Background
David Sylvester was born on September 21, 1924 London, United Kingdom. He was a son of Philip Sylvester and Sybil Sylvester.
Frognal, London, NW3 England, United Kingdom
David Sylvester attended University College School.
(The five volume work presents an authoritative survey of ...)
The five volume work presents an authoritative survey of the artist's oeuvre, from 1916 to his death in 1967.
https://www.amazon.com/Rene-Magritte-Catalogue-Raisonne-Paintings/dp/0856674230/?tag=2022091-20
1992
(Winner of a Venice Bienniale Golden Lion Award, Looking a...)
Winner of a Venice Bienniale Golden Lion Award, Looking at Giacometti is a compelling mixture of biography and criticism, including an extraordinary interview with Giacometti. Written over a period of forty years, Looking at Giacometti is a profound response to the art of one of modernism’s greatest sculptors. It takes students from world-renowned art critic David Sylvester’s first visits to Giacometti’s studio in the late 1940s to the author’s prolonged sitting for the artist’s portrait of him in the 1960 and reflections on his complete oeuvre after Giacometti’s death. A compelling mixture of biography and criticism, and including a sixteen-page insert of black and white photographs by Patricia Matisse, this book sheds new light on twentieth-century art and thought. Winner of a Venice Bienniale Golden Lion Award, Looking at Giacometti is a compelling mixture of biography and criticism, including an extraordinary interview with Giacometti. Written over a period of forty years, Looking at Giacometti is a profound response to the art of one of modernism’s greatest sculptors. It takes students from world-renowned art critic David Sylvester’s first visits to Giacometti’s studio in the late 1940s to the author’s prolonged sitting for the artist’s portrait of him in the 1960 and reflections on his complete oeuvre after Giacometti’s death. A compelling mixture of biography and criticism, and including a sixteen-page insert of black and white photographs by Patricia Matisse, this book sheds new light on twentieth-century art and thought.
https://www.amazon.com/Looking-at-Giacometti-David-Sylvester/dp/080504163X/?tag=2022091-20
1994
(Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is widely acknowledged as one o...)
Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest British artists of this century. For over fifty years the intense emotions conveyed in his works have shocked and enthralled an ever-growing audience. David Sylvester, a leading Bacon scholar, brings together many of the artist's best paintings involving the human figure, the central subject of his work. Bacon's diverse body imagery can be seen in his self-portraits; nude studies; portraits of friends such as Henrietta Moraes, George Dyer, and Lucian Freud; and his series of Popes. Many of Bacon's prototypes were "found" images: reproductions of Michelangelo, Velásquez, Degas, Muybridge's photographs of the human figure in motion, film stills from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, magazine photos of politicians and boxers.
https://www.amazon.com/Francis-Bacon-Human-David-Sylvester/dp/0520215397/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(David Sylvester has been called "the best living writer i...)
David Sylvester has been called "the best living writer in English about modern art" (Daily Telegraph). With his expertise, sympathy, and provocative style, he is unique in his ability to talk freely with influential artists. This astounding book includes 21 interviews, recorded over the past forty years, with leading American artists. Together they illuminate all the great developments in American art. Here are the views of David Smith, Richard Serra, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, and more. Conversations from the 1960s vividly conjure up the New York art scene immediately after the war, when the newly arrived Europeans met the Americans who had worked together in the Depression, their different traditions colliding and fusing as they walked the city, talked and worked together. Others, like those with Carl Andre, Cy Twombly, Alex Katz, and Jeff Koons, speak straight from today. No one but Sylvester could have produced this intricate collage, this chorus of voices that blend to create one of the most revealing and unusual histories of American art in the twentieth century.
https://www.amazon.com/Interviews-American-Artists-David-Sylvester/dp/0300092040/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(David Sylvester here muses on key artists of the twentiet...)
David Sylvester here muses on key artists of the twentieth century and their nineteenth-century forebears. In the process, he offers profound insights into their practice of art. Focusing on the spectator's instinctive emotional and physical response to paintings by such artists as Picasso, Matisse, de Kooning, Newman, and Warhol, Sylvester brings an inspiring sense of the relevance and importance of art to life. Added to this updated edition are essays on Pollock, Twombly, and Serra, among others.
https://www.amazon.com/About-Modern-Art-David-Sylvester/dp/0300092024
2001
David Sylvester was born on September 21, 1924 London, United Kingdom. He was a son of Philip Sylvester and Sybil Sylvester.
David Sylvester attended University College School.
Art critic David Sylvester, as he explains in the introduction to About Modern Art: Critical Essays, 1948-1996, started his career with the hope of becoming an artist. Soon, however, he realized that he lacked talent as a painter, so he decided instead to write about art. Knowing numerous painters and intellectuals of older generations soon allowed Sylvester to travel to Paris and get to know several of the artists who would later become subjects for his work as critic.
Sylvester also had a close interaction with Giacometti (1901-1966). Though he is also a painter — his portrait of Sylvester decorates the cover of the book — Giacometti is best remembered for his sculptures of extremely tall, thin, and delicate human figures, such as his Man Walking and Man Pointing. Sylvester curated two exhibits of the artist’s work in the 1950s and 1960s, and underwent some twenty sittings for his portrait; yet, he wrote in his preface to Looking at Giacometti (1994), with all that familiarity, it still took him forty years to produce the book. Some critics wrote that the resulting work suffered from its piecemeal construction.
He began reviewing Francis Bacon’s paintings in the late 1940s and soon became a valued friend of the artist. Sylvester was the original subject for what became the first painting in a series of eight ‘popes’ from 1953. By far the most significant collaboration between Bacon and Sylvester was the series of interviews first published in 1975, but conducted from 1962 to 1974. These have subsequently been revised and enhanced to include later interviews up until 1986.
During the 1950s, Sylvester worked with Henry Moore, Freud and Bacon but also supported Richard Hamilton and the other "Young Turks" of British Pop art. This led him to become a prominent media figure in the 1960s. During the 1960s and 1970s Sylvester occupied a number of roles at the Arts Council of Great Britain serving on advisory panels and on the main panel.
(Winner of a Venice Bienniale Golden Lion Award, Looking a...)
1994(The five volume work presents an authoritative survey of ...)
1992(David Sylvester here muses on key artists of the twentiet...)
2001(Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is widely acknowledged as one o...)
1997(David Sylvester has been called "the best living writer i...)
2001(A book on the works of Rene Magritte, the Belgian surreal...)
1992(This book consists art studies and biography.)
1980Alberto Giacometti was one of the strongest influences on David Sylvester.
David Sylvester was an expert and avid collector of oriental art, particularly Islamic carpets.
In 1950 David Sylvester was married Pamela Briddon. They had three daughters. The marriage was dissolved. He later had another daughters, Cecily Brown, with the English novelist Shena Mackay.