Naturaleza de la luz

Another artist who Sylvester clearly had in mind when writing ‘End of the Streamlined Era’ in 1955 was Germaine Richier. Later that same year he restated ideas from the article in a catalogue essay for Richier’s Hanover Gallery exhibition which began ‘nobody, perhaps, occupies so central, so crucial, a position in contemporary sculpture as Germaine Richier’.⁷⁶ The exhibition was reviewed by both Berger and Alloway, whose responses both engage with Sylvester’s text and demonstrate the differences in their criticism.

Alloway, who was then closely linked to the Independent Group based at the ICA, reviewed the exhibition positively while demonstrating a very different viewpoint to Sylvester:

David Sylvester’s part of the catalogue is concerned with Richier’s technique, about which he is illuminating, and with an interpretation of her content, which is controversial. He suggests that her sculptures symbolise both a “physical assault upon the human body” and a conflation of “the human species with other organisms, animal and vegetable”. There are two ideas here, though Sylvester treats them together. The assault on the body is one thing, the crossing of the body with what used to be called the animal and vegetable kingdoms is another. A beating-up does not change the body you started out with in the way that metamorphosis does.⁷⁷

Alloway not only avoids but denies the violence in Richier’s sculpture, preferring to interpret the work using the optimistic anthropological language favoured within the Independent Group: ‘this flow of metamorphosis assumes not a violent world but a natural state of plenitude to which man is a contributing part’. Sylvester subsequently reviewed Richier’s exhibition again for The Times, where he specifically rejected the reading of Alloway, who considered the

76 David Sylvester, ‘On Germaine Richier’, Germaine Richier: Exhibition of Sculpture (London: 1955), n.p.

77 Lawrence Alloway, ‘Conflated Kingdoms’, Art News and Review, 15 October 1955, p.5.

significance of Richier’s work to reside in the way it represented metamorphosis.

Sylvester wrote that Richier’s sculpture ‘with its bird-men, its humanized spiders and praying mantises, its hybrids of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, belongs to that area of imagery in modern art which is already rapidly being taken over by the popular arts. This is hardly indicative of an original or profound imagination’.⁷⁸ What distinguished Richier in Sylvester’s eyes were the ‘qualities of great sculpture’ he found in her work: the ‘marvellously firm and taut’

contours which make the figures ‘warm and vibrant and entirely affirmative of life’ and about which Alloway said nothing.⁷⁹

Berger, whose article ‘Murder (followed by disembowelling)’ took its title from the catalogue’s other text (by André Pieyre de Mandiargues), chose instead to focus exclusively on what he considered the despair in Richier’s work:

Ninety-nine people out of a hundred, if persuaded to visit the Hanover Gallery to see the bronzes by the much-discussed French sculptress, the late Germaine Richier, would be disgusted […] If the hundredth person happened to be a fashionable intellectual (which most of the visitors will be) he would talk of Kafka and Giacometti […] and would admire the works for their originality, their lack of sentimentality (as he would put it) and the violent power with which they express putrefaction, torture, jungle life and the atavistic instincts. “Richier’s performance,” writes David Sylvester approvingly, “is a way of finding out how much her victims can stand up to.”⁸⁰

Berger’s review demonstrated his rhetorical skill, dismissing Richier’s art as irrelevant on the basis that only a ‘fashionable intellectual’ like Sylvester could

78 [David Sylvester], ‘Hanover Gallery / Mme. Germaine Richier’s Sculpture’, Times, 24 October 1955, p.3.

79 Sylvester himself would comment soon after on how the monster in the sci-fi film The Quatermass Xperiment (dir. Val Guest, 1955) resembled Richier’s sculptures, amongst other artworks. David Sylvester, ‘The Anglicization of Outer-Space, Encounter, January 1956, pp.69-72.

80 John Berger, ‘Murder (followed by disembowelling)’, New Statesman and Nation, 22 October 1955, p.506.

enjoy it. He acknowledges Richier’s skill but finds it of little value because ‘in a disintegrating culture the sophisticated attitude is the most likely to act as a catalyst to further disintegration’.⁸¹ It is of a piece with Berger’s criticism (which in the 1950s was often directed against Sylvester’s writings or exhibitions) in which the political message conveyed by an artwork is more important than its aesthetic qualities.⁸² What Berger’s article doesn’t address, however, is the fact that Sylvester himself found Richier’s works defiantly life-affirming: ‘hers [Richier’s] is a human image challenged, battered, ruined, and still obstinately human’.⁸³

Where Berger persistently demanded art to provide common meanings comprehensible to all (hence his criticism of Richier), Sylvester’s criticism, based in the thinking of Wittgenstein, started from the understanding that each individual understands the world in a different way and modern art should accept and respond to this situation.⁸⁴ Sylvester believed that ‘the modern artist who aims at the inclusiveness of traditional European art runs up against the difficulty of recovering that inclusiveness without embracing what have become the clichés of the tradition, and the awkwardness arises from trying to have one without the other’.⁸⁵ This is why Sylvester dismissed

81 Ibid.

82 Sylvester believed that a character in Berger’s first novel A Painter of our Time (1958) was an ‘unkind caricature’ based on him (Tusa, On Creativity, p.254).

Sylvester was presumably thinking of the character of ‘Marcus Aurelius: an immensely fat man and a well-known critic’. John Berger, A Painter of Our Time (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958; repr. London: Verso, 2010), p.114.

83 Sylvester, ‘On Germaine Richier’, n.p.

84 An alternative view is that of Juliet Steyn, who wrote ‘for Sylvester reality is angst, the modern condition of anxiety. We find in art criticism a version of post-war

concensus [sic], in which ideological differences, class divisions, structural inequalities in society, have apparently been eroded: the ‘universal man’ is being created. In contrast, Berger and the Marxist humanists of the 1950s insist upon an art which helps people to recognise themselves, their own conditions, and to alter them.’ Juliet Steyn, ‘Realism v. Realism in the Fifties’, Art Monthly, July/August 1984, pp.6-8 (p.7).

85 Sylvester, ‘Andrews’ in About Modern Art, pp.163-5 (p.164) (first publ. as ‘Michael Andrews’, The Listener, 16 January 1958, p.105).

Renato Guttuso, who he dubbed the ‘red hope of contemporary painting’, firstly as ‘artistic failure […] poster-ish […] muscle-bound’ (1950) and

subsequently as ‘a good journalist in paint’ (1955).⁸⁶ Even when writing about Léger, who he considered ‘the one great popular artist’ of our time’,

Sylvester’s writing was elegiac: the fact that Léger ‘has not had more and better chances to build his world in a suitable medium and on a suitable scale is the saddest possible commentary upon the state of art patronage today’.⁸⁷ This was not to say that Sylvester disregarded any relationship between the artist and the wider public: in his application for the position of Director of the Whitechapel Gallery in 1952 Sylvester set out his vision by proposing: ‘I would aim at exhibitions whose appeal was not purely aesthetic and which would interest different types of visitors in different ways. In maintaining Whitechapel’s didactic tradition, I would try and emphasise especially the relationship of the artist to his patron and public’.⁸⁸

This was one aspect of the dilemma around Sylvester’s advocacy of Moore, whose art Sylvester (during his flirtation with Catholicism) had initially been drawn to specifically because of its universality. In his first essay about Moore, in 1944, Sylvester wrote: ‘Henry Moore has widely chosen to express Divine Motherhood in an absolutely universal language. His Mother and Child is

86 David Sylvester, ‘Renato Guttuso and Catherine Yarrow: Hanover Gallery’, Art News and Review, 17 June 1950, p.5; David Sylvester, ‘Renato Guttuso and Rodrigo Moynihan’, The Listener, 17 March 1955, p.486. Sylvester was more positive about the 1996 Guttuso exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, although he believed the exhibition was ‘too small to make it clear whether Guttuso was successful as a creator of political monuments’. David Sylvester, ‘Serving the Class Struggle’, London Magazine, August-September 1996, pp.33-7.

87 David Sylvester, ‘Portrait of the Artist: Fernand Léger’ in Art News and Review 25 February 1950, pp.1, 7.

88 Letter from Sylvester to Hugh Scrutton, 11 March 1952, WAG/DIR/1/16. Owing to lack of gallery experience Sylvester was not seriously considered for the job. Those shortlisted included Quentin Bell, Peter de Francia, and the successful candidate Bryan Robertson.

entirely free from historical associations’.⁸⁹ In 1957, however, Sylvester wrote that Moore was one of the artists ‘who have tried to give greater breadth and comprehensiveness to art in our time, but the results have never been entirely convincing. It is not enough to try, the time must be propitious’.⁹⁰ This did not invalidate Moore’s public work, only suggested that such work was not capable of fulfilling the same role as in earlier societies. Sylvester was therefore paying Moore a backhanded compliment when he described him in 1964 as ‘a terrific pro, who can adapt himself skilfully to the demands made on him by an architect. He is the finest civic sculptor of our time’.⁹¹ Even though Sylvester intervened to facilitate the purchase of Moore’s Knife Edge Two Piece (1962-5) by the Contemporary Art Society⁹² and organized an outdoor exhibition of Moore’s large sculpture in Kensington Gardens in 1978, he often wrote of the qualities expressed through his sketch-models and smaller works that were lost in translation to larger works.⁹³

Sylvester detected patterns and formulae in popular art, such as the appropriation of expressionism. In ‘Epstein in Blackpool’, an essay about the surprising purchase of a group of sculptures by Jacob Epstein for exhibition in a Blackpool wax museum, Sylvester concludes ‘the use of Epstein statuary as a form of popular art’ is in fact of a piece with other appropriations of

89 Anthony Sylvestre, ‘Henry Moore and the Aims of Sculpture’, Art Notes, Autumn 1944, pp.41-5 (p.44).

90 David Sylvester, ‘What’s Wrong with Twentieth-Century Art?’, Twentieth Century, March 1957, pp.264-7 (pp.264-5).

91 David Sylvester, Ten Modern Artists: Brancusi, broadcast on BBC1 on 26 April 1964, shooting script in TGA 200816/5/6/2/4.

92 Contemporary Art Society minutes, 1966-8, TGA 200816/3/9. The sculpture remains in its original site outside the Houses of Parliament. Sylvester was also involved with the acquisition of Moore’s Large Spindle Piece (1968) by the City of Houston Civic Art Collection (see correspondence with Janie C. Lee Gallery, TGA 200816/2/1/566).

93 For the qualities of Moore’s sketch-models lost through enlargement see David Sylvester, ‘Introduction’ to Henry Moore: Sketch-Models and Working-Models (London:

South Bank Centre), pp.5-6 (p.6).

Expressionism in popular art, namely the silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr.

Caligari (dir. Robert Wiene, 1920) and ‘horror comics’.⁹⁴ Expressionism connects this essay to ‘The Kitchen Sink’ of the previous year, in which Sylvester critiqued the work of painters such as Bratby and Smith. These painters of working-class domestic interiors were in Sylvester’s opinion exploiting their subject matter to convey heavy-handed messages whereas Giacometti worked in a similar genre but with no programmatic intention beyond painting what he saw, and therefore generated incidental and mysterious overtones in his works.⁹⁵ Sylvester revised his opinion of both Bratby and Smith towards the end of the 1950s, however, and wrote appreciatively of them (something rarely mentioned in discussions of ‘The Kitchen Sink’). This change was particularly pronounced in the case of Smith, as Sylvester wrote the catalogue text for his 1960 exhibition at Matthiesen.

Having suggested in ‘The Kitchen Sink’ that in Smith’s canvases ‘his subject has served as a pretext for painting a picture’, it is unsurprising that Sylvester responded more positively to Smith’s more impressionist, near-abstract later work.

One reason why the ‘Beaux-Arts quartet’ of Bratby, Smith, Edward Middleditch and Derrick Greaves rose so swiftly to prominence (they

94 David Sylvester, ‘Epstein in Blackpool’, Encounter, November 1955, pp.50-51 (p.51).

95 ‘The Kitchen Sink’ was published a matter of months after Freud’s ‘Some Thoughts on Painting’, which Sylvester assisted with. Freud’s proposal that ‘a painter’s tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art’ perhaps informed Sylvester’s analysis of what was lacking from the work of Bratby and Smith. Lucian Freud, ‘Some Thoughts on

Painting’, Encounter, July 1954, pp.23-4 (p.23). Auerbach recently expressed similar views to Sylvester on the subject of expressionism: ‘I am not an expressionist and I do not like expressionism—precisely because it intends to provoke a reaction […] I never think that my painting should induce a specific emotion—somehow that seems to have something to do with effect, and suggests that the painter invests less than he hopes to evoke […]’. Letter written by Auerbach in 2008, quoted in Lampert, p.141.

represented Britain at the 1956 Venice Biennale) was that they satisfied a demand for pictures of recognizable subjects demanded by the public. The postwar period was in fact full of attempts to encourage artists to depict specific subjects, whether the competition for a ‘Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner’ or the Football Association’s ‘Football and the Fine Arts’

competition in 1952. Sylvester’s article ‘Frustrations of Patronage’ sets out his objections to this form of patronage, chiefly on the basis that didactic briefs from commissioning bodies led to artists creating artificial and arbitrary work.⁹⁶ The reason why Sylvester first suggested the CAS should acquire a cast of an existing work by Moore rather than commission a new work was because he believed that commissioned works by even the greatest artists often failed to live up to expectations, and that patronage was more successful when used to acquire successful works than when commissioning or otherwise financing artists to produce new work.⁹⁷ On the other hand, Sylvester was later involved with public commissions such as a new sculpture for the Assemblée Nationale in Paris (won by Walter de Maria) and the Diana Memorial Sculpture competition in Kensington Gardens.⁹⁸