Calidades cromáticas de las fuentes de luz artificial

Sylvester’s critical engagement with American art began when he reviewed the 1950 Venice Biennale for The Nation. Sylvester criticised the paintings on display in the US Pavilion, which included work by Gorky, Pollock and de Kooning. ‘If this pavilion is representative’, he wrote, ‘American

painting has fallen prey to a Germanic over-estimation on the importance of self-expression’ and that the paintings ‘represent the seamier side of

America—sentimentalism, hysteria, and an undirected and undisciplined exuberance’.¹¹⁷ Sylvester simultaneously dismissed new American art as

derivative of Germanic expressionism and generalized about the character of a country he had never visited. In an exchange in the pages of the journal, Greenberg (a long-time writer for the magazine who had in fact recommended Sylvester in the first place) dismissed Sylvester and ‘the European view of American art’ in general as anti-American, endorsing Aline B. Louchheim’s

116 David Sylvester, ‘The Artist who Showed Us What Is’, Sunday Times, 29 March 1987, p.38.

117 David Sylvester, ‘The Venice Biennale’, The Nation, 9 September 1950, pp.232-233.

opinion that the European response to American art at the Biennale demonstrated the ‘habit of Europeans to think of Americans as cultural barbarians’ compounded by ‘their resentment of their present military and economic dependence upon us’.¹¹⁸

Greenberg’s article was written not just with Sylvester in mind, but the fact that Sylvester had published his criticism of the US Pavilion in The Nation provided Greenberg with the perfect opportunity to state his broader case.

Greenberg had resigned from the paper the previous year after almost a decade working for The Nation, having become disillusioned about its

increasingly left-leaning politics. (He soon joined the newly-founded CCF and wrote a letter denouncing The Nation as anti-American, prompting The Nation to file a $200,000 lawsuit against Greenberg and The New Leader, where his denunciation was published.)¹¹⁹ In fact, even though Greenberg may have put forward Sylvester’s name, his biographer Alice Goldfar Marquis suggests that the magazine’s decision to publish Sylvester’s review ‘may have aggravated Greenberg’s anger at its continuing pro-Soviet stance’.¹²⁰ Ironically given

118 Clement Greenberg, ‘The European View of American Art’, Nation, 25 November 1950, p.490. Sylvester replied in the same issue (David Sylvester, ‘Mr. Sylvester Replies’, Nation, 25 November 1950, p.492). On this dispute see also Hyman, pp.25-6.

119 Alice Goldfar Marquis, Art Czar: the Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg (Aldershot:

Lund Humphries, 2006), p.122; Louis Battaglia, ‘Clement Greenberg: A Political Reconsideration’, Shift, I (2008),

http://shiftjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/battaglia.pdf [accessed 25 July 2016]. Greenberg not only joined the CCF, but in a situation which Saunders describes as ‘divided down the middle between the moderates and the militants’, and counted Greenberg among the latter, representing ‘haute anti-Communism’. Saunders, pp.157-58.

120 Marquis, p.122. Sylvester wrote that the original article was commissioned at Greenberg’s prompting in ‘Curriculum Vitae’, p.19; it is unclear why Sylvester was chosen, although Greenberg wrote several times for Horizon during the 1940s and since Sylvester was acquainted with Connolly and Watson, the may have come

through this channel. Another possibility is that Greenberg had read Sylvester’s essay on Klee in Tiger’s Eye and approved of it (perhaps given its relevance to the work of Pollock and other abstract expressionists).

Sylvester’s later work for Encounter, in this instance attacking Sylvester

seems to have been a way of defending the ‘freedom’ championed by the CCF.

Despite important similarities, above all their professed emphasis on the experience of art free from extraneous concerns, Sylvester and Greenberg never recovered from this early skirmish to enjoy the sort of relationship Sylvester had with other American critics such as Rosenberg and Thomas Hess.¹²¹ In a 1959 letter to Heron, Greenberg dismissed Sylvester as a

‘journalist’,¹²² while in 1965 Sylvester objected to the choice of Greenberg as a judge of the John Moores prize on the basis that his presence would prejudice artists’ submissions:

I think that the choice of Clement Greenberg as chairman of the jury is extremely unfortunate. Greenberg certainly has remarkable

qualities as a critic, but he is also extraordinarily narrow in his convictions and sees it as essential to his role that he should dictate to artists how they ought to paint. His prejudices are well known, and I myself think it very likely that young artists here who know he is going to be chairman of the jury will go out of their way to try and please and impress him.¹²³

During the early 1950s recent American art was rarely exhibited in London.

Even when Pollock’s One (1950) was shown in the ICA’s ‘Opposing Forces’

121 Greenberg’s empiricism is to the fore particularly in his 1971 Bennington seminars and the series of articles resulting from them, since published (with transcripts of the seminars) as Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Sylvester’s friendship with Rosenberg may of course been one reason why Sylvester and Greenberg remained distant.

122 Letters from Greenberg to Heron, 17 August 1959 (quoted in Hyman, The Battle of Realism, p.250) and 15 October 1959 (quoted in Andrew Wilson, Between Tradition and Modernity: Patrick Heron and British Abstract Painting, 1945-65 (unpublished doctoral thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2000), p.378). Heron concurred with Greenberg, replying ‘what you say about Sylvester is true […] he has mucked up, and “confused” as you say, so much, and on so many occasions, in the English art scene in the last 10 years […] In the days when it all mattered to me and I was trying to publish my views on painting and sculpture, he was one of my worst enemies’. Letter from Heron to Greenberg, 10 September 1959, quoted in Hyman, The Battle for Realism, p.250.

123 Letter from Sylvester to Godfrey Smith, 17 July 1965, TGA 200816/2/1/1082. The prize was won by Michael Tyzack for his painting Alesso ‘B’ (1965), which showed clear parallels with the colour field painting of artists such as Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis that Greenberg admired at that time. Heron was also on the jury.

exhibition 1953, the canvas was too big for the ICA’s Dover Street gallery and had to be hung partly rolled.¹²⁴ Before critics of Sylvester’s generation were in a position to discuss such painting from direct experience, however, they were already writing columns in American publications. Alloway started writing for the New York-based Art News in 1954 while Heron was a regular

correspondent for New York’s Arts between 1955 and 1958. Sylvester, whose writing for Encounter was already widely available in the US, began writing for Arts and the New York Times in 1956.¹²⁵ Hilton Kramer, the editor of Arts, had admired Sylvester’s writings for The Listener, ‘particularly when they deal with French art’, and subsequently informed him that ‘everyone reads your pieces in the N.Y. Times, and agree it’s about the only readable art criticism in the Times. As a rule the newspapers here publish nothing but pure hokum about art.’¹²⁶ Kramer was dismayed, however, at the admiration both Sylvester and Heron showed for the work of Paris-based American Sam Francis, who

Sylvester in April 1956 briefly considered ‘one of the two outstanding young abstract painters in Paris’ (along with Jean-Paul Riopelle).¹²⁷

Sylvester’s praise of Francis was written shortly after the ‘Modern Art in the United States’ exhibition at the Tate which he described as a ‘Damascene conversion’, although it contained only a small selection of work by the

abstract expressionists. Bryan Robertson’s Pollock retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1958 (the first of a series of important exhibitions of

124 David Sylvester, ‘A New–Found Land’ in Vision: Fifty Years of British Creativity (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), pp.20-1 (p.21).

125 Hilton Kramer declined to reprint in Arts an article which Sylvester had first published in Encounter, on the basis that it would already be familiar to a large American readership. Letter from Kramer to Sylvester, 26 November 1956, TGA 200816/2/1/55.

126 Ibid.

127 Ibid.; David Sylvester, ‘Round the London Galleries’, The Listener, 19 April 1956, p.468.

American artists held at the gallery over the next decade) offered the

opportunity for a more sustained appraisal of Pollock’s work.¹²⁸ Sylvester now saw the connections between the ‘all-over’ approach of Klee and the American artists, to the extent that in a review of the exhibition he recycled a passage from his earlier writing about Klee.¹²⁹

Sylvester’s response to abstract expressionism combined aspects of Greenberg (the historical explanation for the popularity of this form of

painting) and Rosenberg (the importance of personal conviction in the success of a painting), although he was unconvinced by claims that the paintings were wild displays of unfettered emotions, and preferred to emphasise the ways in which they displayed control. In Sylvester’s first substantial article on abstract expressionism he suggested that Elaine de Kooning’s term abstract

impressionism would have been a more suitable name for the style and that ‘if its mode of improvisation is compared with improvisation in jazz, the analogy must be made not with “hot” jazz, but with “cool” jazz’. ¹³⁰

The impression made on Sylvester by the abstract expressionist work he saw influenced his writing on, and relationships with, British artists. Most conspicuously Sylvester broke off ties with Bacon for several years between around 1957 and 1962, partly because ‘his new paintings had seemed so shockingly bad that I felt totally disillusioned about him’, but furthermore

128 When MoMA Director of International Programmes Porter McCoy visited London in 1956 Robertson asked for any planned Pollock exhibition to be asked for it to be offered to the Whitechapel Gallery first, beginning a series of important one-man exhibitions by American artists including Rothko, Guston, Rauschenberg and Johns.

Letter from McCoy to Philip James, 18 February 1958, Box 16, Frank O’Hara Papers, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

129 Sylvester, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, p.14. Compare passages in About Modern Art on Klee (pp.37-8) and Pollock (p.63). In his article about ‘Modern Art in the United States’

Sylvester also wrote that ‘in Rothko’s limpid stains of colour, Klee’s world becomes immense, illimitable’. David Sylvester, ‘Expressionism, ‘German and American’, The Twentieth Century, August 1956, pp.142-7 (p.146).

130 Sylvester, ‘Expressionism, ‘German and American’, p.147.

because he was ‘put off by the way he jeered at the work of abstract painters such as Jackson Pollock’.¹³¹ At the same time, Sylvester suggested that Bacon too had been influenced by American painting, and that the appearance of large flat areas of colour in Bacon’s work from 1959 onwards ‘suggest that Bacon could have been affected by the Rothkos and Newmans shown at the Tate early that year in the exhibition ‘The New American Painting’’.¹³²

Meanwhile Andrews, who Sylvester considered ‘possibly a greater painter than Francis [Bacon]’ in 1957 (around the time his attitude towards Bacon

changed) told Hyman that many British artists whom Sylvester had previously supported felt betrayed when he embraced American art.¹³³

Acquaintance with these American pictures prompted Sylvester to contrast their physicality and conviction with the British abstract paintings shown at exhibitions such as ‘Dimensions’, organised by Alloway at the O’Hana gallery in 1957, which in his opinion showed ‘excessive picturesqueness, a dependence upon poetic allusion rather than on the qualities of the painting as a painting’.¹³⁴ Their American equivalents, on the other hand, ‘seem to have solved as a matter of course one of the problems which most preoccupy painters everywhere today—the problem of avoiding a gratuitous beauty or charm without at once producing its opposite’.¹³⁵ A favourite quotation of Sylvester’s was that of Maurice Denis that a picture is ‘essentially a plane surface covered by colours arranged in a certain order’, and now it was

131 Sylvester, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, p.18; Sylvester, ‘My Brushes with Bacon’, p.31.

132 Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, p.93.

133 Hyman, The Battle for Realism, p.248 fn; William Townsend Journals, vol XXVI, entry for 16 May 1957, UCL Special Collections. In this entry Townsend described how in ‘David Sylvester came to the Slade this afternoon to persuade some

undergraduates from Wadham [College, Oxford] to buy the picture Michael Andrews has been painting at the Slade for the last fortnight’.

134 David Sylvester, ‘Absence of Presence’, New Statesman, 28 December 1957, pp.876-7 (p.876).

135 Sylvester, ‘Expressionism, ‘German and American’, p.147.

American paintings, rather than those made in Britain or France, which best communicated the materiality of paintings as physical objects.¹³⁶ Sylvester now claimed that this insubstantial quality was in fact inherent in the history of British painting:

The flaw, indeed, runs through all British painting and has long done so. Even a master of Turner’s giant size has it—though he exploits it, is not its victim, as Constable is. It seems to be the misfortune of British painters to be born with more in them of Shelley than of Keats.

It is the family curse of British painting.¹³⁷

Despite his frequent disagreements with Alloway, Sylvester accepted that his rival was an incisive commentator on American art.¹³⁸ Sylvester advised Ackerley to employ Alloway to write for The Listener but was told ‘my readers don’t want to read about American art month after month and nothing else’.

In Sylvester’s opinion Ackerley ‘got it badly wrong: Lawrence should’ve had a wider platform than he did have, because he was the one who got it right’.¹³⁹

Alloway’s role as a commentator on American art has detracted from the similar (and in some ways more significant) part played by Sylvester from 1956 onwards in this respect.¹⁴⁰ Such a reading is encouraged by Alloway’s

136 Sylvester, ‘Absence of Presence’, p.877.

137 Ibid. The contrast between Keats and Shelley, which Sylvester often used, was an example of the lasting impact of Leavis’ Revaluation (see transcript of interview with Gayford, TGA 200816/6/2/12 and quoted in Chapter I). The similarities between Sylvester’s characterisations of British art in the late 1950s and Pevsner’s argument in The Englishness of English Art are often striking. Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art: An Expanded and Annotated Version of the Reith Lectures Broadcast in October and November 1955 (London: Architectural Association, 1956).

138 Alloway wrote several articles for Encounter in the late 1950s, surely either commissioned or approved by Sylvester in his role of Art Advisor.

139 Sylvester interviewed by Wollheim. Alloway in fact wrote several times for The Listener during Ackerley’s time as literary editor, but the implication is that he would have written more if Ackerley was more favourable towards American art.

140 Whiteley (p.184) claims Alloway was ‘the only critic who had been committed, at an informed level, to both Abstract Expressionism and Pop’ (seemingly referring to critics in both Britain and the US). Hyman claims that even after 1956 Sylvester

‘struggled to understand the new American painting’, that his ‘Expressionism, German and American’ was only ‘grudgingly respectful’, and writes suspiciously of Sylvester’s laudatory 1958 radio talk on Pollock published in About Modern Art that ‘it is not known how much this text has been revised’ (not at all, in fact). Hyman, The Battle for Realism, pp.202-3, 250fn.

own bullishness: he was eager to represent himself as London’s only informed observer of the American scene, even to distinguish himself from critics such as Sylvester who were largely in agreement with him.¹⁴¹ For instance,

following the important Tate Gallery exhibition ‘The New American Painting’ in 1959 Alloway wrote an article surveying the mostly negative reviews which the exhibition received in the press. In this essay he was generally positive about Sylvester’s radio talk ‘The New American Painting and Ourselves’, in which Sylvester ‘worked conscientiously at the aesthetic raised by American art which everybody else missed or shirked’.¹⁴²

Even so, Alloway needed to stress the way in which Sylvester’s

interpretation differed from his own. He felt Sylvester was wrong to respond to the paintings by imagining the experience of the artists’ execution of the work rather than considering the canvases as autonomous aesthetic objects,

describing Sylvester’s approach as ‘little more than an updating of BB’s [Berenson’s] empathy for Renaissance form displaced to paint’.¹⁴³ Sylvester had said that: ‘the pleasure and pain that went into the creation of a work of art do not end with the completed work: they are communicated to every spectator who responds to that work, and much of what moves the spectator is the re-living of the pleasure and pain of its creation.’¹⁴⁴

This critical approach echoes Rosenberg’s prescription in ‘The American Action-Painters’ that ‘criticism must begin by recognizing in the painting the

141 In response to Alloway’s 1960 article ‘Dr. No’s Bacon’ Sylvester wrote ‘I’ve grown accustomed by now to being told by Lawrence Alloway what I ought not to have written’ (letter to the editor, Art News and Review, 7-21 May 1960, p.2).

142 Lawrence Alloway, ‘sic, sic, sic’, Art News and Review, 11 April 1959, pp.5, 8 (p.8).

143 Ibid.

144 David Sylvester, ‘The New American Painting and Ourselves’, broadcast on BBC Third Programme, 15 March 1959, transcript in TGA 200816/8/1/8. This same

approach can be found in Sylvester’s article about George Mathieu the following year (David Sylvester, ‘The Actions of the Dandy’, New Statesman, 12 November 1960, pp.732-4).

assumptions inherent in its mode of creation. Since the painter has become an actor, the spectator has to think in a vocabulary of action: its inception,

duration, direction […]’¹⁴⁵ Sylvester’s talk also connected abstract

expressionism to Sylvester’s ideas of belatedness and limitations discussed earlier in this chapter. Sylvester interpreted abstract expressionism as above all about the painter’s ‘deeply personal struggle with the medium’, and as such a pragmatic response to the problems of postwar painting. Wittgenstein was again called upon by way of comparison with the abstract expressionists, with Sylvester suggesting that contemporary philosophers and painters faced a similar dilemma about how best to further their respective disciplines:

Can art afford to forego the expression of ordinary human

experience, to concern itself with problems arising out of its own language? Can it justifiably limit the problems it poses to those which are the problems of art itself? The analytic school of

contemporary philosophers has been challenged in much the same way from outside […] What the busybodies who ask this kind of question forget is this: People obsessed with their work are not trying to compete with the greatest work done in their field down the ages […] their concern is to take the tradition on from where they find it, to deal with the problems that are there to be answered now.¹⁴⁶

In 1960 Sylvester finally visited the US for the first time, spending two months there after receiving a grant from the Foreign Leader Program (now the International Visitor Leadership Program) the previous year. This was an

145 Rosenberg, Harold, ‘The American Action Painters’, in The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959; repr. London: Thames & Hudson, 1962), pp.23-39 (first publ. in Art News, December 1952, pp.22-3, 48-50), p.29.

Sylvester himself refers to ‘the significance in existentialist thought of the verb “to act”’ when discussing abstract expression in ‘The New American Painting and Ourselves’.

146 Sylvester, ‘The New American Painting and Ourselves’. The other result of this sense of belatedness was a paradoxical freedom summarised by de Kooning’s

formulation in his interview with Sylvester that ‘it’s really absurd to make […] a human image with paint today…But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it’

(Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, p.48; see also discussion of this idea in

‘Art 54-64’ [discussion between Sylvester, Andrew Forge and David Thompson], broadcast on BBC Third Programme, 1 June 1964, transcript TGA 200816/6/2/12).

See also Looking at Giacometti, pp.21-2.

exchange programme run by the US State Department to bring ‘opinion leaders’ to the US in the hope that they would report favourably on their

exchange programme run by the US State Department to bring ‘opinion leaders’ to the US in the hope that they would report favourably on their