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James Hyman’s The Battle for Realism shows that the truth about
post war art in Britain was much more complex — and far more
interesting. The ‘battle’ was never between realism and
abstraction — always a cliché for artists anyway —
but between different kinds of figurative art, and British artists
(for ‘British’ read English) searching for the very soul
of realism itself.
This is how the ‘battle’ was perceived by the ‘generals’,
the critics David Sylvester and John Berger, at the head of their
opposing factions. In Hyman’s account, David Sylvester represents
the ‘realism of the imagination’, a liberal form of Modernist
realism, based on Bacon, Giacometti and Existentialism and his early
formalist interpretation of Klee. John Berger, the independent Marxist
but non-Party member, represents variations on social and Socialist
realism characterised by the ‘Kitchen Sink’ painters Bratby,
Greaves, Middleditch and Smith, who exhibited at the Beaux Arts
Gallery in the mid-1950s. Both critics fed off each other in their
prescription for the future of realism, and shared common differences
in their opposition to the art of their time. Both objected to most
current French and American art, but for different reasons. Sylvester
because he believed Paris-based art was played out (he initially
thought that Dubuffet was a ‘con’) and American art because
it was unoriginal and overdependent on its European sources. For
Berger, both American and European modernism contained the seeds
of decadence, had long forgotten its social responsibilities and
had lost touch with its audience. The threat to freedom by the Cold
War made the social and political responsibilities of the post war
artist more onerous than they had ever been before. ‘In a period
of cultural disintegration’, or ‘the decadence of the
cultural situation’, are typical phrases Berger used to preface
his art criticism in the Fifties. Yet art in post war Britain was
not all as grey and monochrome as it is sometimes represented, which
will have come as a pleasant surprise to anyone who visited ‘Transition;
the London Art Scene in the Fifties’, the exhibition curated
by Martin Harrison at the Barbican Gallery, in which most of Berger’s
and Sylvester’s foot soldiers are on parade, together with
their commissioned officers.
The idea of a ‘School of London’, as the American Kitaj
liked to think of his English artist friends in 1976, or as a commercial
ploy later used by exhibitions and galleries such as the Marlborough,
was far away in the future. Yet as early as 1948, at a critical
moment after the war when Paris is supposed to have been seceding
its role as the world’s art capital to New York, Sylvester
was writing about a ‘School of London’, which consisted
of the pre-war generation of Moore, Nicholson, Hepworth and Lowry;
as well as the group of Sylvester’s artist friends of his own
generation who were then living in Paris, which included Bill Gear,
Raymond Mason and Eduardo Paolozzi. After the war there were as
many sorts of figurative art in London as there were painters, all
ostensibly realists: a faction descended from Whistler and Sickert;
the still-smouldering embers of Wyndham Lewis’s critical intelligence.
The rival sensibilities of the Royal College and the Slade included
survivors of the Euston Road School, Coldstream; neglected artists
like Bomberg, with their coterie of followers; ‘foreigners’
like Auerbach and Kossoff, both critically neglected; and Bacon
and Lucian Freud, then as unknown nationally and internationally
as the rest. All these and many more, before American art was ever
considered an aesthetic or a political issue, pursued variations
on European realist styles of painting, capable of ideological and
aesthetic grading from strict Party Socialist realism of the Stalinist
sort, down to the tamest of figurative painting, in which, as in
a Lowry, the cloth caps and even the industrial landscape could
be more than a decade out of date. By unearthing long-forgotten
periodicals, exhibitions obscure even when they were held, and reviews
unread since the day of publication, together with an extensive
correspondence with the artists concerned, Hyman is particularly
good at demonstrating these various styles, their origins in the
Thirties, their ideological shading, and how they became known to
Berger and his English troops. Also documented is the importance
of historians and theorists such as Antal and Klingender for the
revival of interest in illustration and the 18th century Hogarth,
as exemplified in the work and Communist Party campaigning of his
modern realist namesake Paul Hogarth. Of the European schools, it
was the Italian, and in particular Guttuso, who featured most prominently
in Berger’s pantheon, and whose painting came closest to meeting
his criteria for realism, exemplified in the pictures of Ayrton,
Greaves, de Francia and Minton, as well as the Kitchen Sink painters.
Clearly, there never was a cohesive group of realists with a programme
or manifesto. It’s true that the Kitchen Sink realists briefly
held the stage, and that it was Sylvester, not Berger, who gave
them their name. As artists they were more like rival individuals.
The group was the invention of the British Council for the Venice
Biennial of 1956, and afterwards fell apart to go its separate ways.
In the 1950s the British Council was in search of a successor to
Henry Moore to tour and show, for Moore was well on his way to becoming
a national treasure, and no longer an inspiration for the younger
generation. According to Berger, when he reviewed an exhibition
of Moore, arguing that it revealed a falling-off from his earlier
achievements, the British Council telephoned the artist ‘to
apologise for such a regrettable thing having occurred in London’
(Permanent Red, 2nd edn. Methuen, 1969). What chance, then,
for a flaky gay Irish artist of irregular personal habits with aspirations
to the Grand Manner? The historiography of Francis Bacon’s
rise to critical prominence, and Sylvester’s role in promoting
him, is the most fascinating theme of Hyman’s book.
In the last century the art critic became increasingly influential
in establishing art’s importance; but its importance... for
what? Its importance for dealers and entrepreneurs would be the
answer today. But at the end of the last century but one, the influential
idea Oscar Wilde promoted was that criticism could be as creative
as art itself and share the same muse. Paradoxically, it was a painter
who was responsible for originating the idea. It was conceived by
Wilde in response to Whistler’s taunts that Wilde had plagiarised
his theory of art. Sylvester may have wanted as much for his own
criticism as Wilde did, for his cut-and-paste interviews with Bacon
are as much his own creation, as his subject’s, if not more.
But in his published writings Sylvester tacitly accepted Sickert’s
dictum that a painter’s reputation could not be made by writers
but only by other painters. Privately, like Whistler (from whom
Sickert got the idea), Sylvester must have known this was only partly
true. There is a passage towards the end of Sylvester’s transparently
self-justificatory introduction to his own volume of collected art
criticism about the need for the critic to square up to the reputation
of Picasso, in which he speaks of ‘those of us who are not
involved in the life-and-death struggle of the game of art but only
in the sham heroics of the game of criticism’. In another passage
in the same introduction, he states that the ‘attraction of
serving on committees is that one can influence events — the
purchase of works, the choice of artists for exhibition — far
more than one can by writing in the press’ (About Modern
Art, Chatto and Windus, 1996). What he is really saying is that
bodies which spend your money and mine, like the Arts and British
Councils, and galleries like the Tate, will always need critics
like himself to help them endorse decisions taken in private, which
they can afterwards broadcast and write about in public. Some game.
Sylvester played the game with increasing influence for nearly
half a century. Part-critic, part-salesman of expensive carpets
— and Bacons — hopefully the forthcoming catalogue raisonné
of Bacon's paintings will tell us more; for a time he shared a house
with the artist. His writings on British art far outweigh in quantity
what he wrote about American and European art, but the omission
of so many of them from his collected criticism gives the misleading
impression that the quota was equal. ‘I published at least
a dozen eulogies of Bacon between 1950 and 1957,’ Sylvester
wrote in 1996. ‘Though they include well-turned phrases...
they are all somewhat spoilt by portentous rhetoric (which is why
only one of them is reprinted here).’ The achievement of James
Hyman is to have disinterred this rhetoric and deconstructed its
code to reveal the Brit Modernist project of the Fifties for what
it was, aesthetic and ideological warts and all.
But this aspect of the book should also come with an art-historical
health warning. For the critically unwary, Hyman too often gives
the misleading impression that Sylvester’s ideas were original
and his own, whereas they were invariably derived directly from
the work and ideas of his artist friends. Take, for instance, his
so-called theory of ‘afocalism’, as developed in the two
early essays of 1948 and 1950, and on which so much of his early
formalist thinking was based. There is nothing in either essay about
the viewer's relationship with the multifocus perspective of late
Klee which could not be found in Bill Gear’s paintings: an
interest shared also by William Turnbull during this period, as
well as by Alan Davie, and similarly evident in their work. Sylvester
knew all three. Other British artists also living in Paris, such
as Raymond Mason, were already on close terms with Sartre and his
circle and had absorbed the implications of Existentialism, upon
which Sylvester drew heavily on his return to London. And it was
Paolozzi whom Sylvester later acknowledged as being the first to
draw his attention to Giacometti; ‘he educated me’ Sylvester
said publicly about Paolozi’s role in his own appreciation
of Giacometti. As with Giacometti, Paolozzi also knew Bacon before
Sylvester did, and Sylvester’s account of Bacon’s use
of news photographs and film stills owes a lot to the Independent
Group, and in particular Paolozzi, for whom the mass media has always
been a ‘metaphor’ for something else. This became Sylvester’s
most favoured discourse for presenting Bacon. In ‘Transition’
there is a fascinating display case showing the press cuttings Sylvester
used for a lecture about ‘New Realism’ given at the Royal
College of Art in 1952. They consist of the front page of the Daily
Express for 4 October 1952, with the first pictures of the atom
bomb exploding, the new Queen at the funeral of George VI, and images
of Lord Beaverbrook from a television transmission.
The Battle for Realism claims Sylvester as the master of
spin. Sylvester worked on the catalogue raisonné of Henry
Moore before dumping Moore for Bacon in 1952; he then skilfully
airbrushed out references to Bacon’s past affiliations to old-fashioned
styles, such as neo-Romanticism and surrealism. There followed the
not-so-subtle elbowing-aside of the rival claimant Sutherland, once
though Bacon’s rival, to make space for the artist-genius now
based on the example of Picasso. Most interesting of all is the
way in which Bacon’s war and Holocaust source material, including
specific press photographs and film stills of Hitler, Goebbels and
so on, cited by Bacon’s critics as evidence for his cruelty
and violence, were edited out in Sylvester’s account to become
generalised ‘metaphors of humanity’, so making the art
appear enlightened and humane. Although not directly in the pay
of the CIA, Sylvester wrote early warnings about the Stalinist ‘Big
Brother’ for Stephen Spender’s Encounter magazine,
which itself was on the payroll There is a persuasive comparison
in The Battle for Realism between a Bacon ‘Pope’
painting, one hand tied to the throne, and a still from the 1954
BBC TV production of Nineteen-Eighty Four, which shows Winston
Smith constrained with handcuffs to a metal frame, faced by his
interrogator O’Brien. According to Hyman, Sylvester even wrote
an essay on the BBC adaptation of Nineteen-Eighty Four, which
includes the description of a state official putting a syringe needle
into Smith's arm, a scene which did not appear in the TV version.
The aesthetic significance, or otherwise, of swastikas and syringes
in Bacon’s painting could do with some revision.
For reasons of world politics, Berger’s project as an art
critic came to an end at about the same time as that of Sylvester
got a new lease of life. In his introduction to the second edition
of Permanent Red, Berger dates this moment to the period,
after Hungary and the Cuban Revolution, when the struggle to achieve
parity in nuclear arms between East and West was no longer a primary
political factor. ‘The raison d’être of polarized
dogmatism had collapsed... In the early 1950s the USSR represented,
despite all its deformations, a great part of the force of the socialist
challenge to capitalism. It no longer does,’ Berger wrote in
1968. A wonderfully telling detail here is of John Bratby, flushed
with acclaim in 1958 from the paintings of Alec Guinness (aka Gully
Jimson) for the film The Horse’s Mouth; he is found
asking Helen Lessore of the Beaux Arts Gallery for two exhibitions
a year and £1,500. The implication is that this was way over-the-top,
but in a good year Bacon probably got handouts well approaching
this from Erica Brausen of the Hanover, and according to Michael
Peppiatt, when Bacon left the Hanover in 1958 for the Marlborough
with gambling debts of £5,000, £1,242 was ‘roughly the equivalent’
of what Bacon could expect to receive from the contents of a new
show (Francis Bacon, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996).
Sylvester described himself as initially ‘blinded by an old-fashioned
anti-Americanism’. When Clement Greenberg invited him to review
modern American art at the Venice Biennial for The Nation
in 1950, he burnt his bridges by condemning it. He was not really
a convert to American modernism until 1956. There followed a wobbly
period of a few years when Sylvester himself also seems to have
had doubts about Bacon, particularly after Bacon’s dramatic
change of style in his Hanover Gallery exhibition of 1957, exemplified
by the de Kooning-like colour and slapdash drawing of the outdoors
‘Van Gogh’ series. Sylvester also had the trans-Atlantic
urban modernism of the Independent Group to contend with, as well
as Lawrence Alloway snapping at his heels (his ‘friend and
enemy’ as he called him in an essay on Caro in 1986). But by
1960, on a US State Department-funded visit to New York, Sylvester
had met de Kooning and Harold Rosenberg, who took him to the Cedar
Tavern, and with Kline, Guston and David Smith, they ‘drank
till 5 am’. In spite of all this bonhomie, he was never really
a buddy for Clem.
In ‘Transition’ there is a picture of which Berger and
Sylvester might have both approved. Albert Herbert’s ‘Children
Playing’ was painted, according to the artist, after hearing
Sylvester give his lecture on ‘New Realism’ at the Royal
College of Art in 1952. ‘Art,’ Sylvester argued, ‘must
show that experiences are fleeting, that every experience dissolves
into the next [and] must be images in which the observer participates.’
The subject of Herbert’s picture, a little girl pirouetting
prettily in a derelict street, was identical with what Nigel Henderson
was then photographing in the East End; but the painting is technically
indistinguishable from anything any follower of Whistler or Sickert
might have made fifty years before.
In conclusion it must be said that British art in the Fifties would
not have been fundamentally different had Sylvester and Berger not
been around to write about it; which is to be expected and as it
should be. While there is nothing in exhibition or book to suggest
otherwise, in the last room of ‘Transition’ (as a coda
to the exhibition) is Anthony Caro’s dark brown-painted steel
sculpture ‘Twenty-Four Hours’ (1960), a work which inaugurated
a new relationship between art and criticism, and one in which Clement
Greenberg, and not Sylvester, would play the dominant role. Nothing
could suggest more eloquently the shift in sensibility towards America
— and the increasing power of art criticism to influence art
— which was to characterise the British art of the following
decade. The critical intelligence in which Berger still believed
was never more needed than it was then. ‘Realism,’ Berger
wrote, ‘is not a method but an attitude of mind... The realist
always starts from the particular and from the beginning tries to
deduce a typical truth.’ Unfortunately, but as usual on these
occasions, sculpture makes no more than a token appearance in either
exhibition and book. It is certainly very odd that the subject of
‘realism’, which can never be fully understood in any
century without the third dimension, should have been attempted
here without it; especially since no book or exhibition purporting
to analyse the realist art of this particular period with any authority
could possibly do so without devoting a chapter or a room to the
sculpture of Raymond Mason (of which a small display has recently
been on exhibition at Tate Britain). On exhibition at Tate Modern
at present is a selection of works by artists Sylvester admired
and wrote about. Fortunately, it is not too late for John Berger
to curate an exhibition of his choice in his lifetime. He should
be asked to do so without delay.
References
Martin Harrison. Transition, the London art scene in the Fifties.
London: Merrell in association with Barbican Art Galleries, 2002.
ISBN 1 85894 172 5 (hardback).
ISBN 1 85894 173 3 (paperback).
James Hyman. The battle for realism: figurative art in Britain
during the Cold War 1945—1960. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2001.
ISBN 0-300-09089-7.
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