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 (The recent Robert Hughes volume The Spectacle of Skill contains, amongst its previously unpublished material, a passage in which Hughes states his admiration for Sylvester's work while completely failing to comprehend why he was so drawn to Gilbert & George.)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.

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.