Características visuales del ojo

2.4 Film and Photography

Sylvester’s engagement with popular culture has received surprisingly little critical comment to date, perhaps because it runs counter to the

96 David Sylvester, ‘Frustrations of Patronage’, Britain Today, January 1954, pp.35-8.

97 Contemporary Art Society minutes, 18 January 1966, TGA 200816/3/9.

98 Sylvester never published on De Maria, although his The Lightning Field (1977) was a favourite work of Sylvester’s. Sylvester, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, p.28. While I haven’t seen any documents regarding Sylvester’s views on the De Maria sculpture, he may have responded to De Maria’s proposal (a granite sphere) for similar reasons to works by Serra such as Weight and Measure at the Tate Gallery in 1992.

prevailing view of him as a connoisseur and elitist. As a result, the significant overlaps between Sylvester’s interests and those of Alloway and the

Independent Group have yet to be elucidated. Alloway and Sylvester shared strong interests in popular culture, and were equally at home discussing interests which fell outside of the fine art canon. Sylvester would certainly have agreed with Alloway’s point in his ‘Personal Statement’ that: ‘we grew up with the mass media. Unlike our parents and teachers we did not experience the impact of the movies, the radio, the illustrated magazines. The mass media were established as a natural environment by the time we could see them’.⁹⁹

Sylvester, like Alloway, was closely involved with the ICA in its early years, partly through exhibitions such as ‘Recent Trends in Realist Painting’

and ‘Young Painters’ (both 1952), but also through regular lectures and panel appearances (Sylvester took part in thirty-nine ICA events in the 1950s).¹⁰⁰ Sylvester wrote surprisingly little about the now-revered exhibitions organised by the protagonists of the Independent Group during the 1950s, but here again his ideas about Klee and afocalism were influential. The concept of the

‘multi-evocative sign’ that Sylvester used in relation to Klee was an

acknowledged influence on Nigel Henderson and the exhibition ‘Parallel of Life and Art’, while Giovanni Casini has made a convincing case for Richard

Hamilton’s early work as also reflecting the influence of Sylvester’s writings on

99 Lawrence Alloway, ‘Personal Statement’ in Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic, ed. by Richard Kalina (London: Routledge, 2006), pp.51-3 (p.51) (first publ. in Ark, no 19, March 1957, p.28).

100 Most of these are listed in the chronology included in Anne Massey and Gregor Muir, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1946-1968 (London: ICA, 2014). Sylvester and Alloway were both combining writing and curating at this time.

Klee.¹⁰¹ Several years later, Sylvester described another ICA exhibition, the Alloway-Hamilton-Victor Pasmore collaboration ‘an exhibit’, as ‘organised as freely and meanderingly as a Klee’.¹⁰²

Notable points of convergence between Sylvester and Alloway include their joint participation in a symposium on film heroines at the ICA in 1955.

Chaired by Alloway, the event included Sylvester talking about Marilyn Monroe and Toni del Renzio on Audrey Hepburn. Sylvester had watched films

voraciously since his schooldays, and his writing on film offers an interesting counterpoint to his art criticism. Whereas his art criticism emphasises art as the expression of an individual sensibility, his film writing of the same period was written with a specific purpose: ‘to subvert the complacent standards of the caucus of highbrow and middlebrow writers on film [...] I believed that the cult of the director among film critics was a distortion of the culture of the movies’.¹⁰³ In his book on Alloway, Whiteley summarises an exchange between the opposed views on film criticism of Alloway and Andrew Sarris, who championed ‘auteur theory’ and the film as an expression of the director’s vision. Of the two perspectives Sylvester was closer to Alloway’s.¹⁰⁴

Sylvester’s contribution to the ICA symposium was subsequently published in Encounter. By Sylvester’s own estimation this made Encounter the ‘first highbrow magazine’ to publish an essay about Monroe, which in

101 Victoria Walsh, Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art (London: Thames &

Hudson, 2001), p.103; Giovanni Casini, ‘Richard Hamilton at the Slade School of Fine Art (1948-51) and his ‘Abstract’ Paintings of the Early 1950s’, Burlington Magazine, September 2015, pp.623-630.

102 David Sylvester, ‘In Homage to Victor Pasmore’, Modern Painters, Summer 1998, pp.110-11. The text was written at the time of the 1957 exhibition but not published at the time.

103 Sylvester, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, p.24.

104 Whiteley, pp.275-6. Sylvester accepted ‘films had been made which in intention and achievement were works of art—notably films by Eisenstein, Pabst, Dreyer, Buñuel, Renoir, Preston Sturges and Rosselini’—but he rarely wrote about these.

Sylvester, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, p.24.

contrast to the negative assessments of Encounter’s cultural criticism quoted earlier in this chapter suggests the magazine was prescient in publishing intelligent writing about Monroe at this stage in her career.¹⁰⁵ Encounter published several articles on films by Sylvester, which differ significantly from the doctrinaire pro-American, anti-Communist ethos behind the magazine as a whole. Hyman, who interpreted Sylvester’s criticism as Cold War existential anxiety writ large, failed to realise this and wrote of Sylvester’s first film review: ‘Sylvester’s response to a science fiction film called Them typifies the sense of threat to be found in Encounter’s approach […] For him the science fiction film became a thinly veiled allegory of the struggle between democratic freedom and Soviet tyranny’.¹⁰⁶ This is incorrect. While Sylvester quotes from another article which interprets the film’s message as ‘trust the FBI and watch out for deadly monsters who infest America. The Ants in fact are the Reds’, it is to explicitly reject this view:

Clearly the Message is anything but “trust the FBI.” Still, Them! Has a Message all right […] It is this: that the age of liberal belief in science as a purely beneficent force is past, because science is not as omniscient as people used to assume it would become, and because science itself has fathered new threats to civilisation and progress.¹⁰⁷

Even when Sylvester was explicitly anti-Communist, as in ‘Orwell on the

Screen’, this was balanced with criticism of the animated adaptation of Animal Farm (1954) which was funded by the CIA (having known Orwell well,

Sylvester’s article, with its claim ‘the thing which obsessed Orwell most of all

105 David Sylvester, ‘The Innocence of Marilyn Monroe’, Encounter, May 1955, pp.50-52; Sylvester, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, p.25. While Alloway had first published an article about The Third Man in 1950 (Lawrence Alloway, ‘Symbolism in ‘The Third Man’, World Review, March 1950, pp.57-60), Sylvester was writing regularly on cinema several years before Alloway.

106 Hyman, The Battle for Realism, p.165.

107 David Sylvester, ‘Them!’, Encounter, November 1954, pp.48-50 (pp.49-50).

Ironically the review Sylvester quoted from was published in Twentieth Century, which had refused to follow the instructions of the CCF.

about Soviet totalitarianism was its ruthless dishonesty’, was likely drawn from experience rather than speculation).¹⁰⁸

Sylvester occasionally spoke about the relationship between art and film (notably as a participant in a discussion on ‘Cinema as a Visual Art’ in 1957), but the significance of the medium for Sylvester’s art criticism was lesser than that of photography. ¹⁰⁹ Sylvester has stated that the latter was central to many discussions in the 1950s, when photography had yet to achieve general recognition as a fine art but was used regularly as source material by leading painters.¹¹⁰ Bacon was perhaps the most radical in the way he used

photography to stimulate his extraordinary paintings, and it should not be underestimated how much Bacon’s appeal for Sylvester derived not only from his abilities as a painter but also the way he drew from the photographic imagery (often of pop-cultural origins) that interested Sylvester. Sylvester’s first significant statement about Bacon’s work (initially broadcast on the Third Programme on 28 December 1952, and so anticipating Sam Hunter’s

influential article on Bacon the following month) was primarily a discussion of how Bacon adapted photographic source imagery and why it was important, which also referenced other painters to have used photographs such as Degas and Sickert.¹¹¹ Alloway recognized Sylvester’s role alongside Hunter in

revealing Bacon’s sources in 1956 when surveying different interpretations of

108 David Sylvester, ‘Orwell on the Screen’, Encounter, March 1955, pp.35-7 (p.36);

The Battle for Realism, pp.166-8.

109 ‘Talking of Films’, broadcast on Network Three, 5 November 1957, microfilmed transcript in BBC WAC.

110 Sylvester, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, p.23. In Transition (p.54) Harrison reproduces a newspaper cutting of Lord Beaverbrook used in Sylvester’s lectures in the fifties, reminiscent of Bacon’s Three Studies of the Human Head (1953).

111 David Sylvester, ‘Francis Bacon’, broadcast on the BBC Third Programme 28

December 1951 (published as ‘The Paintings of Francis Bacon’, The Listener, 3 January 1952, pp.28-9. Sylvester used to attend football matches with Bacon and the

photographer Nigel Henderson (information from Victoria Walsh).

the painter’s work: ‘There is the psycho-legend of destroyed masterpieces, spread by Robert Melville. There is Bacon’s use of photographs […] revealed by David Sylvester and Sam Hunter.’¹¹²

Sylvester once told Bacon that he thought Andy Warhol was

‘tremendously influenced by you […] the one person who’s taken clues from you’, and when Sylvester later wrote about Warhol, he underlined the

American artist’s similarly creative use of photography.¹¹³ Sylvester even planned to organise a joint Bacon/Warhol exhibition with Mark Francis.¹¹⁴ Common to Sylvester’s writing on both artists is a conviction that they redeem photography through painting and make more of it than it could ever be on its own, in keeping with Sylvester’s assessment that ‘photography is not an art’

on the basis of its failure to provoke responses in him similar to those common to other art forms.¹¹⁵ In his 1987 article about Warhol, Sylvester wrote (and this is also relevant to the source imagery of Bacon’s paintings):

Speaking of boredom, it’s really photographs that are boring, once their amazing initial impact has passed. The reason is mainly the blandness of their surface, which has none of the vitality,

suggestiveness and mystery that a painted surface can have.

Warhol’s versions of photographs give them the vibrancy of great painting […] he can be seen as one of a line of painters, such as Bacon, who have taken the photograph and breathed life into it; he

112 Lawrence Alloway, ‘Notes on Francis Bacon’, Art News and Review, 9 February 1955, p.7. Curiously, in 1960 Alloway offered a different assessment: ‘Sylvester, though in a position to do so, never got around to writing about a Bacon who was not a bogey-man’ (Lawrence Alloway, ‘Dr. No’s Bacon’, Art News and Review, 9 April 1960, p.2). For Alloway’s perspective on Bacon see Martin Hammer, ‘The Independent Group Take On Francis Bacon’, Visual Culture in Britain, 15:1 (2014), pp.69-89.

113 Transcript for Sylvester-Bacon interview 3, session 3 (recorded October 1973), TGA 200816/4/2/9.

114 See exhibition proposal by Sylvester and Mark Francis dated 11 January 1999, TGA 200816/2/1/369. See also letter from Tony Shafrazi to Sylvester about the idea of a Bacon and Warhol exhibition, 26 February 1999 (TGA 200816/2/1/1135) and

Sylvester’s statement ‘the artist whom I want to see alongside Bacon is Warhol’

(Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, p.215).

115 Gayford, ‘The Eye’s Understanding’, p.37. Sylvester was due to interview the photographer Richard Avedon to coincide with his National Portrait Gallery exhibition in 1995, but cancelled at the last minute after seeing the exhibition and a replacement had to be found. Conversation with Jonathan Burnham, 13 April 2016.

may well, indeed, have been influenced by those monochromatic Bacon paintings of around 1950 in which grey paint resembling ectoplasm floats in the middle of a large dark empty areas of stained canvas.¹¹⁶

This conviction that ‘it’s really photographs that are boring’ explains why Sylvester wrote very little about photography, and only installed one photography exhibition, ‘A Positive View’ at the Saatchi Gallery in 1994. He felt that photography was a source of great images but primarily as source images for artists such as Warhol and Bacon to imbue those images with greater

depth and resonance.