About Modern Art: Critical Essays 1948-1997.

The key to a critic's method sometimes comes in a confession of failure. David Sylvester's frank autobiographical introduction to About Modern Art mentions a number of "failures" - missed opportunities, silences. The most ironic may have been his problem with American Minimalism: "I felt at home with it, felt I might have invented it. Yet I have totally failed to write about it." Because Sylvester's oeuvre has such remarkable breadth and range, because it passes so gracefully from the liberated painterly forms of Francis Bacon or Willem de Kooning to the spare, structured presentations of Gilbert and George or Robert Morris, his incapacity with regard to Minimalism is curious.

In fact, many of the critic's insights suggest that he's always had an appreciation, even an instinct, for Minimalism's principles. Younger artists of the 1960s, he writes in 1994, believed not only that "less is more," but also that "less intervention is more: they set things in motion and then let them alone" - here, a sense of the Minimalist commitment to process appears. Much earlier, in 1964, Sylvester wrote of Ad Reinhardt as if he (Reinhardt, but also Sylvester himself as the proper kind of viewer) were "inventing" Minimalism: "Reinhardt presents the spectator with an artifact from which he'll get nothing unless he's prepared to look really hard at something outside himself" - here, the Minimalist object emerges.

By approving of Reinhardt's idiosyncrasy (as the Abstract Expressionist who wasn't), Sylvester marks the sensibility of his own generation, those for whom professional life began with the Atomic Age in the late 1940s - in terms of art, not the time of the Abstract Expressionists, but of Neo-Dada or Pop. To be sure, the majority of Sylvester's essays have explored earlier figures. Many know him for his lasting sensitivity to European Modernism of a now unfashionable expressionist, existentialist bent - the likes of Soutine or Giacometti. And he remains one of the great critics of the New York School, not only for his reviews and commentaries but also for having conducted extraordinarily searching interviews of Barnett Newman, de Kooning, and others.

Yet the entirety of Sylvester's practice might be considered as preparation for Minimalism. The frame established by an isolated act of viewing - without history, without society - sets the interpreter's immediate limits. In this respect, Sylvester often sounds like a Greenbergian Modernist, but there's a great difference. Clement Greenberg described artworks as external objects in possession of internal properties; Sylvester takes a phenomenological approach, relating the object to his bodily experience as a viewer and as a surrogate for all viewers, not just those with "taste." In early essays on Klee (1948, 1950) he wrote: "The relationship between the picture and yourself is reciprocal ... The picture finds its focus in [you]."

Materiality is Sylvester's primary interest. His appreciation of Frank Auerbach, for example, hinges on an opposition between that painter's material pursuit of his model's image and Jean Dubuffet's pursuit of pure matter. The essay dates from 1961, at the then-invisible shift of radical abstraction from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism. Although Dubuffet might seem the more logical inspiration, it's through his response to Auerbach that Sylvester appears (once again) to be "inventing" Minimalism: "It's often lamented that there isn't enough of nature in the art of today, that paintings have become ends in themselves ... I believe that what is wanting is not reference to nature but a more firmly focused reference ... [The painter should concentrate] all the richness and variety of his perceptions of some particular thing - his visual perceptions, his tactile perceptions, his perceptions from close to and from far away, his perceptions when he is standing still and when he is on the move, the changes in his perceptions and the play of memory upon them, in short the total experience of an object."

If I take the liberty of understanding that an "object" of sensory perception can be the very thing an artist creates as much as what that thing depicts, and if I take Sylvester's words at their most literal, a telling transformation occurs - the critic's paean to Auerbach's images becomes a description of Minimalism in the making. The shift from immaterial image to material object always remained something Sylvester could deftly contemplate. Years later, to cite only one instance, he remarked on John Cage's "concentrated awareness of the exact dimensions of the page."

So why couldn't, why can't, Sylvester write successfully about Minimalism actually encountered? Because he's committed to describing and interpreting experience itself, rather than principles that might be illustrated by it. His self-proclaimed Minimalist "failure" is most poignant in the case of Fred Sandback: "[He] can transfix and subjugate me with a length of twine strung across a corner of a room, but I have not found a way to write about the experience." A lesser critic would respond to Sandback's twine with a string of words, preferably including some fashionable allusion to theory, but Sylvester's responsive, experiential criticism is committed to letting the object lead. He keeps his writing taut, set to a standard of conciseness and self-containment worthy of Modernist art. And worthy, too, of Minimalist art, but, by his own estimation, inadequate to it.

Sylvester needs to be read carefully, because there's so little pretense in his language that he can be mistaken for a lesser talent. His pithy statements often seem more descriptive than analytical, but, like successful pictorial abstractions, they have a subtle way of turning themselves into arguments, complete with a sense of inevitability. I don't claim that this effect comes about all the time, not even in the carefully edited and somewhat obsessively rewritten selections Sylvester is offering to posterity, but the fact that it happens even occasionally sets him apart.

Sometimes a final, dramatic sentence causes the reader to reflect back on all that has preceded it, as in Sylvester's appreciation of Newman's first foray into lithography. Sylvester speculates that the painter's compositional choices in the new medium were guided by his understanding of the most basic ways of converting a surface into a picture. Newman recognized the materiality of the pictorial ground, the oppositional graphic values that articulate it, and the artistic process of establishing those values. If this begins to sound like a theory, Sylvester's final sentence reverses the priority that most critics would give to such intellectual speculation and puts the emphasis back on sensory experience: "What I know is that when I stand and look at [Newman's lithograph] the whole of art is there." Lesson: the "whole of art" can be found wherever pictorial principles are freely engaged. Further: this "principle" must itself be recognized anew in every painting through an engaged response, not as a principle but as the specific experience of that work alone. This is Newman's version of "less is more," his expansive "Minimalism."

The pitfall of an experiential critic like Sylvester is habit, predilection. Habits close what experience would open. Sylvester has a very marked habit, one that pushes his analysis along, but also weighs upon it: he compares relentlessly. Jasper Johns viewed in 1963 shows similarities to Chardin and Seurat; viewed in 1997, he resembles Cezanne, Rembrandt, and Braque. Sylvester usually avoids claiming that artists are conscious of such relationships even as he announces their ineluctability: "[Johns'] Watchman is clearly, knowingly or not - Johns tells me not - a remake of [Rembrandt's] Descent from the Cross." This kind of comparison would never work on Sandback.

Perhaps it was Sylvester's tendency to compare and find precedent that irritated Richard Long enough to refuse an essay commissioned horn the critic in 1994. (Sylvester, interestingly, figured Long's practices and visual effects through Johns as well as Henry Moore and Caspar David Friedrich.) Later, Sylvester published the essay independently, making public acknowledgment of Long's disapproval. Uncharacteristically, the piece includes little direct observation and commentary on the physical actions and material objects of Long's art, except to point out certain inconsistencies. By contrast, on the occasion of Richard Serra's "Weight and Measure" exhibition in 1992, Sylvester offers an extensive, compelling analysis of his own sensations and movements through the space Serra manipulated. Both essays, on Serra and on Long, are true to Sylvester's method: it's as if the critic discovered that he had a great deal of memorable experience in the one instance, little in the other. This difference sets the tone for the two accounts, which have equal merit as aesthetic evaluation; Sylvester's experiential criticism is nothing if not honest. Theory and even principle waver. Experience sticks to its object.

Richard Shiff is Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and director of the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin.