exceptions to this: the Hanover Gallery, Marlborough Fine Art and the Anthony d'Offay Gallery. At this point I should note that extracts from Sylvester's many artist interviews were often printed in exhibition catalogues (most frequently those he did with Bacon and Giacometti). As these interviews weren't carried out specifically for the exhibition catalogues (or at least the Bacon and Giacometti interviews weren't- they were mostly done for the BBC or other broadcasters), I'm not counting those amongst Sylvester's 'catalogue texts'. And the Marlborough texts were mostly extracts from Bacon interviews, which leaves us with the Hanover Gallery and Anthony d'Offay Gallery as the most significant galleries for commissioning texts from Sylvester.

The Hanover Gallery texts date from 1949-62, while the d'Offay Gallery texts are from 1976 to 1997 (this is including a 1997 Lichtenstein interview which seemingly took place specifically to tie in with the exhibition of Lichtenstein's new paintings at the d'Offay Gallery that year). As such the two groups offer a way of identifying sets of artists who Sylvester wrote about towards the beginning and end of his career. These groups do not include the artists he wrote the most about (Bacon, Giacometti, Moore, Magritte), but they have the benefit of all exhibiting at the same gallery. Sylvester presumably had good relationships with Erica Brausen (of the Hanover Gallery) and Anthony d'Offay, which may suggest something of the underlying reasons for his interest in these artists.

The Hanover texts were on Reg Butler, William Turnbull, Eduardo Paolozzi, Germaine Richier and Henry Mundy. Butler, Turnbull and Paolozzi were part of the group of sculptors exhibited at Venice in 1952 and referred to as the 'geometry of fear' sculptors (deriving from a felicitous phrase in Herbert Read's catalogue text for the Venice exhibition). Richier was a French sculptor whose work featured prominently in the 1993 Tate exhibition 'Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55', situating it in the context of post-war disillusionment which Sylvester responded to in his introduction. Mundy was the anomaly. Sylvester took an interest in the painter's work at a time when he was regularly comparing British painting negatively with that being produced on the other side of the Atlantic, alluding to that general tendency when writing 'it is rare to find paintings by an English artist in which shape and colour co-operate as entirely as they do here in expressing sensations'.

The d'Offay Gallery texts cover a wide range of artists- starting with Sir William Coldstream, who Sylvester had a long friendship and working relationship with (the title of this blog is a reference to an article Sylvester wrote about Coldstream in the 1960s). Subsequent artists written about were John Cage (a visual artist as well as composer), Malcolm Morley, Richard Hamilton, Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns. This group as a whole includes figures Sylvester had known since his early days as a critic and lecturer in London (he first met Hamilton when they were both teenagers, and worked at the Slade when it was run by Coldstream in the 1950s). It also registers the subsequent American focus of his writing (Johns and Lichtenstein were both interviewed as part of a famous series of broadcasts in the 1960s, subsequently published as Interviews with American Artists). Equally, Sylvester had interviewed Cage before, and Morley, while British, has spent much of his career working in New York.

Undoubtedly there was nothing deliberate about the way these groups of texts developed, but they serve as a reminder of the links Sylvester formed with certain gallerists. He had immense admiration for the great dealers, like Kahnweiler, and understood the need for commercial galleries to take the initiative and (particularly in the 1950s) to show innovative work before it gained institutional acceptance. Therefore it is unsurprising that he found himself repeatedly contributing to catalogues for Brausen and D'Offay.