Art in the flesh

David Sylvester (1924-2001) is one of the leading art historians, British critics and curators of the second half of the 20th century century. In addition to the exceptional acuity of his analyses of the works of artists who have marked the London art scene since the Second World War worldwide, he is one of the first in Europe to have grasped the importance and the scope of the artistic renewal carried out across the Atlantic by the representatives of abstract expressionism and their descendants. This gaze turned towards America did not prevent him from paying attention throughout his life very lively to the artists of the old continent, attention nourished on the one hand by a deep knowledge of the pioneers of modernism and, on the other hand, a link privileged in Paris, where he has continued to return since the end of the 1940s. Despite this proximity and his attachment to France, his prolific work and very widely commented on in Anglo-Saxon academic circles is only little, and very partially, known to the French-speaking readership. This work aims to fill this gap by offering a corpus of critical texts and interviews of artists that offers a retrospective look at how Sylvester looked at, thought about and wrote about 20th century art. The choice of texts takes up the milestones that Sylvester himself had chosen for the exhibition designed with Nicholas Serota at the very end of his life and presented at the Tate Modern, alas at posthumously, in 2002. These translated and commented texts are accompanied essays by Yve-Alain Bois, Nicholas Serota, Fabrice Hergott, Sarah Whitfield and Jean Frémon on the place of Sylvester's work in the history of art in the 20th century.