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 (The recent Robert Hughes volume The Spectacle of Skill contains, amongst its previously unpublished material, a passage in which Hughes states his admiration for Sylvester's work while completely failing to comprehend why he was so drawn to Gilbert &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

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.

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!