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".

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.