David Sylvester. By James Finch. Part One

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David Sylvester 

By James Finch 

Part One

Fig. 1) The First Part of David Sylvster's Autobiography

Introduction 

The English critic and curator David Sylvester (1924-2001), the subject of my PhD thesis, was widely recognised as one of the finest writers on art of the twentieth century. This was recognised particularly when in 1993 he became the first critic to receive a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. Sylvester first established himself as an art critic in post-war London, championing innovative artists at a time when there was little exposure and encouragement for progressive art, and encouraging a more international outlook in keeping with the renewed possibility of continental travel after World War II. Sylvester was amongst the first to champion artists such as Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, for instance, although as a critic who constantly revised his opinions, he characteristically ceased to write about both artists later, when he felt the quality of their work had declined. In the 1950s he became particularly close to two artists, Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti, perhaps the seminal European artists of the postwar period before embracing Abstract Expressionism in the late 1950s (he was equally enthusiastic about Pop Art in the following decade). After he organised an exhibition of René Magritte’s work in 1969, the 1970s and 1980s were dedicated largely to editing and co-authoring the magisterial Magritte catalogue raisonné (and a separate monograph), before returning to regular reviewing, curating, and authoring a number of books in the 1990s. 

Sylvester’s role as a commentator and catalyst in post-war European and American art is of evident significance, particularly in the way he helped to build the reputations and shape the discourses around many major artists through his writing and exhibition-making. The more pressing issue in writing about Sylvester is finding a way to frame the practice of a critic whose work was avowedly anti-theoretical. Unlike many of his significant contemporaries (including Clement Greenberg, Lawrence Alloway and John Berger), Sylvester never articulated a programme underlying his work as a critic. Since the articulation of strongly-held views in trenchant essays immediately allows the reader to understand a critic’ perspective, it is unsurprising that the best-known modern critics have often been those who have done so in texts such as Greenberg’s ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ which then become regularly anthologized and (however incorrectly) associated with the critic’s work as a whole. The question for me, therefore, was what to do with the absence of such a viewpoint? 

The most detailed study of Sylvester’s work available to me, The Battle for Realism: Figurative Art in Britain during the Cold War 1945-1960 by James Hyman took the approach of devising a concept of ‘modernist realism’ (Hyman’s term) to stand for Sylvester’s critical approach during this period, enabling him to pit Sylvester directly against the ‘socialist realism’ of Berger in the ‘battle for realism’. Hyman makes a persuasive case, but as far as Sylvester is concerned, at least, his overall thesis is flawed. While Sylvester undoubtedly felt strongly that Berger’s art criticism in the 1950s had been a ‘serious distraction’ even long afterwards, focusing exclusively on his rivalry with Berger means that other critical voices such as those of Alloway, Patrick Heron and Bryan Robertson (all of whom Sylvester argued with) are sidelined. Furthermore, Hyman’s concept of ‘modernist realism’, epitomized by Bacon and Giacometti, requires selective attention to Sylvester’s work and the neglect of his interest in abstract art and less obviously ‘modernist’ figurative art. An artist such as Victor Pasmore, for instance, whose bold move into abstract constructions was resolutely defended by Sylvester, is barely mentioned. The closing pages of the book, meanwhile, understate Sylvester’s commitment to Abstract Expressionism after 1956, when it began to be shown in London with some regularity. Essentially, Hyman claims Sylvester had a deliberate strategy as a critic, associated with the promotion of a very specific form of art. 

Fig. 2) Victor Pasmore, Abstract in White, Green, Black, Blue, Red, Grey and Pink
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Floating_Abstraction_Victor_Pasmore.jpg?uselang=en-gb

In fact, Sylvester was the least propagandising of critics, as becomes clear from the study of his work as a whole. In his early twenties, inspired by Jung, Sylvester began writing a treatise grandly titled Principles of Archetypal Symbolism before abandoning it when he realised his explanation of how art worked ‘was something I had simply made up … it had no empirical foundation and no means of verification’ [1]. His preference was for trusting his senses rather than his intellect (asked how he looked at paintings, his only response was ‘I just look’), leading to numerous volte-faces in which he changed his mind about artists he had previously championed, or shocked his friends by giving them bad reviews [2]. For this reason some of Sylvester’s best writing is about the minutiae of looking at art: he writes at length about the difference between looking at Pollock’s work by natural light, artificial light, or a mixture of the two; and equally the effect of viewing Giacometti’s sculpture from different distances and angles. Sylvester’s loyalty was to the specificity of each individual experience, not to discovering overarching ‘principles’ (this may explain why he was also an extremely successful curator, renowned in particular for his installation). 

This absence of a ‘big idea’, while initially making it difficult to get a handle on Sylvester’s work as a whole, at the same time opens up a space to consider his writing on its own terms, and to stay close to the contingency of the art critic who doesn’t know where he is going next. It seemed more appropriate to me to consider Sylvester’s work through the genres which he used at different times in his career, as a way of emphasising that Sylvester’s work was mediated through the collaborative world of publishing. I have often returned to this entreaty from Malcolm Gee to keep in mind the materiality of art criticism: 

‘A printed text is the result of a collaboration in which factors other than the ideas and will of the author play a major part. The nature of the support defines the audience for the text, determines its form, and influences its writing. While art criticism has often been treated by its authors as a literary genre and sometimes as an academic one, it has also been largely a type of journalism [3].’ 

The purpose of my research has been to consider Sylvester’s work as both literature and journalism: to convey Sylvester’s ideas about art, how they originated, and how he brought them to bear in his writing; and to set these in the context of the publications and formats Sylvester was engaged with. 

Fig. 3) Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man, 1960
Source: https://kunstvensters.com/2015/09/20/canon-van-de-moderne-kunst-alberto-giacometti/

The Birth of a Critic 

Sylvester has written superbly about his career and early life in the essay ‘Curriculum Vitae’ (which introduces his book of essays About Modern Art) and his unfinished autobiography (the first part of which has been published as Memoirs of a Pet Lamb [4]. These writings provide some information about how Sylvester found his voice as a critic, which gradually emerged during his little-known writings of the 1940s (scarcely any of which have been reprinted). Sylvester’s career as a critic began in 1942, when at the age of eighteen he began writing for the socialist paper Tribune. George Orwell was the paper’s literary editor, and so Sylvester’s superior, for most of the three year period in which he wrote for the paper. For much of the 1940s, in fact, Sylvester’s aim was to become a literary critic and poet rather than an art critic (a common pattern among art critics), and numerous unpublished manuscripts from this period can be seen in the archive. 

Sylvester’s Jewish upbringing, which he was proud of if ambivalent about, clearly exerted a strong influence on his criticism (in an interview he claimed ‘almost all the best writers on art have been Jews. Bernard Berenson, Clement Greenberg, Leo Steinberg … Gombrich. Lawrence Gowing … It may be because of some special relationship between the body and the intellect’) [5]. Other important ingredients in his formation as a critic were his literary studies (the Cambridge literary critic F.R. Leavis, to whom he sent some early essays, was a particular hero, and his even greater passion for the philosophy of Wittgenstein (towards the end of his life Sylvester nominated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as his ‘book of the century’. Wittgenstein probably influenced Sylvester’s writing more than any art critic ever did, as he explained in an interview: 

'I’ve always tried to write with a maximum of clarity. I’ve believed in a precept of Wittgenstein: ‘Whatever can be said, can be said clearly. And whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ I’ve always excluded from my writing vague metaphysics, complicated intellectual constructions, I’ve tried to write as simply and directly as possible and most of my reworking of my writing, and there’s a great deal of reworking, is towards making it simpler and clearer' [6] 

This love of Wittgenstein almost led to Sylvester going up to Cambridge to read the Moral Sciences Tripos combining philosophy and psychology before he decided to instead move to Paris, ‘with a vague hope that artists’ studios might become my university’ [7]. This was just what happened: Sylvester regularly visited the studios of established artists such as Brancusi, Laurens, Masson, Léger (who he considered ‘one of the most wonderful human beings’) [8], and most importantly Giacometti. It was through the combination of observation and conversation that took place in these studio visits that Sylvester developed his ideas, and Sylvester’s writing is full of references to these discussions. In the words of Frank Auerbach: ‘Francis Bacon, who could be fairly acerbic, said that he [Sylvester] discovered his preferences by speaking to the right people. But that, too, is a talent’ [9]. 

Fig. 4) Constantin Brancusi, Fish, 1926, London, Tate Modern
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sculptures_by_Constantin_Br%C3%A2ncu%C8%99i?uselang=en-gb#/media/File:%27Fish%27_by_Constantin_Br%C3%A2ncusi,_Tate_Modern.JPG

Moving regularly between Paris and London from 1947 to 1950 as travel became possible again after World War Two, Sylvester established credentials as a commentator on Parisian art and the ‘École de Paris’. He appeared regularly on French-language radio programmes on the BBC French Service (once discussing British and French drinking habits with Roland Barthes), had an essay on Klee edited by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and published in Les temps modernes, and became an important London-based advocate for artists including Jean Hélion and, again, Giacometti, who had no more energetic champion than Sylvester, through his writings and organising of exhibitions. 

Fig. 5) Paul Klee, Super-Chess, 1937, Kunsthaus Zürich
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_Klee_Ueberschach.jpg

In England, meanwhile, Sylvester had become close to Henry Moore, the most famous English artist of the day and in invaluable contact for the young critic. Moore briefly employed Sylvester as his first secretary and even secured Sylvester (at the age of twenty-six) the invitation to organise his 1951 Tate Gallery exhibition, thus launching Sylvester’s career as a curator. There was nothing calculated about the way Sylvester came to Moore’s attention (in an article for Tribune proclaiming him to be ‘with the exception of Picasso, the greatest artist since Cézanne’) [10]. Nevertheless in retrospect Sylvester certainly acted shrewdly in simultaneously associating himself with artists as different as Moore and Giacometti (whose approach to sculpture he himself described as ‘an anti-Moore position’), benefitting in different ways from both artists [11].

Fig. 6) Henry Moore, Reclining Figure, 1951, Fitwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore#/media/File:HenryMoore_RecliningFigure_1951.jpg

In the Fifties 

Sylvester wrote for a number of London-based publications during the 1950s, starting with Art News and Review. This magazine, still published to this day with the more modish title of ArtReview, was then in its infancy, and gave valuable opportunities to young writers like Sylvester, Alloway and Reyner Banham. Sylvester soon graduated to the BBC magazine The Listener, which reached a far wider audience and paid its contributors rather better, while in addition in 1953 he also became, at Stephen Spender’s request, arts advisor and contributor to the journal Encounter (covertly funded by the CIA). This position that seems to have perfectly suited Sylvester, who by this time was enthusiastic about American culture and disillusioned with the Left. In a rare public statement of his political views Sylvester said ‘I was to the left of the Labour Party but that changed after [the Communist coup d’état in] Czechoslovakia in 1948. I didn't even wait for Hungary in '56. I saw that you can't get into bed with the communists without getting clap’ [12]. (This might lead us to suppose that Sylvester’s early writings were in the same vein as those of his contemporary (and fellow Tribune contributor) John Berger, but in fact even in the Tribune articles there is rarely any overt political stance). Sylvester was part of the generation of Spender and The God that Failed, and this no doubt contributed to Spender inviting him to work on in the 1950s. Spender’s intention was for Encounter to be ‘excellent on the creative side, excellent on the arts and unchallengably [sic] disinterested in politics’ [13], and as an art critic Sylvester’s aspirations were similar, regarding politics as superfluous to the intrinsic value of a painting or sculpture [14]. 

In 1957 Sylvester temporarily stood in for Berger at the New Statesman before taking over its art column permanently in 1960, although having finally secured this position he had long coveted, Sylvester soon felt dissatisfied because ‘I […] lacked the space to milk my ideas when they were worth it, and I didn’t feel I was walking around with an inexhaustible mine of good ones’ [15]. He also said that ‘it was too easy to write attacking art criticism. And I made a deliberate decision that I would only write about art I liked’ [16]. In 1962, therefore, he left the New Statesman ‘on an impulse’. Whether by luck or design, he then had the good fortune to join the new Sunday Times Magazine, the first British publication modelled on the American format of full-colour magazines consisting of up to fifty per cent advertisements [17]. Karl Miller, who had been Sylvester’s literary editor at the New Statesman, in 1969 Miller recalled that when it first emerged the magazine was ‘new and smart and swinging’, and if, as Miller claimed, the magazine ‘can claim to have assisted the expansions and experiments associated with the art of the Sixties’, Sylvester certainly played a significant part in that through his role as an editor and contributor [18]. In the Sunday Times Magazine Sylvester wrote about Pop Art, both British and American, and aided by the magazine’s alluring presentation, was able to reach far greater audiences than those of specialist art magazines or even papers such as the New Statesman. 

Sylvester was part of an insurgency into British art criticism of a number of talented writers whose backgrounds diverged from the traditional Oxbridge background of Fry and Bell, but it is worth noting that despite their lack of a university education, writers like Sylvester and Berger were given opportunities to work for the BBC (British Broadcasting Company) and the New Statesman from an early age. The BBC, in particular, employed Sylvester regularly during the 1950s and 1960s, when he was most prolific as a critic (he described the BBC as ‘a very enlightened patron of modern art’, one that did far more for modern art than any of the other journals in circulation during that period). In addition to his work for The Listener, Sylvester appeared regularly on the radio, both delivering prepared reviews and lectures and appearing on discussion programmes and interviewing artists. Little of this material has appeared in print and my research draws upon extensive research in the BBC archives, where transcripts of many of these programmes are kept [19]. 

A third strand of Sylvester’s work for the BBC was his work for television, which comprised numerous programmes either written, directed or presented by Sylvester, of which the most notable was his series Ten Modern Artists in 1964, for which he was acclaimed as a presenter on the arts to rival Kenneth Clark [20]. While Sylvester never produced an individual masterpiece as seminal as Clark’s Civilization or Berger’s Ways of Seeing, he was a regular and renowned face and voice on television and radio during the post-war period, and an integral part of the way that the BBC Third Programme (its most ‘highbrow’ station) made available high-quality material to the British public with far fewer concessions than are required today. (Incidentally, this year’s celebrations of the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the Third Programme on the BBC have barely mentioned Sylvester’s name). 

End of Part One
Go to Part Two 

NOTES

[1] TGA 200816/5/1/2.

[2] John Tusa, On Creativity: Interviews Exploring the Process (London: Methuen, 2004), p.247.

[3] Malcolm Gee, ‘The Nature of Twentieth-century Art Criticism’ in Art Criticism Since 1900, ed. by Malcolm Gee (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp.3-21 (p.4).

[4] Drafts for several subsequent chapters of the autobiography are in the Tate Archive.

[5] Interview with Michael Kustow, Jewish Quarterly, Autumn 2000, p.8.

[6] John Tusa, interview with David Sylvester, broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 3 December 2000 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00nc3yd#play [accessed 21 July 2016].

[7] TGA 200816/5/1/3/1.

[8] Sylvester interviewed by Richard Wollheim, British Library.

[9] Auerbach to the author, 18 February 2014.

[10] Anthony Sylvestre [David Sylvester], ‘Henry Moore’, Tribune, 5 January 1945, p.19.

[11] Letter from Sylvester to Donald Hall, 4 October 1965, TGA 200816/2/1/24. For Sylvester and Moore see Martin Hammer, ‘Ambivalence and Ambiguity: David Sylvester on Henry Moore’, in Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity, Tate Research Publication, 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/henry-moore/martin-hammer-ambivalence-and-ambiguity-david-sylvester-on-henry-moore-r1151307, accessed 03 November 2016.

[12] Quoted in Nicholas Wroe, ‘Sacred Monster, National Treasure’, Guardian, 1 July 2000

[13] Spender quoted in Howard, p.55.

[14] In this sense Sylvester’s art criticism differed from his film criticism, which often addressed the political issues raised in American cinema.

[15] Sylvester, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, p,22.

[16] Gayford, ‘The Eye’s Understanding’, p.39.

[17] According to Sylvester ‘the fact is that it was he [Boxer] personally who showed how to transform photomagazines from penny plain to tuppence coloured’. Sylvester in Mark Amory, ed., The Collected and Recollected Marc (London: Fourth Estate, 1993), p.30.

[18] Miller, ‘A Sunday Dilemma: Getaway People and Ghetto People’, Sunday Times Magazine, 14 December 1969, pp.27-32 (p.32).

[19] I have watched, listened to, or read transcripts of almost 250 programmes on which Sylvester appeared (although I have been unable to access transcripts of many more programmes he appeared on).

[20] ‘When Television Turns to the Arts’, The Times, 11 April 1964, p.12.