Iluminancia promedio sobre el plano de trabajo

Sylvester wrote that ‘from the early 1950s to the late 1970s the BBC Third Programme was probably Britain’s best forum on the subjects of contemporary art and architecture—better than television, better than any particular periodical’.⁶ It aspired to broadcasting that was both educational and

2 Anon., ‘When Television Turns to the Arts’, The Times, 11 April 1964, p.5; Anon.,

‘Radio’s Services to Art’, The Times, 10 October 1964, p.12.

3 French, ‘My Mentor (2001): An Obituary’ in Philip French, I Found It at the Movies:

Reflections of a Cinephile (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011), pp.1-4 (p.1).

4 Gerald was, however, described as a ‘pompous literary parasite’ in the editor’s introduction to the volume in which the play was published. J.C. Trewin, ‘Introduction’

in Plays of the Year, Volume 28, ed. by J.C. Trewin (London: Elek, 1965), pp.7-14 (p.10).

5 Frank Marcus, ‘The Formation Dancers’ in Plays of the Year, Volume 28, pp.219-327 (p.250). Forge wrote of Sylvester that ‘his eclecticism was a scandal’ (‘In the Shadow of Thanatos’, p.28).

Yvonne Gilan, actress and former wife of Michael Gill, identified the characters in the play for me (conversation with Gilan, 18 July 2014).

6 David Sylvester, ‘Picasso as Sculptor’, p.35.

of cultural merit, and Harrison Birtwistle and Harold Pinter (both friends of Sylvester’s) are amongst the many who have testified to the importance of the programme in giving them access to advanced culture at an early age.⁷ For several years Sylvester broadcast regularly on the Third Programme, which began in 1946 as a flagship station broadcasting entirely scripted material all intended to be of publishable quality.⁸ The Third Programme was both revered for its uncompromising standards and reviled for its perseverance in making programmes which rarely reached audience numbers comparable to those of the Home Service or Light Programme, but Sylvester was always a supporter of its ethos.

Sylvester’s Third Programme career had started falteringly. He met with the critic and Third Programme Talks producer Basil Taylor in 1948 and made several suggestions for broadcasts, but was not commissioned to write any of them.⁹ Then in 1951, just as he was beginning to establish himself on the station, he heard that following his talk on Bacon the head of the station Harman Grisewood ‘swore that it would be a long time before I did another talk for them’.¹⁰ The same broadcast was also singled out for criticism by Read in his own Third Programme broadcast, ‘The Art of Art Criticism’. Read quoted a passage from Sylvester’s broadcast in which he spoke of how ‘in looking at some of Bacon’s paintings, we are conscious at first only of the paint, seeing it

7 Pinter said the Third Programme expanded his horizons ‘enormously’ and was ‘a great thing’ (Humphrey Carpenter, The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3 1946-1996, 2^nd edn (London: Phoenix Giant, 1997), p.50) while Birtwistle said ‘if you ask me where I was educated, I would say the Third Programme’ (Tusa, On Creativity, p,56). Both were friends with Sylvester.

8 Carpenter, p.216.

9 Sylvester’s suggestions included talks on ‘Modern Jewish Painting’, ‘The Rise and Decline of Expressionism’, and ‘The Ideal Museum’. Letter from Sylvester to Taylor, 24 March 1948, RCont 1 David Sylvester Talks file 1 1948-1958, BBC WAC.

10 Sylvester, ‘My Brushes with Bacon’, p.30. After this Sylvester didn’t present another talk on the Third Programme for another four years.

as some amorphous, ectoplasmic substance floating aimlessly on the canvas.

It takes a little time before this stuff that is paint crystallises into an image’.

Read objected that in Sylvester’s talk:

The language is such as might be used by a lecturer in a physics laboratory […] in describing the painter’s intention by terminology taken from the science of physics, this particular critic is, I would say, using precise analytical language. It would seem, therefore, that what we really distrust—and by ‘we’ I mean the general

public—is the analytical method itself: we remember Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘we murder to dissect’, and we would rather be left with a living unity, however baffling it might be.¹¹

The rather artificial choice that Read sets out here is between poetic evocation and clinical dissection, but as shown by the very passage that Read quoted, Sylvester is as evocative as he is analytical. As subsequent examples in this chapter also demonstrate, Sylvester’s career in art broadcasting involved trying to maintain a balance between the elucidation and evocation of artworks.

After beginning his Third Programme career with occasional individual broadcasts such as his talk on Bacon, Sylvester eventually found a regular slot giving shorter talks on the Thursday night arts magazine ‘Comment’. Twenty minutes in length, ‘Comment’ consisted of either two or three separate items on various art forms, with Sylvester regularly reviewing exhibitions or films.¹² This was a change from early resistance to regular features on the Third Programme, which initially preferred a more fluid approach to scheduling, and it took a newspaper strike in 1955 to initiate a regular arts programme on the station. As French recalled, ‘it was decided to have a programme to perform a

11 Herbert Read, ‘The Art of Art Criticism’, The Listener, 1 May 1952, pp. 714-6 (p.715). Like Sylvester’s talk on Bacon, Read’s talk was broadcast first and then published in The Listener.

12 Some of Sylvester’s ‘Comment’ reviews were published in About Modern Art, showing his high regard for them.

service that had been lost—to provide theatre and arts reviews. So Comment began, and David Sylvester and Robert Kee were brought in as ‘advisers’ for it, but it was just a staff announcer introducing the pieces, which were written scripts commissioned from the people whose newspaper columns were in abeyance’.¹³

The programme was first broadcast on 21 July 1955 and Sylvester made his first appearance on 25 August 1955, reviewing the new Marilyn Monroe film The Seven-Year Itch (dir. Billy Wilder, 1955). In his Encounter article on Monroe earlier in the year Sylvester had been critical about

Hollywood’s misuse of Monroe’s talents, but after seeing The Seven-Year Itch he applauded it as ‘the best starring vehicle this remarkable and delectable creature has so far had.¹⁴ Due to its success ‘Comment’ was kept on after the strike finished, and became, as French remembered, ‘the beginning of topical interviews on the Third’, providing a suitable outlet for Sylvester’s important series of interviews with American artists (Chapter 4).¹⁵

An example of Sylvester’s work for ‘Comment’ is his broadcast on a 1958 Kurt Schwitters exhibition in London (Sylvester’s most extensive

discussion of Schwitters’ work).¹⁶ Sylvester claims that, like Naum Gabo, ‘the obsessions which could give creative vitality to Schwitters’ work were curiously narrow and precious’, residing only in one aspect of his output: his collages and constructions.¹⁷ The delicacy of this work is compared with Whistler,

13 Carpenter, p.216. Sylvester was himself one of those newspaper writers. Sylvester also co-produced ‘Comment’ with George Macbeth for a short time in 1959.

14 David Sylvester, ‘On the film ‘The Seven Year Itch’, ‘Comment’, broadcast on BBC Third Programme on 25 August 1955, transcript in TGA 200816/8/1/6.

15 Carpenter, p.216. The programme was retitled ‘New Comment’ in 1961.

16 David Sylvester, ‘David Sylvester on the exhibition of work of Kurt Schwitters at Lord’s Gallery, St. John’s Wood’, ‘Comment’, broadcast on BBC Third Programme, 23 October 1958, transcript in TGA 200816/8/1/5.

17 Ibid.

whose art shocked ‘because he refused to confer on man and his image the importance traditionally given to them’. At the same time that Schwitters’

method of redeeming specifically discarded materials is compared to other Dadaists and described as ‘a sort of pantheism of the dustbin’, its use of form and colour is compared once again to that of Klee.¹⁸ This is not an exhibition review which isolates and discusses any individual works but demonstrates how Sylvester can, in a short broadcast, provide a compelling framework for interpreting an artist’s work as a whole.

Another notable aspect of Sylvester’s radio talks was his capacity for compelling close analysis of specific paintings, as demonstrated by his talks for the BBC’s successful Home Service series ‘Painting of the Month’, which ran from 1960 to 1967.¹⁹ In this series critics, artists and art historians spoke about three paintings within the same genre in British public collections.

Sylvester was assigned still-life, and spoke about paintings by Cézanne,

Braque and Bonnard. Comparing the respective audiences of the Home Service and the Third Programme, Sylvester noted ‘speakers had to assume that the Home Service audience would be less informed than the Third Programme audience’.²⁰

18 Ibid.

19 A revised series of programmes, which repeated Sylvester’s talk on Cézanne’s Still Life with a Teapot, was broadcast on Radio 3 in 1969.

20 Sylvester, introduction to ‘Still Life: Cézanne, Braque, Bonnard’ in About Modern Art, pp.90-110 (p.90). Another example of Sylvester’s approach to writing for different BBC audiences can be seen in a letter he wrote complaining about low rates of pay for work on ‘Woman’s Hour’ (on which Sylvester occasionally reviewed films): ‘writing a talk for a mass audience requires a good deal more time and trouble than writing one for a highbrow audience. In the latter case one writes spontaneously, as one might talk to friends; in the former, one has the task of simplifying one’s ideas to make them more accessible. When writing for newspapers, rewards are proportionately larger in relation to the size of one’s audience: Beaverbrook pays more than The Times because he commands a larger circulation […] there still does seem to me to be a case to be made out for taking the size of the audience into consideration when assessing the fee, simply because the labour involved in producing the talk tends to increase as the

Response to ‘Painting of the Month’ was extremely positive, hence its longevity: the radio critic of The Times more than once described it as an

‘exemplary’ programme which drew increased numbers of visitors to the galleries which housed the paintings discussed.²¹ The critic of The Times explained its appeal: ‘for a modest sum it equips its audience with a portfolio of reproductions […] and a pertinent commentary upon its selected pictures.

Fortified by these excellent materials the listener is equipped to get the best out of the 20-minute talks’.²² Sylvester also approved of the project, which he described as ‘one of the most rewarding commissions I have ever had’ while he also reprinted all three of his talks in About Modern Art.²³

The programmes’ audience included the future critic and art historian Richard Cork, who was a schoolboy at the time the programmes were broadcast. Cork recalled:

Every Christmas I would ask my parents for a year’s subscription to the BBC’s Painting of the Month […] More often than not, […]

speakers as perceptive as David Sylvester or Andrew Forge made me appreciate just how much could be gained from the steady, continually alert and questioning examination of a single image. […]

All the most nourishing talks delivered by ‘Painting of the Month’

broadcasters likewise invited the listener to resist any temptation to lapse into passive consumption of a neat, watertight analysis. They required us instead to take an active part in ‘joining up’ the ‘internal workings’ of every image under consideration. I remember in

particular the formidable challenge presented to my fourteen-year-old responses by Braque’s Cubist Still Life with Fish when David Sylvester explored it in February 1962.²⁴

audience increases’. Letter from Sylvester to Ronald Boswell (BBC Talks Booking Manager), n.d. [1959?], RCont 1 David Sylvester Talks file 1 1948-1958, BBC WAC.

21 ‘Giving Us Shocks to Open Our Eyes’, The Times, 26 January 1963, p.4; ‘Radio’s Services to Art’.

22 ‘Radio’s Services to Art’. ‘Painting of the Month’ was not the first BBC programme to use this combination of broadcasting and publication: in 1947 a Burlington Magazine editorial discussed a ‘Gallery Book’ devised by the Third Programme, with the Radio Times publishing photographs of works to be discussed. Anon., ‘Editorial: Broadcasting and the Visual Arts’, Burlington Magazine, October 1947, pp. 265-6.

23 Letter from Sylvester to Jean Rowntree, TGA 200816/2/1/160.

24 Richard Cork, ‘Art on Radio: A Modest Proposal’ in Ariel at Bay: Reflections on Broadcasting and the Arts: A Festschrift for Philip French, ed. by Robert Carver (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), pp.68-73 (pp.71-2).

Cork, like Birtwistle and Pinter, is proof of the role of the Third Programme, despite its small overall audience, in attracting audiences who might not otherwise have encountered intelligent discussion of the arts.