Sylvester’s writings about Klee, while never producing a coherent theory of ‘afocalism’ (a word he often used to describe similar ‘all-over’ art),
nonetheless pointed the way towards Sylvester’s writing on the two artists with whom he was most closely associated with in the 1950s, Bacon and Giacometti. In the introductory essay to About Modern Art, Sylvester quoted from a lecture he gave at the Royal College of Art titled ‘Towards a New Realism’, in which he said the artist:
Must show that experiences are fleeting, that every experience dissolves into the next … must produce images which are not
case owing to the Kennedy assassination taking place shortly before his work was due to be published, and resulting in the space allocated for Hockney being taken up by a tribute to Kennedy instead. Christopher Simon Sykes Hockney: the Biography. Volume 1, 1937-1975 (London: Century, 2011), pp.134-5; and Marco Livingstone,
‘Montgomery Clift through the eyes of Peter Blake’, B’05 : Buletina = Boletín = Bulletin, no.1, 2006, pp. 111-138. For Hockney as ‘colour supplement artist’ see Andrew Brighton, ‘Hockney’s Courage’ in David Hockney 1960-1968: A Marriage of Styles, ed. by Alex Farquharson and others (Nottingham: Nottingham Contemporary, 2009), pp.73-80 (p.73).
57 For instance, Sylvester wrote ‘it was almost entirely because of my nagging a resistant exhibitions committee of the Arts Council that Lucian [Freud] had the first of his retrospectives at the Hayward [in 1974]’. Letter from Sylvester to Calvocoressi, 31 March 1997, TGA 200816/2/1/1006.
58 In 1969 Sylvester also resigned as a trustee of the Tate, from the British Film Institute production board, and from the Contemporary Art Society.
scenes, set up apart from the observer and seeming capable of existing when there is no observer present … but must be images in which the observer participates, images whose space makes sense only in relation to the position in it occupied by an observer.59
The works of Bacon and Giacometti were used to illustrate this, along with examples from Klee, Cubism, and Impressionism. The lecture was unusually polemical by Sylvester’s standards but only in advancing the idea, present in much of his writing of the 1950s, that a modern conception of realism must take into account the subjectivity of both artist and viewer and to embody individual experience of the world. The extent to which this remained a preoccupation ten years later can be seen in a memo dated 16 January 1961 for a planned publication or lecture series headed ‘the Eye and the I’:
This might now be retitled “Art as Investigation”. It would begin by taking for granted that with Impressionism or just before it there arose a kind of art the main concern of which was not the finished product but the process of discovery […] The book would then
pursue various consequences of this position. It could do so in terms of themes or it could do so– this seems more likely—in terms of individual artists, say, Monet, Cezanne, Bonnard, Picasso/Braque, Giacometti, de Kooning. The Klee idea would also come into it as a conceptual version of the same preoccupation.60
While Giacometti and Bacon were Sylvester’s key artists in the 1950s, his view of modern art was rooted in the innovations of Impressionism. Sylvester was critical of the 1957 Monet exhibition at the Tate Gallery specifically because its organisers, Douglas Cooper and John Richardson, had neglected Monet’s late works, and therefore overlooked what Sylvester considered most significant about the artist: ‘Professor Cooper does not seem to have appreciated the fact that one of the essential differences between modern art and earlier art is that it is never possible to be sure when a modern work is ‘finished’, that in a
59 Sylvester, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, p.17; manuscript relating to the original lecture is in TGA 200816/4/1/25.
60 TGA 200816/7/15. In ‘Curriculum Vitae’ (p.23) Sylvester gave The Eye and the I as an example of how ‘the best thinking I did in the Fifties never got into print’.
sense a modern work is not finishable, that modern artists are constantly uncertain whether their works are finished or not’.61 For Sylvester, the modern artwork had to be something that the viewer completed, so it was important for it not to look entirely finished.62
Sylvester also had in mind this question of ‘finish’ in 1955, when he wrote ‘End of the Streamlined Era in Painting and Sculpture’, an article in the Times that was ‘the nearest thing to a personal manifesto that I had so far published’.63 Again clearly inspired by Giacometti (an exhibition of whose work Sylvester organised that year), the article describes a shift from the smooth or
‘streamlined’ surfaces of Brancusi and other artists of the interwar period to rough or unfinished ones in art by postwar artists such as Auerbach. Sylvester considered this a difference ‘between post-war and pre-war thinking: that we now accept imperfection and we no longer have Flaubert as an ideal but rather Dostoevsky’.64 Wittgenstein’s ideas about subjectivity were again to the fore here. Sylvester began his first article about Bacon by repeating ideas familiar from his earlier writings on Klee:
There are any number of ways of representing the world, and all of them are equally valid. Simply because, as J.Z. Young told us, ‘the brain of each of us does literally create his or her own world’. So the
61 David Sylvester, ‘Monet, More or Less’, New Statesman, 5 October 1957, pp.413-4 (p.414). This passage closely resembles that in Sylvester’s assertion in Looking at Giacometti that ‘the question of the unfinished and the unfinishable is, of course, one of the things that modern art is about’. David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), p.17.
62 The 2016 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition ‘Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible’
is not only of general relevance to Sylvester’s thinking, but includes several specific works that he wrote about by artists including Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas (David Sylvester, ‘Satyr vs. God’, Vanity Fair, 1984 [issue unidentified but p.72; copy in TGA 200816/8/1/5]), de Kooning’s Woman I (David Sylvester, ‘The Birth of Woman I’, Burlington Magazine, April 1995, pp.220-32) and Robert Morris’ Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (David Sylvester, ‘Box with the Sound of its Own Making’ in David Sylvester and Michael Compton, Robert Morris (London: Tate Gallery, 1971), pp.10-11).
63 About Modern Art, p.49.
64 David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), p.52. Sylvester was referring to de Kooning’s indifference to finish.
artist’s task is not to paint things ‘as they are’—the phrase indeed, is meaningless—but to make us believe that things are as he paints them.65
So for Sylvester painting is a less an attempt by artists to communicate common meanings than to represent convincingly their own distinctive realities. This approach has much in common with Rosenberg’s essay ‘the American Action Painters’ (first published in 1952, shortly after the ‘Towards a New Realism’ lecture), which Sylvester much admired, and which similarly displaced the question of what to paint from a question of communal subject matter onto the personal impulses of the individual.
Sylvester’s emphasis on the disregard of perfection and finish in postwar art has much to do with his conviction that modern art was, seen in historical context, part of the aftermath of the great movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In an essay that seems pertinent for both the art Sylvester wrote about and Sylvester’s criticism itself, Boris Groys wrote that whereas the avant-garde was once a source of revolutionary
energy, by the mid-twentieth century it was merely a way of commenting upon earlier art.66 Sylvester wrote in a draft text on Giacometti that both surrealism and abstract expressionism ‘have cut their losses and settled for limited aims as well as limited success […] [they have] felt the shock of the Dadaist critique and set out to see what can be salvaged from the wreck’.67 He believed that Cézanne was the last truly great artist and that the ‘wreck’ of
65 David Sylvester, ‘The Paintings of Francis Bacon’, The Listener, 3 January 1952, pp.28-9 (p.28). The quotation from Young (a professor of Anatomy at UCL) had also been used previously in ‘Towards a New Realism’. In Bacon and Sylvester’s 1973 interview Bacon says he has recently been reading a ‘very brilliant’ book by Young, who Bacon says he used to see at the Gargoyle Club. Transcript for Sylvester-Bacon interview 3, session 2 (recorded July 14 1973), TGA 200816/4/2/9.
66 Boris Groys, ‘Clement Greenberg: Art and Culture: Critical Essays, 1961’ in The Books the Shaped Art History, ed. by Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard (London:
Thames & Hudson), pp.128-139).
67 TGA 200816/5/4/3/18.
Dada during the Great War was followed by a series of attempts to reconcile its revelations with the desire to continue making art in the great tradition.68 This framework explains much about the art which Sylvester favoured,
including artists such as Bacon, Giacometti and Jasper Johns, all of whom very consciously responded to a sense of belatedness with regards to the tradition of Western art, refusing easy solutions which overlooked the ‘wreck’ of Dada and taking sceptical approaches towards art-making painting as an activity without jettisoning the delight in sensuality and materiality which
characterised their precursors. The other likelihood is that this viewpoint was imposed by the postwar ‘restrictive practice’, and that working with limited options was in some sense a metaphor for the experience of living in postwar Britain (this is one way of viewing another of Sylvester’s favourite artists, William Coldstream).
Sylvester considered these artists ambitious because they embraced the problems inherent in representation, which he interpreted as a way for artists at this juncture to challenge themselves rather than allow themselves the liberty of painting in an abstract idiom.69 The quotation in the previous paragraph shows that Sylvester considered abstract expressionism and
surrealism as limited in comparison to Giacometti’s aims in his figurative work,
68 Sylvester, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, p.21.
69 David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon (Thames & Hudson, 2000), p.196.
In a 1964 television programme about de Kooning Sylvester said ‘I would say that figuration in art is likely to go further than abstraction. This is not because there’s any special virtue in figuration for its own sake. It’s because figuration offers a resistance.
It creates a tension. It makes the work exist on two contradictory levels at once, as in this drawing by Bonnard where the marks have their own life as a dance on paper but also a precise statement of another kind of life’. David Sylvester, Ten Modern Artists:
De Kooning, broadcast on BBC1, 7 June 1964, transcript TGA 200816/5/6/3/5.
which helps to explain why he did not write about Giacometti’s earlier surrealist works in any detail during the artist’s lifetime.70
Sylvester’s early criticism on Bacon and Giacometti has been
well-documented in The Battle for Realism, but the importance of Coldstream in his writing is still under-appreciated, largely because Coldstream’s reputation has languished since Sylvester and Lawrence Gowing’s 1990 Coldstream exhibition at the Tate Gallery. In fact, Coldstream was one of the most important artists in Sylvester’s writing in the 1950s and early 1960s for two reasons. One was Sylvester’s proximity to him as a regular lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art, where Coldstream was director (such was Coldstream’s influence that Sylvester confessed to ‘the feeling that I was living my life as part of a dream in the mind of Coldstream’).71 The second, meanwhile, is that in two of
Sylvester’s major articles on British art of the early 1960s he makes it clear that he considers Coldstream to be one of Britain’s two leading painters
(alongside Bacon), as well as ‘the leader of a school’ emulating his meticulous measuring technique.72 In the 1980s he retained this conviction, and
suggested that artists such as Victor Willing and Michael Andrews developed by assimilating the dual influences of Bacon and Coldstream in different
ways.73 Coldstream had other notable advocates at this time, including Forge, Gowing and Stokes (all painter-critics)—but it was rare for him to receive such
70 In a draft, Sylvester wrote ‘Giacometti, after being a Surrealist in his early days, has set out to attempt larger aims, to represent external reality as he sees it’ (TGA
200816/5/4/3/18). Compare this with the published equivalent ‘Giacometti, after a period of adherence to Surrealism, has set out to attempt to represent external reality as he sees it’ (Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, p.20).
71 Sylvester, ‘Writings by Victor Willing’, p.58.
72 David Sylvester, ‘Dark Sunlight’, Sunday Times Colour Magazine, 2 June 1963, pp.3-15 (p.3); David Sylvester, ‘Aspects of Contemporary British Art’, Texas Quarterly, Autumn 1961, pp.118-28 (p.126).
73 Sylvester, ‘Writings by Victor Willing’, p.58.
high-profile endorsement as in the Sunday Times Magazine, where one of these articles was published.
If Bacon represented the progression of a malerisch tendency in modern art which Sylvester associated with precursors such as Soutine, the critic saw Coldstream and the Euston Road School (which included Stokes and Pasmore, both artists he admired) as emerging from the perceptual tradition of
Cézanne. In turn, there are evident similarities between the work of Coldstream and Giacometti: the latter even visited the Slade and went for dinner with Sylvester and Coldstream when visiting London for the first time for his 1955 exhibition.74 More interesting, however, is the way that Sylvester seems to have considered Coldstream’s method of working, with his
measuring system (whose limitations he wryly admitted) and his willingness to let a sitter’s attention span determine the outcome of a work, as a peculiarly English version of the sort of Taoist mentality that Sylvester later ascribed to a host of mainly American artists (such as Cy Twombly and the composer and artist John Cage). Sylvester delighted in observing the way that all of these artists worked in a way that deliberately relinquished control over the outcome of their works and encouraged unforeseen outcomes.75
74 The similarities and differences between the two artists are discussed in Bruce Laughton, ‘Coldstream and Giacometti in London’, British Art Journal, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Spring 2009), pp.79-85. Young British painters of the 1950s were as inspired by Giacometti’s example as Turnbull and Paolozzi. Auerbach said ‘an artist like Giacometti offered hope, to continue and to give everything for a truthful art without any
compromises’. Auerbach quoted from a 1987 interview in Catherine Lampert, Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015).
75 See David Sylvester, ‘On Letting Alone’, Barnett Newman, Joseph Beuys, Cy Twombly, Yves Klein, Jasper Johns / with texts from Chuang Tzu (London: Anthony d’Offay, 1993).