Books by David Sylvester
Interviews with American Artists
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.
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Looking Back at Francis Bacon
by David Sylvester, Francis Bacon
"Ninety-five percent of people are absolute fools, and they're bigger fools about painting than anything else. . . . Hardly anyone really feels about painting: they read things into it--even the most intelligent people--they think they understand it, but very, very few people are aesthetically touched by painting."--Francis Bacon Controversial in both life and art, Francis Bacon was one of the most important painters of the twentieth century. His monumental, unsettling images have an extraordinary power to disturb, shock, and haunt the spectator, "to unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently." Eminent writer and curator David Sylvester provides the definitive account of the career of an artist whose friend and collaborator he was for more than forty years. Drawing on his unparalleled personal knowledge of Bacon's inspirations and intentions, he first offers a critical overview of the development of Bacon's work from 1933 to the early 1990s, and then addresses its crucial aspects. Sylvester also reproduces previously unpublished extracts from his celebrated conversations with Bacon in which the artist speaks about himself, modern painters, and the art of the past. Finally, he gives a brief account of Bacon's life, correcting errors that elsewhere have been presented as facts. Accompanying the incisive and revealing text are reproductions of almost every Bacon work discussed, including twelve triptych fold-outs. The most complete work on Bacon yet, this book constitutes a portrait of one of the creative geniuses of our age by a writer of comparable distinction. 230 illustrations, 84 in color.
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Magritte
by David Sylvester, Marcel Paquet
The Belgian painter René Magritte (1898-1967) was one of the outstanding--and most enigmatic--figures of the Surrealist movement. Since the 1960s, his work has had an enormous and continuing influence, not only on art, but on culture at large. His unforgettable paintingspoetic and often puzzlinghave become part of our popular imagery. This magisterial volume by David Sylvester, the foremost expert on Magritte’s work--out of print for more than a decade--is available again to celebrate the opening of the new Magritte Museum in Brussels. Brought up to date by the museum's director, Michel Draguet, the book offers 40 chapters of critical insights and clues to Magritte's puzzles, and over 500 lush full-color illustrations, making it an uparalleled source for understanding and appreciating an enormously popular and remarkably creative artist.
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Magritte
by David Sylvester, Marcel Paquet
From men in bowler hats, floating in the sky, to a painting of a pipe above the caption "this is not a pipe", René Magritte (1898–1967) created an echo chamber of object and image, name and thing, reality and representation.
Like other Surrealist works, Magritte’s paintings combine a precise, mimetic technique with abnormal, alienating configurations which defy the laws of scale, logic, and science: a comb the size of a wardrobe, rocks that float in the sky, clouds that drift through an open door. The result is a direct yet disorientating realm, often witty, often unsettling, and always prompting us to look beyond the visible, to “what is hidden by what we see.”
This introductory book explores Magritte's vast repertoire of visual humor, paradox, and surprise which to this day makes us look and look again, not only at the painting, but at our sense of self and the world.
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Interviews with Francis Bacon
Nine interviews with Francis Bacon spanning over twenty years from 1962 to 1986 which give invaluable insight into the creative mind of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists
Since its first publication, this book―with its subsequent revised and augmented editions―has been considered a classic of its kind. As a discussion of the problems of making art it has been widely influential, not only among artists but among writers and musicians. It has also been seen as the most revealing portrait that exists of one of the most singular artistic personalities of our time.
Bacon’s obsessive thinking about how to remake the human form in paint finds unique expression in his encounters with the distinguished art writer David Sylvester over a period of twenty-five years. In these masterfully and creatively reconstructed interviews, Sylvester provided unparalleled access to the thought, work, and life of one of the creative geniuses of the twentieth century. 146 illustrations
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