David Sylvester, who died on June 19th 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 Cezanne 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 major shows to many museums and galleries.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when he was at his most prolific as a journalist, , ran a cricket team called the Eclectics, and reviewed films wherever he could.
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 throughness with which he tested his early champion, Giacometti - in essays, in collected in Looking At Giacometti (19940, exhibitions (1951) and 1981), and on film (1967) - gives some measure of how prolonged and painful such a shift could be.
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 London's National Gallery put on monthly shows, and some commercial galleries exhibited British artists. In this way, he 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 and Francis Bacon.
His stint with Tribune ended in 1945. In 1947, he turned down a place to study 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 then wanted to publish in translation. David Sylester 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 that heralded the dramatic response. Lord Snowdon liked to tell the story of how, driving with David Sylvester to Brighton, Snowdon asked a question at Reigate, and saw the domes of the Brighton Pavillon appear before a voice form the back seat answered deeply, "Yes".
His first glimpse of American abstract expressionism, in 1950, left him unimpressed. He was , at this point, anti-American and profigurative, and more interested in Bacon, whom he had identified as the most outstanding of contemporary artists. During 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. Interviews with Francis Bacon made David Sylvester's reputation, and has been revised, extended and republished in several editions.
In 1960, he took from John Berger at the New Statesman. Two years later, he resigned, having discovered that the column was too short for his ideas, and come 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 Artin 1960 (he had been a visiting lecturer at the Slade form 1953-57), and, in the same year invited him to spend two months in America.
It took David 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.
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) ann Magritte (1969)- 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.
The commission for his work on Magritte had been offered by the art patrons Jean and Dominque De Menil in 1967, initially as a four year contact. What was originally intended to be one book finished up as five -volume catalogue raisonne, a critical biography and a touring exhibition. The culmination of the Margitte period came in 1992: the first volume of the catalogue raisonne was published, and the exhibition opened at the Hayward gallery.
After this, one volume appeared every year until 1996.
Of the artists within his field of expertise, Francis 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, David Sylvester curated a show of paintings at the Museo Correr, for the Venice Biennale, and was awarded the Golden Lion, the first tiem it had been given to a critic rather, than an artist. Three years later, by which time the French had made him an Officer 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, Dublin, which preceded the installation of the reconstructed interior from Reece Mews, South Kensington. 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: born 1924; died, June 2001.