Moore and Minimalism

Giacometti and Moore were the sculptors Sylvester was most closely associated with. Both were primarily sculptors of the human body. The way Sylvester experienced their figurative work was inevitably affected by recognition of the human form- for example, they way that his posture stiffened involuntarily in the presence of a Giacometti sculpture.

His experience of abstract sculpture was often predicated on the way its physical form affected him in a similar way. For instance, in his 1967 interview with Robert Morris, Sylvester began:

'I have found with almost all the pieces that the kinds of feelings and muscular sensations that I have in front of them are the sorts that one has in looking at humanist sculpture and painting of the figure- that is to say, a very pronounced sense of one's own body and feelings about extensions of once's own body, the scale of it, all kinds of sensations of this sort referring back to one's body, such as one feels and is meant to feel in front of, say, a Michelangelo'.
(he later compares these sensations specifically to the west pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia)

Equally, in an essay on Richard Serra's Weight and Measure installation at the Tate Gallery in 1992, Sylvester compares encountering one of the two steel blocks with 'dancing with an unfamiliar partner who isn't ridiculously taller or shorter than yourself', before adding:

'I imagine that the short and the tall cannot respond to this work as others do: this applies to a lot of minimal art, the impact of which is so often bound up with its height in relation to ours'.

Or again in his 1999 interview with Rachel Whiteread:

DS: Do you have problems deciding the size of the works? Of course, if you are doing a bath, a mattress, or a house, it's given.
RW: Exactly. I don't think I have ever made anything that hasn't been related to my own physicality, my scale.
(Whiteread continues to talk about the 'human scale' in her Water Tower in New York).

I was just wondering how this related to Sylvester's writing on Moore, for instance, and it occurred to me that this sensitivity to scale was what he found lacking in many of Moore's larger works. This is from a 1996 text on de Kooning:

'When Henry Moore, reacting very positively to de Kooning's first sculptures- the thirteen hand-sized pieces that the artist made in 1969- suggested that some of the m could be enlarged to a monumental size, the advice was of course flattering. But it might have given de Kooning pause, because Moore's enlargements of his own work were notorious for the fallibility of his judgment as to how big they could afford to be. He often went too far, so that the result looks overblown; there is a certain tendency for his maquettes, made with his own hands as he worked alone in a small studio, to be more alive, more poetic, more compelling, than the big sculptures that came out of them.'

Sylvester was far from unusual in his belief that bigger wasn't always better in Moore's work, but whereas many objected to him relying upon big public commissions, particularly from the US, or selling his sculptures in various sizes, this wasn't Sylvester's objection. Indeed in his 1968 monograph on Moore, he gives Locking Piece as an example of 'one of the few images Moore has realized in both medium-size and large versions which works about equally well as both'. The issue was how far Moore had drifted from his 1937 statement that 'there is a right physical size for every idea'. In the 1960s, by which time Moore had completed some of his best-known public works, Minimalist artists such as Morris retained the sensitivity to scale which he thought Moore had lost. Not only did Sylvester interview Morris at the same time that he was organising Moore's 1968 Tate exhibition, he was already planning for the Morris exhibition which was to take place at the Tate in 1971 (although Sylvester ended feeling that his plans for an elegant retrospective of Morris' Minimalist works had been sabotaged by the participatory installation that Morris favoured.

What I like about Sylvester's writing on Moore, which can be followed from the early 1940s up to the 1990s, is how most of Sylvester's changing interests can be glimpsed in it somewhere. The 1968 catalogue is the best example of this- apart from the artists mentioned in the text, it seems clear to me that the text shows Sylvester thinking about Moore in relation to Minimalism, Oldenburg (in the 'Hard and Soft' section) and others.

British Figurative Art

Around 1995, an editorial in Art Monthly criticized the British Council for promoting figurative art as the main achievement of British art in the 20th century. In 1993, one of the first Francis Bacon exhibitions since the artist's death took place at the Museo Correr in Venice, with Richard Hamilton in the British Pavilion. In the following Biennale, in 1995, Leon Kossoff was in the British Pavilion, and he also featured prominently in the curated exhibition Identita e Alterita, which focused on images of the human body. Other British Council touring shows focusing on post-war figurative painting were also cited as evidence of this disproportionate emphasis.

The Bacon exhibition at the Museo Correr, and the Kossoff exhibition in the British Pavilion in 1995, were both curated by David Sylvester. As a result, he was strongly connected to the promotion of a group of artists widely referred to, however erroneously, as the 'School of London'. To an extent this showed Sylvester continuing to favour one (although not the only) sort of art he had admired since the 1950s: figurative painting, predominantly of the human body, combining close observation and a relish for paint as substance. However, within amongst British artists falling into this category, Sylvester's own preferences had changed over the years.

Princess Diana and Andrea Rose at the 1995 Kossoff exhibition in Venice (photo by William Feaver)

Sylvester had been amongst the very first to write in support of both Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud, but had long since ceased to write about either artist (criticizing the later work of both artists in a public discussion in Edinburgh in 1995). On the other hand, Kossoff and Euan Uglow, neither of whom he had written about before (except for passing mentions), were both the subject of eulogistic texts in the nineties. Some of the same qualities can also be found in younger painters he admired in the nineties, Jenny Saville and Cecily Brown, while it is also relevant in this context that Sylvester was a huge admirer of Gilbert & George, to the despair of some of his admirers. (The recent Robert Hughes volume The Spectacle of Skill contains, amongst its previously unpublished material, a passage in which Hughes states his admiration for Sylvester's work while completely failing to comprehend why he was so drawn to Gilbert & George.)

In his essay for the 1995 Kossoff catalogue, Sylvester makes (perhaps too) clear that he considered Kossoff to be directly descended from Constable, as he did another English artist who he sometimes claimed to be the greatest of his generation, Malcolm Morley. The excellent series of responses to the proposition 'There's No Such Thing as British Art' in volume one of the Paul Mellon Centre's British Art Studies reminded me of Sylvester, not least because Martin Hammer, in his statement, quotes him on Sickert: "The tragic flaw in English painting is compromise, unwillingness to be committed to a point of view, a desire to have the best of two or more worlds (especially, in our time, a present and a past world)." Sylvester's sense of British art, or at least the best British art, seems to have involved the attributes found in the artists mentioned above, and I think this is why he was so keen on making this connection between Constable and Kossoff.

This is all pretty well known and I'm always keen to draw attention to the less familiar aspects of Sylvester's work, but it's striking how neatly the group of essays about British artists he chose to reprint in his selected essays, About Modern Art, fit together. In the final edition 22 out of 77 essays are about British artists, of which only five are about abstract art, and only one on a British abstract painter (Bridget Riley). Given how wonderfully Sylvester wrote about artists such as (abstract) Pasmore, it's hard not to see this presentation as a streamlining of the British tradition. One of my favourite unpublished Sylvester statements, in fact, is a wonderful defence of Marcus Harvey's Myra at the time of the Sensation exhibition, which demonstrates his conviction in its power and importance not only as an image but as a painting.

What I mean to say, simply, is that in reflecting on Sylvester and British figurative art in the 1990s, it's important to remember there was a lot more going on than the succession of Bacon exhibitions he curated. He paid close attention to the work of younger artists, sometimes in texts which haven't been reprinted and sometimes in personal correspondence and other unpublished writings, but it all adds up to a strong sense of an ongoing tradition.

Art Criticism of an Aftermath

From very early on in his career Sylvester believed that the art of his time was, to quote the title of a 1957 essay, 'the Art of an Aftermath'. The most incisive writing of his early years as a critic, on artists such as Klee, Bacon and Giacometti, was animated by a conviction that they were practicing art criticism within their art. To see Sylvester's criticism as 'existentialist' is probably at least as wrong as seeing the art of Bacon and Giacometti in those terms. If anything, Sylvester underplayed the post-war context which now seems inseparable from much of Bacon and Giacometti's best-known work. Herbert Read took issue with Sylvester's first radio broadcast on Bacon because 'the language is such as might be used by a lecturer in a physics laboratory'. Sylvester's 'analytical method', for Read, brings to mind Wordsworth's phrase 'we murder to dissect'.

It is revealing that near the start of Looking at Giacometti, Sylvester lists the similarities between Giacometti and another of his heroes, Wittgenstein:

There is a similar consuming dedication to an activity, and a similar refusal to take for granted accepted assumptions about the purpose and possibilities of that activity. There is a similar feeling that this activity is not a means of producing works of philosophy or works of art, but a search that can never lead to a final solution. There is a similar passion for economy [..] a similar reluctance to make their work public [...]

(it goes on)

Undoubtedly Sylvester is in one sense a man of feeling in the lineage of Pater and Berenson. He referred to 'the way I can't help writing about art, which is not unlike St Teresa of Avila's reports on her intercourse with the deity', and certainly, reading Sylvester is often like reading a review of a live event. Tom Lubbock astutely described this sort of criticism as one where 'the critic performs, not by talking to us about work to which we're both assumed to have access, but rather by experiencing the work on our behalf, for our benefit'.

An interesting thing about Sylvester's writing, however, is that this 'phenomenological' approach coexists with the side which saw the condition of modern art as a form of criticism. Sylvester found he couldn't write about the Minimalist works he loved, because the experience alone was insufficient. The quality shared by Sylvester's writing not just about Giacometti and Bacon but also Moore and Magritte, was that he was able to by turns convey a visceral experience of their work, and see it as the outcome of a comprehensible process. This says something about both the jaded post-war art world in which Sylvester developed as a critic, and his pragmatic sense of criticism as a vocation.   

Matching Up

'The figurative artist [my italics] is now competing with all the art of the past. In the Renaissance he was only competing with the Romans and copies of the Greek.
Giacometti was competing with the Egyptian, the Sumerian, the Cycladic, the Byzantine, the Romanesque.
And there was also Cézanne to deal with [...]'

This comes from a notebook compiled by David Sylvester around 1992, possibly after having seen the major Giacometti exhibition at the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris (November 30, 1991-March 15, 1992). Compare this with an earlier (c.1960) comment that Abstract Expressionism, like Surrealism, was an attempt to 'see what could be salvaged from the wreck' of Duchamp and Dada. Neither note made it into the book they both relate to, Sylvester's Looking at Giacometti 1994, but they both reinforce the point that Sylvester was above all an advocate of figurative art. This allegiance is easily exaggerated or misinterpreted, because Sylvester's interests were much wider than this, and in 1960 he was at his most energetic in promoting Abstract Expressionism.
But reading the comments above I was reminded of Francis Bacon's well-known outburst against abstract art in his second (1966) interview with Sylvester. Sylvester would lament Bacon's closed-mindedness to abstract art and the arguments they had as a result, but what Sylvester and Bacon shared was a strong sense of tradition and dialogue with the art of the past. However you feel about the Francis Bacon and the Masters exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre, it does approach this question of the grand tradition head-on. And Sylvester, like Bacon, was a quintessentially European in his regard for the integrity of a figurative tradition, as shown by his choice of artists- Moore, Giacometti, Bacon, de Kooning. And much of his advocacy of Bacon and Giacometti has to do with the fish-out-of -water character of their art. Bacon and Giacometti were for Sylvester the closest he got to finding his own Picasso and Braque. But where Picasso and Braque in their Cubist years were like mountaineers roped together, Sylvester saw Giacometti as more like a high-jumper. The mountaineer knows when he's reached the summit, but however much the high-jumper achieves, he fails in the end.

Henry Moore and Nature

A 1992 interview with Anthony Caro included in Richard Cork's recent book Face to Face: Interviews with Artists includes the following comment from Caro on his time as an assistant to Henry Moore:

'At Much Hadham, where I was living at this period when I was with him [Moore], we [Moore's assistants] would find things there and put them on the path where he walked, and he'd pick them up and he'd say: 'Look what I've found!' [laughs]'

The obvious way of reading this mischievous play is that of a critique of Moore's fondness of using stones, bones and shells as source material, examples of the 'principles of form and rhythm' he sought to incorporate into his sculpture as outlined in his essay in Unit 1 (1934). Caro and his colleagues, then, cracked the code, planting objects in Moore's path which, when selected by him, demonstrated that his apparent trust in serendipitous encounters with nature was in fact a predictable system. Caro was demonstrating the same sort of thinking that makes Ryan Gander prefer van Doesburg to Mondrian (Ampersand: Notes on a Collection, pp.129-31) as the less deceived.

David Sylvester, in a note on Moore from 1960 made clear what he felt were the limits of Moore's use of natural forms:

'There is something too passive about Moore's acceptance of nature's way of working stone and so on. What we ask of the artist is that he should have a kind of love-hate relationship with nature and that the very intensity of his love should be a motive for destruction [...]'

This was written at a time when Sylvester felt that Moore's adherence to natural processes betrayed a naivety, a lack of rigour. I suspect that he felt this way about Hepworth's work, although his complete indifference to it meant he never wrote enough about it to be sure of that.

By 1968, when Sylvester curated Moore's major 70th birthday exhibition at the Tate, his opinion had changed. Here, in the section 'Stones, Bones, Shells' in the monograph/catalogue for the exhibition, he suggests that Moore's fixation with these objects was to some extent an alibi, which fulfilled 'a need to tell himself that his abstract forms were obeying some authority beyond that of his own instincts'. Particularly in the climate of hostility to abstract art in which Moore developed, Sylvester claims Moore 'was painfully anxious to allay any suspicion that his abstract direction meant a retreat from reality [...] nevertheless, he protests like a man conducting an argument with himself'.

The change in Sylvester's thinking is clear: in 1960 Moore was too content in his ruralism to take entirely seriously; in 1968 he is seen as more complex and conflicted, a man who both wants to express his personal taste and fantasy, but lacks the absolute confidence to do so of a Picasso (hampered in part by a particularly English timidity). The question I couldn't help asking, then, was: if Moore had known that the stones were placed there by Caro rather than appearing by nature's good offices (or if, for argument's sake, if Caro had fashioned a similar-looking object and left it amongst the stones), would that have made them any less worthy of his attention? Maybe Caro (to his own surprise) would have been just as good an alibi as nature.

This need for a 'love-hate' relationship with nature can be found all over Sylvester's writings, and probably has something to do with growing up amongst the earnest neo-Romanticism of the 1940s. Mondrian was for Sylvester the classic case of an artist who approached nature with eyes wide open:

'One of the great landscape-painters of his generation, one of the great flower-painters of his generation, comes to find trees monstrous, green fields intolerable'.

More recently, I think this is the reason why Richard Long rejected the catalogue preface which Sylvester wrote for the 1994 Sao Paulo Biennial. Long, in a piece published several years later, said of Sylvester:

'he just didn't get my work. It was a classic case of an urban intellectual who didn't have a clue of what it was to walk in the Andes or getting wet in thunderous rain on a Scottish hillside'.

No doubt, and Sylvester's reading of Long's work is more indebted to Jasper Johns than anyone else. In their 1965 interview Sylvester and Johns memorably confronted Johns' claims of impersonality, and the same questions of acceptance and decision resurface in Sylvester's writing on Long.

A Certain Doubt

I've always loved the end of Sylvester's autobiographical essay 'Curriculum Vitae' (in About Modern Art, first published 1996), which confronts Sylvester's disappointment at seeing a Giacometti retrospective in 1978, when it occurred to him that:

'Seeking had become- what it never had with Cézanne, say, or with Mondrian- fetishistic.
One day (according to Maurice Jardot) Picasso told Michel Leiris that he felt that the work of their old friend Giacometti was becoming increasingly monotonous and repetitive. Trying to explain and excuse this, Leiris spoke of Giacometti's consuming and intense desire "to find a new solution to the problem of figuration". Picasso answered: "In the first place there isn't any solution, there never is a solution, and that's as it should be.'

This comes, of course, from someone who did perhaps more than anyone else to establish Giacometti's reputation in Britain and whose monograph on the artist (Looking at Giacometti, 1994) was thirty-five years in the making. It's nothing like a loss of faith but an acceptance that opinions change over time.

I quote this because it complements something John Ashbery wrote in 1971 which I recently read, reprinted in Jed Perl's anthology Art in America, 1945-1970. Ashbery notes similarities between Giacometti and Leland Bell, with the caveat that:

'where the latter artist [Giacometti] seems sometimes to have embarked on a hopeless mission, a sort of Penelope's web created only to be rubbed out and rebegun, Bell is not afraid to contemplate completeness [...]'

Ashbery, like Sylvester, knew something about doubt and uncertainty, and like Sylvester, realized that for that uncertainty to become permanent is a parody of itself, a strange kind of certainty.

Of course, there are many similarities between Giacometti and another of Sylvester's passions, Francis Bacon, not the least of which is the knowledge one has in looking at their works that they could so easily have been destroyed, or are perhaps inferior to works which didn't survive. I often think of their surviving works like the fortunate survivors from ancient civilizations, which managed to escape all the opportunities for their destruction (this of course applies in different degrees to all art), with this exchange from Giacometti's interview with Sylvester (in Looking at Giacometti) an indication as to why:

DS: So when we see, say, a standing woman, this sculpture cast in bronze has possibly been made in a couple of hours but had already been done perhaps fifty or a hundred times.
AG: Yes, certainly.
DS: Do you know whether you need this constant repetition for personal reasons or for artistic reasons? And when you've redone something fifty times, is it decidedly better the fiftieth time than it was the twentieth?
AG: Absolutely not. Maybe no better than the first time.

There's always the risk of romanticising the destructive element in Giacometti and Bacon, and no doubt many other artists have gone through the same process without it becoming part of their mystique in this way. But to go back to Giacometti's doubt, one of his differences from Bacon is that I can't imagine Bacon saying this (again from the Looking at Giacometti interview):

'It's a matter of complete indifference to me whether a work is a success or not [...] A failure interests me just as much as a success. And we ought to exhibit our less good works rather than choose the best [...] because if there are others hidden away that aren't so good and don't hold up, even if you don't show them they still exist. And if someone looks very carefully he can see weaknesses even in the best of them. So we should start with the poorest.'

Bacon, the gambler, took risks in his work because he was constantly hoping for the marvellous accident that would produce a masterpiece and define his career, make his time on earth mean something. He took an impersonal view of luck and was happy to accept it. Giacometti, in this statement at any rate, saw every piece as one more plus or minus in the overall tally. The question with Giacometti, which the Picasso anecdote above sums up wonderfully, is this: if Bacon was concerned with 'deepening the game' he thought art had become, was Giacometti refusing to play it? Marla Daniels has that great line from The Wire: "you cannot lose if you do not play".

Cage

Irving Sandler suggested that John Cage was, apart from everything else he was, 'arguably the most influential critic/theoretician of the second half of the twentieth century'. Sylvester became interested in Cage's work and interviewed him twice (1966 and 1987), as well as writing about his work.
       That Sylvester took an interest in Cage is not surprising- Cage's links to artists such as Johns and Rauschenberg played a part, as did his visual arts background and the visual appeal of his scores (the subject of an essay by Sylvester). But what is more interesting is the challenge to Sylvester's own position that represented, because as he stated in a radio discussion in the early 1970s, Sylvester needed the filter of an artist's intelligence to stimulate him. The example he gave was that he couldn't find a fork as found, as interesting as one presented or represented in the terms of an artwork. I expect that a fairly high percentage of those interested in contemporary art would be sympathetic to this view, because of the sense of a discussion or exchange which comes with it.
       The irony of Cage's work is that it seeks to undo itself. It is a body of work created by an individual that is dedicated to breaking down the barriers between itself and everything outside itself. As Sylvester wrote of him,

'he is trying to create art that operates like nature- that leaves us to operate on it as we have to on nature. To look harder than art demands because art presents  us with a vision, with nature we have to use our own'.

Experiencing Cage's art might then implicitly critique its audience, like an advertisement for a gym on TV. But in the unpublished text from which the above is taken, Sylvester seems to find Cage's work as containing pathos rather than the direct challenge of some of his contemporaries. What I think Sylvester takes from Cage's work is a temporary absorption in nature. In experiencing Cage's work we might have that feeling of being more aware of our surroundings, and wonder why we aren't always (or at least more often) in that state. But soon after the performance ends we go back to normal.
         Sylvester was conscious of the way in which art focussed his attention, and wondered what would happen 'if we all went fishing and none of us made works of art'. This again chimes with the interview in which Cage reports that Johns had told him 'that he could imagine a world without any art in it and that he saw no reason for thinking that it would not be a better world than the one we're living in'. The paradox is that it's knowing what we get from art that makes us think that we should be able to get along fine without it.

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'.