About Modern Art – David Sylvester (1)

Nothing looks built to last. Expendability is everywhere, novelty is everything. And yet, at a party at Romanoffs, it was frightening actually to see, what one of course knew, how long the stars had been around. A pic- ture of the scene could have been called An Allegory of the Race between Fame and Time. But the interesting thing was not the intimation that the stars are not immortal gods.

The interesting thing was that these embalmed faces were those of still current stars. We talk about the fickleness of fashion, the call for new gimmicks and new faces in the entertainment world. But this is balanced by a need for enduring images. The minor stars can come and go, must come and go: it is part of our fantasy of them that they should be expendable, seasonally sac- rificed.

The major stars endure — Wayne, Gable, Cooper, Grant, Crawford, Dietrich, etc. There is a longing that the stars should be immortal, and the public tries to ensure that they are. Still, they are not immortal, and we want some more interesting relic of them than their footprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. We want them pre- served in a form that will renew them for us continually, as art does.

When we come across a picture of thirteen mostly bearded men in robes and sandals seated over a meal at a long table, we do not have to stop and wonder who they are and what they’re celebrating: we see the scene at once as the Last Supper. We recognise it as that because we have learned to interpret this image; we know the iconography of Christian art.

Now, the art of this century, when it is representational, generally has subject-matter which we need no such special know- ledge to identify — jugs on tables, nudes in bedrooms and so on. There are not many important modern paintings like Guernica the signifi- cance of which cannot be found through looking at the picture but only through possession of information gained from sources outside the picture.

It is not surprising that most modern representational painting has used subject-matter of the kind which Panofsky calls ‘natural’ or ‘primary’, inasmuch as it is the product of the age that invented abstract art. For in a certain sense representational painting of ‘natural’ subjects is closer to non-representational painting than it is to representational painting of subjects which are intelligible only if we understand their iconographic conventions.

David Sylvester was born in 1924 in London and has lived mainly there. His published books include Henry Moore (1968), Interviews with Francis Bacon (1975), René Magritte (1992), the five-volume cata- logue raisonné of Magritte (1992-3-4-5) and Looking at Giacometti (1994, also available in Pimlico). Since 1951 he has curated or co-curated numerous major exhibitions at museums in London, Paris, Venice, New York and Washington, including Dada and Surrealism Reviewed and one-man shows of Picasso, Laurens, Soutine, Mird, Magritte, Giacometti, and de Kooning.

His films include Matisse and his Model (1968) and Magritte: the False Mirror (1969). He was awarded the C.B.E. in 1983. He is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy and a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art. In 1993 he became the first critic ever to receive a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale.

C NN bin GRANT MacEVYAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE aw Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2023 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/aboutmodernartcrO000sylv_h4u9 re ‘ABOUT INI ERIN; ACR Critical Essays 1948-97 MAVID SYLVESTER New Updated Edition PIMLICO [ EAI ! NG RESc URCE! ser PIMLICO An imprint of Random House 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA Random House Australia (Pty) Limited 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney, New South Wales 2061, Australia Random House New Zealand Limited 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited Endulini, 5A Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa Random House UK Ltd Reg.

No. 954009 First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 1996 Pimlico edition, with revised Preface, Curriculum Vitae and Postscnipt 1997 13579108642 © David Sylvester 1996, 1997 The night of David Sylvester to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser Papers used by Random House UK Limited are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests.

The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham PLC ISBN 0-7126-7353-9 CONTENTS Preface 9 Curriculum Vitae 11 1. LATE Kee (1948-50) Klee-I 35 Klee-II 38 2. Post-War (1954-64) End of the Streamlined Era 49 Giacometti 52 Bacon-I 55 Dubuffet 58 Pollock 61 Rothko 64 Guston 66 Reinhardt 68 3. Masters (1957-68) Art of an Aftermath 71 . Monet 74 Kandinsky 76 Picasso—I 79 Gris 86 Uses of Still Life: Cézanne, Braque, Bonnard go Soutine 110 Mondrian—I 132 Bonnard 136 Matisse 140 4.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 667ffc396b0fc729
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 26,058,183 bytes (24.851 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 0712673539
• Pages: 485
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 961.85 minutes
• Total Words: 192,369
• Total Characters: 1,123,178
• Average Words per Page: 396.64
• Average Characters per Page: 2315.83

Most Frequent Words

art (729), one (723), work (536), painting (516), like (481), paintings (365), time (314), between (302), made (285), way (284), life (278), still (267), also (263), picasso (262), paint (259), artist (258), picture (245), first (240), two (237), space (235), forms (226), much (219), seems (217), works (212), new (205), great (191), something (187), form (186), look (184), image (183), rather (174), things (173), artists (169), make (169), years (164), even (164), kooning (163), sense (162), painted (162), painter (162), late (160), figure (158), pictures (158), figures (154), another (154), say (151), think (151), sculpture (150), making (149), now (148), see (147), point (144), images (144), canvas (143), exhibition (142), thing (142), said (142), human (142), nature (140), course (139), woman (139), objects (138), himself (137), less (136), perhaps (136), often (135), always (133), certain (133), modern (132), seen (132), well (131), long (130), fact (130), man (129), cézanne (125), three (123), world (123), almost (122), kind (122), style (122), use (121), series (118), colour (116), it’s (115), subject (113), abstract (112), cubism (112), seem (111), different (111), ing (110), matisse (109), many (108), looking (108), painters (107), reality (107), since (105), though (105), sculptures (105), bacon (103), light (103).

PDF Download