David Sylvester

David Sylvester, who wrote many memorable pieces for this paper, died in 2001.

Constable’s Weather

David Sylvester, 29 August 1991

Perhaps our weather is the main ingredient in our education as well as in our conversation. Could it not be that the origin of the Englishman’s phlegm is a childhood of last-minute cancellations through rain of long-awaited treats, inuring him for ever to disappointment? In any event the great English painters of weather did not have to submit to the weather’s domination. They recorded it with closer fidelity than any painters before or since, but they were free to put it where they wanted it.

Italy’s New Art

David Sylvester, 30 March 1989

The Italians have the same sort of problem over making art as we have over playing football. After ages of doing it far better than anyone else, they had to come to accept that quite a lot of foreigners were doing it better – with the difference that our football has been in that situation for about thirty-five years, Italian art for about three hundred and fifty. However, the time of its supremacy had been even longer, so that the accumulated riches, plus the legacies of the Romans and the Etruscans, plus its all being so ubiquitous and conspicuous, make life easy for tour operators but complicated for artists: ever-present glories of the past create inhibition and resentment but also constant temptation, like that of a well-stocked cellar.

Late Picasso at the Tate

David Sylvester, 1 September 1988

At the Tate Picasso’s late paintings seem almost to be different paintings from those they seemed to be at Beaubourg. There they looked, by common consent, more aggressive and explosive and electric, here more luminous, more beautiful, more grand. The differences in the selection, the hang and the ground-plan have not been crucial enough to account for so extreme a difference of effect. Clearly the Tate’s having daylight, a light that is soft and diffuse, must be relevant, but the difference has also been there, though not as extreme, at times when the lighting has been mixed or purely electric. It must, therefore, mainly be due to the architecture. In Paris the spaces were not enclosed by the walls: above the tops of the manifestly temporary partitions you could see those hyperactive Beaubourg ceilings. Here, the moveable walls reach the ceilings and these are vaulted, so that the paintings are surmounted by an amplitude of space in which to breathe. Those vaulted spaces do not suit every sort of art, and there are some paintings in the show which look less telling than they did in Paris. But others look greater than I have seen them look before and the list of outstanding late paintings which I propose in the catalogue demands the addition of the Reclining Man and Woman with a Fruit Bowl of 29 December 1969 and The Embrace of 1 June 1972. And by and large the paintings do look very much at home in these vaulted spaces.

Giacometti and Bacon

David Sylvester, 19 March 1987

Giacometti’s widow, says the preface, has chosen ‘to prevent the appearance in her husband’s biography of any unpublished writings by him of whatever sort: letters, journals or random notations’. Another recent biography of a leading modern artist was composed under similar restrictions. Peter Ackroyd says he was ‘forbidden by the Eliot estate to quote from Eliot’s published work, except for purposes of fair comment in a critical context, or to quote from Eliot’s unpublished work or correspondence’. As it happens, the two subjects, while profoundly unalike inasmuch as Giacometti was an atheist, a leftist and a bohemian, had many things in common, besides good looks, charisma, chronic mental torment and the hesitant production of a relatively small corpus of work notable for its marvellous marriage of innovation and tradition. Both of them came from cultivated and comfortably-off families rooted for generations in a backwater and both went on to spend their adult lives in a metropolis in a foreign land; both were quick to win fame as artists and quickly became legends, yet almost into middle age could not earn a living from their art and had to work in other areas to survive; both of them married but had no children; both were dominated – people say – by a mother – and haunted – the work says – by the idea of doing a girl in.’

Get out: Francis Bacon

Julian Bell, 19 October 2000

Somewhere in London, two heads would be nodding together: one tall like the boulder topping a cairn, the other broadened like a Hallowe’en pumpkin. Two lordly sensibilities, the...

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Not His Type

Frank Kermode, 5 September 1996

In a preliminary chapter called ‘Curriculum Vitae’ David Sylvester explains that he became interested in art when, at 17, he was fascinated by a black and white reproduction of a...

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Men at Work

Tom Lubbock, 12 January 1995

Personal witness has a peculiar status in the criticism of painting and sculpture, a status which it seems not to have in the criticism of other arts. There’s some feature of the visual...

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Robbing banks

George Melly, 25 June 1992

Inspired by the bourgeois ‘bad taste’ of Magritte’s house in the Rue des Mimosas in suburban Brussels, Jonathan Miller took off into one of his self-intoxicating fantasies. We...

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Bacon’s Furies

Robert Melville, 2 April 1981

In the preface to his new edition of montaged interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester draws our attention to what has become the last section of the fifth interview. Altogether, there are...

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