David Sylvester. By James Finch. Part Two

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David Sylvester 

By James Finch 

Part Two

Fig. 7) Francis Bacon, Figure with Meat, 1954, Art Institute of Chicago
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Francis_Bacon_(artist)#/media/File:Figura_con_la_carne.jpeg

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The Artist Interview

The importance of conversation to Sylvester’s work, as mentioned earlier, manifested itself particularly through his many interviews with artists, a format in which he is one of the acknowledged masters for his incisive questioning and sensitive editing. Hans Ulrich Obrist, whose Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects was discussed on this site recently, has repeatedly acknowledged Sylvester as a formative influence on his own practice, and it is hard to imagine books of single-artist interviews such as Obrist’s ‘conversation series’ without the prior example of Sylvester’s legendary interviews with Francis Bacon [21]. These were significant not only for providing a way for a non-writing artist such as Bacon to convey his ideas to his audience (thus establishing him within the modern phenomenon of the ‘interview artist’), but also bestowing prestige on Sylvester as the privileged interlocutor (‘Bacon’s Boswell’, as the dustjacket to Sylvester’s later Looking Back at Francis Bacon claimed).

Fig. 8) Francis Bacon, Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1963, Moma Collections
Source: http://www.moma.org/collection/works/83362?locale=en MoMA via Wikimedia Commons

Sylvester’s interviews with artists, and the development of the artist interview during the 1950s and 1960s has been a particular focus of my research, and in Sylvester’s practice the interview functions in two main ways. The first is as a way of collecting and disseminating information about artists he had little prior personal acquaintance with, such as the Abstract Expressionists he interviewed on his first visit to the US in 1960, collected in his Interviews with American Artists, or younger artists such as Rachel Whiteread and Douglas Gordon he became interested in towards the end of his life. The second, meanwhile, was as a way of investigating, in ever greater depth, the work of an artist such as Bacon, who he already knew very well. The interviews with Bacon serve not simply as a convenient way for artists to release well-honed statements about their intentions (although that is clearly still part of their function) but also for as an exploratory form able to generate new insights as it develops [22]. 

Fig. 9) Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Twenty Four Switches), Tate Liverpool
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Untitled_(Twenty_Four_Switches),_Tate_Liverpool.jpg

The presence of original transcripts for many of these interviews (including the Bacon interviews) in Sylvester’s archive has enabled me to examine in detail how Sylvester assembled the interviews with Bacon, to consider why material was left out, and what role Sylvester played in creating a document which has had such a tremendous influence on the way Bacon is viewed [23]. The enduring appeal of these interviews was once again demonstrated when, as I was completing my thesis, Sotheby’s released a video of the actor Jeremy Irons reading extracts from the interviews: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8K2_-MQ43s). They have become texts to be interpreted (contrast Irons’ solemnity with Bacon’s more animated presence in this televised interview with Sylvester: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02t7ck5/francis-bacon-fragments-of-a-portrait). Sylvester knew that it was Bacon whose name sold the book, but nonetheless felt strongly about the interviews as his creation above all: for this reason he was annoyed when the publisher of the French translation, Gaëtan Picon, planned to put Bacon’s name above the title of the book. Writing to Michel Leiris (who translated the interviews into French), Sylvester asserted ‘insofar as the book is a literary work, it is my creation. I am its author in the same sense as the director of a documentary is its author’ [24]. 

The Monographs

This quotation is one of several times when Sylvester refers to his work in literary terms, even though he invariably wrote in standard art-critical formats (the monograph, catalogue essay, review, interview, etc) rather than more consciously literary formats. He wrote four monographs, for instance, yet inflects this most conventional format quite differently, reflecting his ideas about the different way in which each artist should be presented (this same general preference for focusing on one artist in order to present them as well as possible rather than as part of a curatorial conceit can be seen in Sylvester’s work as a curator, most of which was of one-man shows).

Sylvester’s book on Moore, which accompanied the 1968 Moore exhibition (again at the Tate Gallery) which he organised, is a case in point. Both the book and the exhibition emphasised the role of the unconscious and of sexual imagery in Moore’s work at a time when his monumental sculptures for American public spaces threatened to overshadow the artist’s more intimate work (Sylvester dedicated the book to Adrian Stokes, one of his heroes amongst art writers, whose work is similarly concerned with these subjects) [25]. The book comprised a series of short essays on different aspects of Moore’s work (‘Internal/External’; ‘Hard and Soft’; ‘Holes and Hollows’) that allow him to trace the persistent relevance of these categories to Moore’s work rather than dividing it into periods or a simplistic progression as other monographs on the artist tended to. In addressing Moore’s work through a series of lapidary glimpses rather than a stately chronological progression, Sylvester found a way to present the sculptor’s work anew. 

Fig. 10) Henry Moore, Three Piece Reclining Figure No. 1, 1961, Yorkshire Sculpture Park
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore#/media/File:Moore_ThreePieceRecliningFigureNo1_1961.jpg

By this time Sylvester had already been working for several years on arguably his finest work (and certainly that with the greatest literary merit). This was Looking at Giacometti, which was eventually published In 1994 and represented the culmination of Sylvester’s engagement with the artist. In this book Sylvester brought together texts written over a period of almost forty years, often returning to an earlier point from a different angle to show how his thinking about the artist had developed. Of crucial importance to the writing of the book was Giacometti’s death in 1966, when Sylvester was close to finishing it in an earlier incarnation. Sylvester wrote:

‘Most of the book was still in progress when Giacometti died in January 1966. I went on with it, delivered it to a publisher [Weidenfeld and Nicolson], and after working on it for some time on the galley proofs never returned them. It had become clear that a text written as a study of work in progress could not suddenly be converted into a text on the subject of a completed body of work’ [26].

Fig. 11) Paolo Monti, Servizio fotografico Biennale Venezia 1962 - Giacometti at work
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paolo_Monti_-_Servizio_fotografico_(Venezia,_1962)_-_BEIC_6328562.jpg

In the way it restarts again and again (there are a formidable number of drafts for the book in Sylvester’s archive) the book consciously emulates Giacometti’s own famed perfectionism (or rather refusal to settle for the easy option). At the same time, however, the book serves as an antidote to the mythology which surrounded the artist in his own lifetime (and continues to fuel much of the discourse around him to this day). The final chapter of the book, ‘A Sort of Silence’, shows Sylvester fundamentally revaluating Giacometti’s work and his significance, and acquires its force from the gravity with which this volte-face is conveyed. In a review of the book the critic Tom Lubbock suggested that having changed his mind about Giacometti, Sylvester should have rewritten the book from this new perspective. I think that the power of the book’s conclusion derives from what went before it. For this reason, as an account of looking at art intensely and honestly over a long period, Looking at Giacometti has few equals. 

In between starting and completing his Giacometti book Sylvester had overseen the Magritte catalogue raisonné, the major project of his later career. Sylvester’s immerse in Magritte was surprising because Magritte’s poker-faced semantic games and insistence that his images were as valid in reproduction as in the original ran counter ran counter to Sylvester’s love of paintings as objects and disregard for conceptual art (typical of which was his contention that Duchamp was ‘not a real artist, like Picasso and Matisse, but a genius playing at or with art, like Leonardo by comparison with Michelangelo and Raphael’) [27].

Fig. 12) René Magritte, The Son of Man, 1964, Private Collection
Source: http://www.barbarainwonderlart.com/2013/04/01/rene-magritte-il-non-senso-della-realta/

Sylvester’s work on Magritte demonstrates two crucial things about his career. The first is his ability, despite the lack of any formal training as an art historian, to oversee a superbly comprehensive (and user-friendly) catalogue raisonné on an artist who, through his painting multiple versions of images and penchant for lying about the date his works were painted, posed formidable challenges for scholars of his work. The second is that Sylvester’s approach to Magritte demonstrates the fundamental continuity in his approach to artists. It would be simplistic to describe Sylvester as a formalist (although some have, perhaps to imply a dichotomy with more socially-engaged approaches) [28]. A better (though unfortunate) term for Sylvester’s writing might be ‘individualist’. Put simply, Sylvester’s writing tried to understand the relationship between a work of art and its maker, and the way in which the work resolves challenges within the circumstances of its production, or contradictions within the personality of its maker. In short, the way that an artist manifested herself through her work, a belief summed up by Jasper Johns’ idea of painting, quoted approvingly by Sylvester, as ‘not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement… what you can’t avoid saying’. This explains Sylvester’s preference for writing about artists he knew and also the paucity of his writing on earlier art. As the critic explained in one of his few statements about his approach:

‘I think if there’s a method in my work, it is to work out the relationship between the artist’s conscious and unconscious intentions … I’m not a good historian by nature, I’m not good at projecting myself into the past. I think I have a better understanding of how people think in my own time. Of how they think since the invention of the flushing lavatory’ [29].

Magritte, as viewed by Sylvester, is an aesthete, a gifted painter and a melancholy figure distressed by the challenges which restricted him in later life (Sylvester admitted to emphasising the ‘frustrations and hardships and disappointments’ in Magritte’s life, particularly the way that in later life he was often obliged to paint several versions of his most popular subjects rather than developing new ideas) [30]. Sylvester wanted to correct what he saw as a mistaken tendency in writings about the artist to depict himself as ‘a rather jaunty character’ in the Duchampian mould, and set out to affirm the relationship between the artist’s ‘conscious and unconscious intentions’ as a way of getting closer to what he saw as the impulses motivating Magritte’s painting. Sylvester saw Magritte not as working to some private plan, but as beholden to the transcendental power of art (as was Sylvester), and ‘working as much in the dark as an abstract expressionist is’ [31].

Further Research

Having studied Sylvester’s work for the past three years and written the first monograph to cover his output as a whole, I believe that subsequent research investigating his career and its significance in greater depth and more specific focus would pursue one of two areas. The first is the relation of Sylvester (and his contemporaries) to the development of the art market and its wider infrastructure (collectors, galleries, institutions) in far greater detail, an aspect of Sylvester’s work which would sustain much more research, through his close ties to the Arts Council and other institutions, dealers such as Anthony d’Offay, numerous collectors (he has been described as ‘the most plutocratic arbiter of taste since Bernard Berenson'), and his own collecting (Sylvester’s collection fetched over £2.7 million when auctioned in 2002) [32]. Setting to one side analysis of the ideas and style of a few critics considered to be of particular interest, and looking instead at the function and impact of art criticism in a more holistic way, I think, would provide a broader and less rigid understanding of art criticism, and would benefit from employing digital humanities methods to analyse large quantities of critical writing in relation to various other forms of data (sales of works, exhibition attendances, etc). I remain convinced, however, that the best art criticism, while inevitably tethered to its immediate context, remains of more than documentary interest because it in some sense exceeds the moment and subject of its creation. 

The second area I consider worthy of further research is Sylvester’s approach to writing about art as anchored in personal experience in all of its unpredictability and infinite variations. I have been struck, while conducting my research, by the similarities between Sylvester and other critics of different periods and markedly different tastes, but who share a particular skill and interest in writing, above all, about aesthetic experience. This might seem to be a truism, but to return to a point made earlier in this post, the literature on twentieth century art criticism which I have encountered, on the whole pays little attention to how critics have approached this task, and the radically different results that inevitably come from two critics saying what they see. 

For various reasons my thesis has done neither of these two things, although it incorporates elements of both. Looking forward, I hope to develop either, or both, in subsequent research.

NOTES

[21] An interesting comparison can also be made between Jeff Koons’ recent book of interviews with Norman Rosenthal (also discussed on this site) and Sylvester’s own late interviews with Koons. 

[22] This is the aspect of the interview which Obrist’s exhaustive and unorthodox interviewing practice (e.g. making interviews in unconventional locations) expands upon.

[23] Sections of the interviews not published in the book subsequently appeared in Sylvester’s Looking Back at Francis Bacon (2000). Sylvester drew a comparison with the editing of film, writing that in editing the interviews he left ‘a great deal of good material on the cutting-room floor’ (Looking Back at Francis Bacon, p. 8).

[24] ‘En tant qu’œuvre littéraire, cet ouvrage est ma création. J’en suis l’auteur au même titre que le cinéaste qui dirige un documentaire en est l’auteur’ (author’s translation). Letter from Sylvester to Leiris, 3 April 1975, Ms 45172, Fonds Michel Leiris, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet.

[25] At this time Sylvester was strongly impressed by the soft sculptures of Claes Oldenburg, which at several points in the book he seems to be implicitly comparing with Moore’s work. 

[26] Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, p.9.

[27] TGA 200816/7/2/4.

[28] See for instance Richard Shone’s obituary of Sylvester, Burlington Magazine, November 2001, pp.695-6

[29] Kustow interview, p.11. 

[30] Letter from Sylvester to Harry Torczyner, 30 May 1992, TGA 200816/2/1/1137.

[31] TGA 200816/5/5/10.

[32] David Cohen, ‘The Golden Lion of English Artwriting: David Sylvester 1924-2001’, artcritical.com, 8 July 2001, http://www.artcritical.com/2001/07/08/david-sylvester/ [accessed 14 November 2016].