Vertientes alternas de estructura

Kozloff wrote of the 1960s that ‘art writers of the time tended to be centered by the work of one artist, considered paradigmatic’.⁶² For Kozloff that artist was Johns, while for Sylvester it was Giacometti who more than any other artist epitomised the concerns with representation and the challenge of making art in the twentieth century which were at the heart of Sylvester’s criticism. The example Giacometti provided of an artist relentless in his resistance not just to simple solutions, but to the idea of completion itself (which relates to Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty and Sylvester’s early writing on Klee and the work which is completed by the spectator) placed him at the heart of much of Sylvester’s writing during the period when he was writing most regularly.

What Giacometti represented to Sylvester was closely connected to his reading of Wittgenstein and Sartre. Sylvester’s book Looking at Giacometti included a long comparison between Giacometti and Wittgenstein while, as has been noted, Sylvester’s writing on Giacometti shows the clear influence of Sartre’s ‘The Search for the Absolute’ with its portrayal of the artist as a Sisyphean figure.⁶³ Sartre compared Giacometti with artists and writers in whom he detected the same sensibility: ‘as da Vinci said, it is not good for an artist to feel satisfied […] Kafka, dying, wanted his books burned, and

Doestoevsky, in the last days of his life, dreamed of writing a sequel to

62 Kozloff, Cultivated Impasses, p.19.

63 Lubbock placed similar passages by Sartre side-by-side in his review of Looking at Giacometti (paras. 22-6 of 39). The curator Patrick Elliott described parts of

Sylvester’s text as ‘almost copyright-issue close’ to Sartre’s. Email from Elliott, 9 July 2015.

Karamazov’.⁶⁴ Sylvester, however, was less interested in the philosophical implications of this stance (as Sartre was) than in the artworks which emerged from it, which by virtue of being unfinished thereby required the engagement of the viewer to ‘complete’ the work. In placing this theme of the ‘unfinished’

at the centre of his criticism from early in his career Sylvester was prescient, and anticipated the widespread international interest in the question of finish.

Kelly Baum’s catalogue essay for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition

‘Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible’ begins ‘since World War II, artists working in Europe, the United States, and Latin America have courted the unfinished with pronounced enthusiasm, seeking bolder, ever more novel, and

experimental ways to not finish works of art’.⁶⁵

Looking at Giacometti incorporates this struggle to reach completion into its own structure (Sylvester’s archive contains over one hundred and twenty folders of draft material relating to the book written over a forty-year period).⁶⁶ The book began with the catalogue text for the Giacometti

exhibition Sylvester organised in 1955, which fed into ‘a monograph worked on continually from 1955 to 1967’.⁶⁷ A version of this was completed in 1959 but Sylvester ‘took it back from the publisher to continue working on it’.⁶⁸ This was the version which Sandler recalled Sylvester reading at ‘the Club’ in

1960.⁶⁹ On 18 March 1960, seemingly having broken his first contract,

64 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘The Search for the Absolute’ in Alberto Giacometti: Exhibition of Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings (1948), pp.2-22 (20). The catalogue lists no translator for either Sartre’s essay or the translations of Giacometti’s own writings, reproduced therein.

65 Baum, p.206.

66 These are catalogued individually within the reference number TGA 200816/5/4.

67 TGA 200816/5/4/3/8. ‘A few passages were first put to paper in 1954 or 1955’, TGA 200816/5/4/3/21.

68 Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, p.8. There is no material in the archive to indicate which publisher this was.

69 Sandler, A Sweeper-Up After Artists, p.41. A complete typescript of this version is in TGA 200816/5/4/2/2.

Sylvester signed a contract with the New York publisher George Braziller to deliver the completed manuscript of around 18,000 words later that year.⁷⁰ The decision to work with an American publisher may have had something to do with interest in Giacometti’s work in the US, since Sylvester later wrote that Giacometti was ‘the European contemporary who deeply impressed the abstract expressionist generation’.⁷¹

The 1960 text comprised five chapters, including most of chapters two and three of Looking at Giacometti, along with passages which would be incorporated into Sylvester’s catalogue essay for the 1965 Tate Gallery exhibition, and other material which was either discarded from Looking at Giacometti or only appears in fragmentary form. At the time this was a monograph concerned above all with Giacometti’s most recent work and its relevance to modern art in general rather than a survey of his work as a

whole, and there was little attention given to the artist’s early surrealist works.

At this time it was the fact that Giacometti had repudiated surrealism to embrace the challenge of representing the human figure which Sylvester saw as a powerful vindication of the continuing compulsion to create great human images.⁷²

In the opening pages Sylvester contrasted Giacometti with Duchamp as embodying two types of modern artist:

Whether as schoolboy or blind man, the modern artist appears as one who knows he doesn’t know the answers […] but the validity of art as an activity is taken for granted [by Giacometti], as it is not by

70 Contract from George Braziller, TGA 200816/2/1/126. This may have had something to do with Hess, who in a letter to Sylvester (undated but probably 1960) responded enthusiastically to the first version of the text and said ‘I am mailing it to Robert Goldwater, and enthusiastically recommending it to Braziller for publication this autumn, with Faber in London, & anyone else’ (TGA 200816/2/2/11).

71 ‘Paper for Symposium at Christie’s’, TGA 200816/2/1/220.

72 Sylvester’s 1955 Giacometti exhibition included only thirteen pre-war works out of a total of ninety-two in the exhibition.

Duchamp—in practice as well as in theory: Duchamp gave up

producing art; Giacometti is the very type of the dedicated artist.⁷³

While Sylvester greatly admired Duchamp he considered him ‘not a real artist, like Picasso & Matisse, but a genius playing at or with art, like Leonardo by comparison with Michelangelo & Raphael’.⁷⁴ Giacometti as the dedicated artist was an exemplar for the first generation of postwar artists including the abstract expressionists, who were very interested in his work, while artists and younger critics of the 1960s were more sceptical (and tended to favour

Duchamp). Kozloff was one of the latter: his review of the 1965 Giacometti exhibition at MoMA described Giacometti’s work as ‘an almost animal collision between a painful obsession and a facile execution’ while Johns’ response to Looking at Giacometti was to say ‘I’ve always disliked Giacometti, and now I understand why’.⁷⁵ While Sylvester was closely linked with Giacometti during the 1960s, retrospectively he too came to feel that the ‘painful obsession’ of the artist’s final years led him to diminishing returns.

Sylvester was extraordinarily sensitive about the photography and reproduction of sculpture, something that can be seen in correspondence relating to both the Moore and Giacometti books. Correspondence between Sylvester and Braziller suggests that having ‘turned down dozens of other requests to publish books on him’, Giacometti’s cooperation with Sylvester’s

73 TGA 200816/5/4/2/2. Sylvester was considering Duchamp as the schoolboy for adding a moustache to the Mona Lisa, and Giacometti as the blind man because of his poem ‘Un aveugle avance la main dans la nuit’ [‘a blind man extends his hand into the night’].

74 TGA 200816/7/15. It is telling that Sylvester’s favourite works by Duchamp were the painting Tu m’ (1918) and the object Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy? (1924), two of his most evocative works. Sylvester told Duchamp this in 1966, when a group of British artists and critics including Sylvester interviewed Duchamp (transcript in TGA 200816/4/2/36).

75 Max Kozloff, ‘Art’ in The Nation, 28 June 1965, pp.710-11 (p.710); letter from Sylvester to Alfred Brendel, n.d., TGA 200816/2/1/147.

book depended on using photographs by Herbert Matter. In 1962 Sylvester submitted a completed text to meet a deadline only to for it to be held up due to delays in receiving Matter’s photographs, and between procrastination from Sylvester and Matter the book still had not been published by 1964 when the rights were relinquished to MoMA.⁷⁶ Matter had photographed Giacometti’s 1960 portrait of Sylvester after every sitting which were probably all intended for inclusion in the book.⁷⁷ After withdrawing from the project he allowed Sylvester to reproduce three of his photographs in the book, but the complete set of progress photographs was kept for publication in Matter’s own book on Giacometti, which was published posthumously in 1987.

From the mid-1960s onwards Patricia Matisse became the sole

contributor of photographs for Looking at Giacometti (with the exception of Matter’s photographs of the Sylvester portrait in progress). It was Matisse whose ‘magical photographs […] of spectral beings rising from the chaotic studio’s plaster rubble’ in the 1948 Pierre Matisse exhibition catalogue had been so suggestive for Sylvester and others at that time,⁷⁸ and when she agreed to provide photographs for the book, Sylvester responded: ‘your photographs have haunted me since I first saw them in 1948 almost as much as the sculptures themselves (they seem to partake of his secret). And now I’m to have a bookfull [sic] of them. It’s like having one’s favourite film star fall in love with one.’⁷⁹ It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that the final text of

76 Correspondence between Braziller, Sylvester and MoMA staff, 1960-5, TGA 200816/2/1/126.

77 The portrait is in the collection of Emily Rauh Pulitzer (promised gift to Harvard Art Museums).

78 Sylvester, ‘Curriculum Vitae’, p.15.

79 Letter from Sylvester to Patricia Matisse, 17 May [1965], PMG archive, Morgan Library. He also said ‘with photographs by others, I feel I am looking at somebody’s interpretation of Giacometti; with yours I feel it’s the thing itself’ (Letter from Sylvester to Matisse, 4 May 1965, PMG archive, Morgan Library.)

the book (published after Matisse’s death) says little about her role in the book, whereas a 1981 draft preface had been much more forthcoming about the importance of the photographs for the book:

In 19__ all her [Matisse’s] photographic negatives and most of her prints were destroyed in a warehouse fire. A number of key works discussed in the text of this book are not reproduced because either no prints of them are extant or because Patricia never photographed them satisfactorily. I feel it is better to leave those gaps than to fill them with photographs by others. The missing works can readily be found reproduced elsewhere, though in many cases the pieces she failed to photograph satisfactorily—such as those tall and extremely slender female figures of around 1950 which are among

Giacometti’s supreme works—have not been satisfactorily photographed by anyone else either and may well be unphotographable.⁸⁰

If Sylvester had left such information in the text, the reader would be in no doubt as to the importance not just of the photographs being taken by Matisse, but the choice of images to be reproduced. In the absence of this justification, however, reviewers complained that the photographs did not provide an adequate reference point for the text (works as important to the text as In Spite of Hands [Malgré les mains, 1932] for instance, were not illustrated).⁸¹

By the time of the 1965 Tate exhibition, Braziller had released their rights to the book to MoMA, who intended to publish it in conjunction with their

Giacometti exhibition that same year before Sylvester’s continued

procrastination forced them to abandon the idea, and as a result the book

80 TGA 200816/5/4/3/21.

81 Timothy Hyman claimed that ‘Patricia Matisse’s documentary photos, though resonant and beautiful, do not entirely match the needs of the text’. Timothy Hyman,

‘Fragments and Paradoxes’, London Magazine, February-March 1995, pp.138-40.

remained unpublished when Giacometti died in 1966. ⁸² As Sylvester explained:

Most of the book was still in progress when Giacometti died in January 1966. I went on with it, delivered it to a publisher

[Weidenfeld & Nicolson], and after working on it for some time on the galley proofs never returned them. It had become clear that a text written as a study of work in progress could not suddenly be converted into a text on the subject of a completed body of work’.⁸³ For Sylvester, this was the defining moment in the genesis of the book.

Anticipating Berger’s 1969 claim ‘it seems to me now that no artist’s work could ever have been more changed by his death than Giacometti’s’,⁸⁴ Sylvester divided the book into two parts: ‘the first consisting of chapters written in the present tense while the artist was alive and the second including the chapters begun in his lifetime but completed in the past tense’.⁸⁵

After setting the book aside for several years, Sylvester’s next major step was a reappraisal of Giacometti’s surrealist work, written around 1976-8.⁸⁶ Surrealism was at the heart of Sylvester’s work of the 1970s on the

Magritte catalogue raisonné and related exhibitions in 1969 (Tate Gallery) and 1978-9 (the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels), and the exhibition ‘Dada and Surrealism Reviewed’ (Hayward Gallery, 1978).

Earlier versions of the Giacometti text tended to isolate the artist, as Sylvester had done in much of Henry Moore), avoiding discussion of the artist’s

contemporaries the better to focus on the artworks themselves However, Sylvester’s lecture ‘Giacometti and the Surrealists’, delivered at MoMA in 1982

82 Instead MoMA published a catalogue with introduction by Peter Selz, and James Lord’s book about sitting for Giacometti, A Giacometti Portrait.

83 Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, p.9.

84 John Berger, ‘Giacometti’ in The Moment of Cubism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), pp.112-6 (p.112).

85 Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, p.8.

86 TGA 200816/5/4/3/8.

(but never published) took a very different approach, contextualising

Giacometti’s involvement with surrealism and attempting to date Giacometti’s involvement with the movement as precisely as possible.⁸⁷

Sylvester’s treatment of the surrealist works eventually became the longest chapter in Looking at Giacometti and assumed a prominent position at the beginning of the second part of the book. The treatment of these works was different to that employed in the rest of the book, since whereas Sylvester generally wrote about the character of Giacometti’s work as a whole or in groups without referring to specific works, he felt that the surrealist works

‘have to be described and discussed individually’.⁸⁸ He referred to the

surrealism chapter as a ‘catalogue’, and drafts show how Sylvester grouped Giacometti’s works from this period under headings such as ‘violence or death’

and ‘fragments of the body’.⁸⁹ The evolution of Sylvester’s thinking can be seen from comparing his 1966-67 description of Giacometti’s Man and Woman [Homme et femme, 1929] with his interpretation in Looking at Giacometti. In the earlier text he wrote: ‘Man and Woman represents an assault in which the woman recoils and collapses under the thrust of a weapon suitable for both rape and murder’.⁹⁰ The published version is far more nuanced:

What is happening, apart from the certainty that some sort of assault is involved, is curiously obscure […] the woman’s posture is […] ambiguous: it is not really clear whether she is recoiling or coyly receptive. It is also unclear whether penetration is on the point of happening or whether the action is in momentary suspense or whether the scene depicts a threat that is not going to be fulfilled […] If, then, the action is indeed suspended, the reason might be less the man’s fear of his aggression than his fear of castration.⁹¹

87 TGA 200816/5/4/3/14; TGA 200816/5/4/3/32.

88 TGA 200816/5/4/3/19.

89 TGA 200816/5/4/16.

90 TGA 200816/5/4/10. In the same passage Sylvester refers to the ‘cringing withdrawal of the woman’s [body]’ in Man and Woman.

91 Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, p.87.