Remembering David Sylvester - art critic - Brief Article - Obituary

David Sylvester once told me that art criticism--our profession--should be practiced only by young people. He meant that it requires a keenness of sympathy for contemporary art available only to youth, and, since he was already in his 40s at the time, he was afraid he'd had it. This opinion was erroneous, at least as it applied to his career. He pursued art writing from the astonishingly early age of 18, in 1942, until his death from cancer in June at age 76--keen, all the way.

But he excelled at more than just criticism. David was a lecturer, a curator for such institutions as the Tate and the Pompidou Center, an explainer of this century's visual art--and not only Western art. He collected Persian carpets and became an expert on them. He was an adept of Indian culture, as well as a member of museum boards. Few could surpass him as an interviewer--his conversations with Francis Bacon and Jasper Johns being classic high points. He wrote just as clearly for the New Statesman or for Modern Painters as for American Vogue. He often took to the radio to acquaint a broad public with artistic events. In his native Britain, where he was a national figure, this cosmopolitan enthusiast of modernism was also known as an authority on cricket. Here was a man of vast intellectual curiosity and large appetites, who was also endowed with an unforgettable personality that disconcerted and beguiled his friends.

English critics are different from American ones. In London, they introduce older art with the same vivacity, the same expectation that it will intrigue the public, as they do new art. They come by their historicism as a natural tendency of their culture. In the '60s, David was so plugged in to that tradition of memory that he could look freshly on contemporary American culture, and evaluate his own in relation to it. So, he wrote: "Most of British Pop Art is a dream, a wistful dream of far-off Californian glamour as sensitive and tender as the Pre-Raphaelite dream of far-off medieval pageantry" (1963). And: "If the history of Surrealism were cast in terms of the past, one might say that Arp represents its primitive phase, 1930s Miro its classic phase, Gorky its mannerism, and Oldenburg its baroque" (1967).

His impulse to compare cultural time zones and artistic phases was matched by his tenacity in looking at individual works of art. Sometimes a critic's name is associated with extensive work done on favorite artists. In David's case, they were Bacon, Giacometti and Magritte, although he regretted that he probably spent too much time on a catalogue raisonne of the last--some 25 years. Each of these artists presented special problems of perception, a challenge to subjectivity he was eager to refine. "As I stand looking at one of [Giacometti's] standing women, she will be as distant as a person on the other side of the street, then suddenly appear to be looming up over me: at one moment she is like a figurine ... at the next she is a giantess."

He was a much more analytic writer than he was a synthesizer. If you were with him in a gallery or a museum, he would always seek out your physiological and optical impressions and check them with his own. Ditto, your sense of history, your sense of who was important and who overlooked. One could be drawn into his rating schemes, which certainly had their hierarchical overtones, only to realize that he was searching out the basis of a consensus. The esthetic life that he lived so intensely existed so that it would be shared; in fact, it had to be shared. Best, then, that it be articulated with as much shrewdness as possible. (Shrewdness was the polish for the rough accountability he always imposed upon himself.) David Sylvester ran an amiable trade in insights and mots justes, which he would oblige you to exchange, whether you were up to it or not.

Though he was competitive, he was also weirdly diffident (given his establishment status, his being on speaking terms with royals, his many honors and awards), and no friend of systems. The variables of artistic experience were for him too exciting to indulge in rigid field theories, which were the bugbears of American criticism during his prime--the '60s and '70s. For him, artistic forms were always transmitted through changeable bodily perceptions, an awareness of which acutely guided his installation of shows. He regarded an artist's stature in this or that court of opinion as academic, until he could support it by the scruple of his interpretation.

David was a man of large girth--he was fat, really--with a deep voice and pale complexion. Though he came from a Russian Ashkenazi background, his features had a Sephardic cast, at any moment meditative, anxious or droll. Yet those expressions were frequently out of tune with the social occasion, I think they were the source of his magnetism, along with certain conspicuous time-lags in the thrall of schmooze. When they happened, you felt, as John Russell wrote in the New York Times, that David had left the room. After that, he would resume, infallibly remembering where he left off, listening beautifully, even seductively. All this took a bit of getting used to--and was worth it.