ArtsObituaryDavid Sylvester
A brilliant art critic, his work deepened our understanding of Matisse, Picasso, Magritte, Giacometti, Henry Moore and Francis BaconDavid Sylvester, who has died aged 76, was one of the finest writers on art in the second half of the 20th century. His clarity of expression and his adherence to the discipline of looking, as a route to understanding the power of a work of art, set him in a class apart. He wrote predominantly - whether in his journalism, in catalogue essays or books - about modern art, from Cézanne and Matisse up to mature artists of today. He was also a skilled maker of exhibitions. He curated his first Henry Moore show in 1951, and contributed many major shows to British and foreign museums and galleries.
His exhibition schedule was particularly frantic during the 1990s, after he finished the catalogue raisonné of René Magritte, which had taken, "with interruptions", 25 years. Though his writing was marked by its simplicity of style (he cautioned editors that he used shorter words than most critics, so if his pieces did not make the required column length, that did not mean he had not supplied - or should not be paid - the agreed amount), it never came easily or quickly. It was also marked by his analogies - accurate, but unexpected - drawn as easily from sex or football as from art history and psychology.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when he was at his most prolific as a journalist, Sylvester also wrote about football and cricket for the Observer, ran a cricket team called the Eclectics, and reviewed films wherever he could, introducing sci-fi films and musicals to the readers of Encounter.
His expertise in modern art was matched by a love of Islamic, Indian and Oriental - as well as Egyptian and tribal - art, and he collected throughout his adult life. He revolved this personal collection with obsessive frequency, and unsuspecting visitors to his house might find themselves up a stepladder, hanging on to a Picasso drawing or a 16th-century Chinese carpet, while he fretfully solicited their views on this latest domestic rehang.
Sylvester had begun listening to jazz as a schoolboy in the 1930s, and still had the buff's ability to identify time, place and line-up of a session on CD without recourse to the sleeve notes. He also owned an enviable collection of art-house videos, which he reordered with Desert Island avidity; David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary Of Film was his indispensable volume of choice. He was an inveterate compiler of lists. Eliot was his favourite poet; L'Age D'Or and Ai No Corrida vied for his favourite film; Manchester United was his team; and Mike Brearley, one of his favourite cricketers, was among his closest friends.
As for his favourite painter, the artists he championed changed over the years. "I started being hostile to Picasso in print in 1948," he explains in his book of essays, About Modern Art (1996). And not until 40 years later did he feel nearer to "accepting [Picasso's] genius, rather than resenting it". It was a tug of love that underpinned his development as a critic, and only the thoroughness with which he tested his early champion, Giacometti - in essays, collected in Looking At Giacometti (1994), exhibitions (1951 and 1981), and on film (1967) - gives some measure of how prolonged and painful such a shift could be.
The question of Picasso dominated Sylvester's career as a writer. "It is not even the question of Picasso versus Matisse," he wrote, "for even at those times when Matisse seems the greater, Picasso himself is still the question, probably because Matisse is a great artist in the same sort of way as many great artists of the past, whereas Picasso is a kind of artist who could not have existed before this century, since his art is a celebration of this century's introduction of a totally promiscuous eclecticism into the practice of art.
"Picasso is the issue, Picasso is the one to beat, Picasso is the fastest gun in the west, the one every budding gunfighter has to beat to the draw in order to prove himself . . . The young critic cuts his teeth on Picasso. He proves his manhood by putting down Pic- asso, which is quite easy, because he is so flawed an artist, is such a colossal figure that he has several parts that are clay, probably including his feet, but not his balls."
Sylvester was born in London, the son of a Russian-Jewish antiques dealer, and went to University College School, which he left at the age of 16. He enjoyed a brief career as a dealer himself before turning to painting at 17, inspired by a black and white reproduction of Matisse's La Danse. Until then, he said, he thought of art as "telling a story".
Matisse changed all that. It was not its narrative qualities that enthralled him, but its abstract ones; he understood the rhythms and tensions in its series of curves. By his own account, Sylvester was not a good painter, and decided he might be better at writing about it than making it.
While still in his teens, he had an article about drawing accepted by Tribune. He wrote another, after which the literary editor, George Orwell, gave him some book reviews. There were few wartime art exhibitions to write about, but the National gallery put on monthly shows, and some commercial galleries exhibited British artists. In this way, Sylvester was introduced to the works of Henry Moore, Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland and Matthew Smith, while he met a younger generation of London artists, including Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon.
His stint with Tribune ended in 1945. As Sylvester remembered, its then editor, Aneurin Bevan, found his style too "heavy with Latinisms". In any case, he was soon redeployed: his last piece for the magazine, on Henry Moore, elicited an invitation to the sculptor's studio, and a job as Moore's part-time secretary. The chance to study an artist's work in depth led to Sylvester's first exhibition installation, and, in 1968, his first book, on Moore.
In 1947, he turned down a place to read moral sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, and went to Paris, finding work editing and translating. In 1948, after seeing the work of Paul Klee, he wrote a piece about him for a New York magazine, Tiger's Eye, which the critical review Les Temps Modernes then wanted to publish in translation. Sylvester asked for time to rework it; it finally appeared two years later.
The time-lag testified to the kind of deliberations of which those who knew him subsequently would find nothing surprising. In conversation, he was a master of the grand pause, the prolonged silence broken by heavy breathing, then a sudden intake of breath that heralded the dramatic response. Lord Snowdon liked to tell the story of how, driving with Sylvester to Brighton, Snowdon asked a question at Reigate, and saw the domes of the Brighton pavilion appear before a voice from the back seat answered deeply, "Yes".
It was through Picasso's dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, that Sylvester, then 24, met Giacometti. After that, he visited Giacometti's studio regularly, and began to write about his work. In 1960, he sat for Giacometti, and the resulting painting finally graced the cover of his collected pieces 35 years later, to critical praise.
Sylvester's first glimpse of American abstract expressionism, in 1950, left him unimpressed. He was, at this point, anti-American and pro-figurative, and more interested in Bacon, whom he had identified as the most outstanding of contemporary British artists. During the 1950s and 1960s, he became a personal friend of Bacon's, and, in 1975, when their collected conversations on art were published, the book was recognised as one of the great additions to the study of late 20th-century art. It made Sylvester's reputation, and has been revised, extended and republished in several editions.
Sylvester's support for figurative (though not necessarily realist) painting embroiled him in an early battle with the critic John Berger, conducted in essays and reviews, particularly on the pages of Encounter. A byproduct of this was a piece that coined a new title for a group of British and French contemporary realist painters - the kitchen-sink school. Taken up by the media, and applied wholesale to literature, theatre and film, it added a new genre to the decade.
In 1960, Sylvester took over from Berger at the New Statesman. Two years later, he resigned, having discovered that the column was too short for his good ideas, and came around too frequently to avoid his bad ones. His career as a broadcaster, however, blossomed. He took up a visiting lectureship at the Royal College of Art in 1960 (he had been a visiting lecturer at the Slade from 1953-57), and, in the same year, the US state department invited him to spend two months in America, during which he interviewed American artists for BBC radio.
It took Sylvester most of the decade to make up his mind about contemporary American art. He was warming to Pollock by the mid-1950s, and, after a touring show at the Tate - and the US trip - had given him a more detailed chance to see it at first-hand, he was finally converted. Then came Pop. He introduced it, in a 1963 essay, Coke Culture, in the Sunday Times magazine, which he had joined as an art writer and adviser.
In the 1960s, his career took off in several directions at once. He was making a series of films, Ten Modern Artists, for the BBC, curating at least one major show a year, writing two books - Henry Moore (1968) and Magritte (1969) - and taking on an escalating number of public appointments. He liked being asked to sit on committees and accept trusteeships - something he put down to being an outsider and a Jew.
Having accepted them, however, they did not always last. He resigned as a Tate trustee after two years, and gave up the British Film Institute production board after three. But he kept up his membership of the art panel of the Arts Council for almost two decades, and, though not a very politicised bureaucrat, he did bring about some fundamental changes. He got the rates for visiting curators raised, and revised the way works were bought for the Arts Council collection - to prevent people pushing their favourites through. Towards the end of his life, he was a trustee of the Henry Moore Foundation, on the board of the Serpentine gallery and, in 1997, became a governor of the South Bank Centre.
In 1950, Sylvester had married a student teacher, Pamela Briddon, with whom he had three daughters, Catherine, Naomi and Xanthe. He later had a fourth daughter, Cecily Brown, with Shena Mackay; all four daughters survive him. When the marriage broke up, he moved back to their old flat in Wimbledon, south London, and filled the two large rooms with pieces of art. Most visitors complied with his rule that they remove their shoes at the door, though the artist Joseph Beuys is supposed, famously, to have refused, and been sent packing into the night. At the end of the 1980s, Sylvester moved to a townhouse in Notting Hill, where, for more than a decade, his then partner, the art critic and curator Sarah Whitfield, lived next door. It was there that he finished editing his work on Magritte.
The commission had been offered by the art patrons Jean and Dominique de Menil in 1967, initially as a four-year contract. What was originally intended to be one book finished up as a five-volume catalogue raisonné, a critical biography and a touring exhibition. In retrospect, Sylvester occasionally wondered if he had made the right decision; he was given to periods of self-doubt, and regretted giving up the opportunity to develop more films and interviews for television.
As it was, Magritte took over his professional life. In 1982, he gave up what had been his most prominent public position to date, his seat on the Arts Council, and vowed to do nothing else until Magritte was finished. In 1983, he was awarded a CBE for his public services to art.
In fact, his period of abstinence did not last long. The following year, he accepted a place on the acquisitions board of the Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne in Paris, and, in 1988, heralded his return with a show of Late Picasso at the Centre Pompidou. His catalogue essay was a tribute from an old adversary who recognised, in the works of the ageing Picasso, the loss not of artistic but of sexual potency.
The culmination of the Magritte period came in 1992: the first volume of the catalogue raisonné was published, and the exhibition opened at the Hayward gallery, and travelled to New York, Houston and Chicago. After this, one volume appeared every year until 1996. After 25 years with Magritte, Sylvester felt it to have been too long: "I still love the work," he wrote, "but the fact remains that I spent years of my life, like Swann, on someone who was not my type."
When the de Menils' support came to an end, Sylvester worried that, both economically and professionally, he might not be able to hold his own. He had always been anxious about money. In the 1950s, he had thought he might be able to finance his life by gambling, as Bacon and Freud did, but he had none of their success. Considering his reputation, some people regarded his fears as false modesty, but he was not immune to depression and insecurity. There was a side to his nature that needed praise, and he was genuinely pleased when he received it. But by this time people expected him to be grand.
The word "panjandrum" was often chosen to describe him, partly because of his reputation, partly in reaction to his imposing physical presence. Although he played on the grandeur when necessary, he could also undercut it. His injection of a slangy word or phrase could refocus the reader's engagement with a difficult piece; when lecturing he could inspire a kind of dinner-table intimacy. And his intimacy, and stamina, on the telephone was legendary among his friends: his late- night conversations took in everything from share prices to the impossibility of resolving the demands of love and morality.
As for returning to a freelance career, Sylvester was soon engulfed by commitments, and, in the last five years of the century, travelled constantly, particularly to the United States. He was writing prolifically - catalogue essays and introductions, reviews, particularly for the London Review of Books, and shorter pieces for the national press.
By now, many of his old friends were in positions of power. Nicholas Serota, whom Sylvester had known since he was a young director at the Whitechapel gallery, was now director of the Tate. Lord Gowrie, who deemed Sylvester his "best friend among the generation immediately preceding my own", was head of the Arts Council. Sir Ian Bancroft and Joanna Drew, for whom he had curated exhibitions at the Hayward, were among his many close friends.
He had been a connoisseur of love affairs for most of his life, and he encountered fem- ale friends with a gaze that could match his pauses of speech in length. It was his very own mirada fuerta, the look Picasso used to seduce and shock. In Sylvester's case, it was described, with fond exasperation, by a hab- itual recipient as "one of those long, sideways, admir ing, get-your-clothes-off kind of stares" that often heralded "a brief, platonic love affair".
Of the artists within his field of expertise, Bacon was the first, and the one he will be remembered for as both champion and major critic. In 1993, a year after Bacon's death, Sylvester curated a show of paintings at the Museo Correr, for the Venice Biennale, and was awarded the Golden Lion, the first time it had been given to a critic rather than an artist. Three years later, by which time the French had made him an Officier de l'ordre des Arts et Lettres, he curated another Bacon show at the Pompidou, which he said looked even better. And in the spring of 1998, he made a relatively small selection of Bacon paintings, on the theme of the human body, for the Hayward gallery, which showed how his familiarity with the work could produce a subtle show that pleased critics and the public alike.
Last year, he published his own study of Bacon, Looking Back At Francis Bacon, and installed a show at the Hugh Lane municipal gallery, in Dublin, which preceded the installation of the reconstructed interior of Bacon's studio dismantled from Reece Mews, South Kensington.
At the end of the 90s, Sylvester had become embroiled in the fuss over the discovery of a clutch of badly executed oil sketches, allegedly disproving what Bacon had told him - that he never did preliminary drawings. Though this provided art historians with a new area of research, Sylvester made his own definitive response last March, during a debate at the Barbican, when he reminded the audience that, whether by Bacon or not, everybody accepted that the drawings were bad, and therefore an intensive study of them was pointless; much better to spend the time studying the paintings, which were, uncontroversially, Bacon's masterpieces.
By this time, Sylvester was ill. But though he complained about growing old, mentally he never seemed it. His experience of life, combined with his intellect, made him an unshockable, unjudgmental and, when the occasion demanded it, candid, adviser and friend. He could be irritable and demanding. But he was delicate, kind and never lost the appetites that made him appear more alive in his senses than most people around him, and which made his writing about art as visceral as it was analytic.
Sylvester will be remembered as one of the great 20th-century critics, on a level with Michel Leiris, the one he probably admired most. During his lifetime, the art world of 1950s Soho, of which he had been part, became mythologised, almost an art-world soap opera. The art world itself became ever more deeply involved with and dependent upon the media, in need of new sens-ations to keep it in the public eye.
Sylvester was still a key personality in all this. He was consulted by Charles Saatchi and Nick Serota; he was asked to write on contemp-orary work, as well as his more characteristic areas of expertise. One of the things that most excited him was the prospect of a long interview about film with the young Scottish artist Douglas Gordon, which he realised shortly before his death.
He was part of the contemporary art world, and yet he was also set apart from it. He understood the game of art, and his writing deepened our understanding of it.
Anthony David Bernard Sylvester, art critic and curator, born September 21 1924; died June 19 2001
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