A man who asked the right questions

David Sylvester’s first ambition was to be a professional cricketer, and he possessed to the end that almost miraculous masculine capacity for total recall of notable prep-school innings ball by ball. Later he tried to be a painter, and then a jazz saxophonist. Later still, the cinema being another of his great passions, he worked with Stanley Kubrick on Lolita — but by this time he was well established as an art critic. He is perhaps most widely known for his invention of the term ‘Kitchen Sink School’ and for his interviews with Francis Bacon which became a source of inspiration for a whole generation of artists .

This posthumous collection of interviews made between 1962 and 2001, with three short essays, is largely devoted to artists, but also reflects its author’s love and knowledge of cinema, music and sport. There are interviews with Leonide Massine whom Sylvester, as a boy, had seen dancing at Covent Garden; with Ken Adams whose film sets, particularly for Dr Strangelove and the Bond films, he thought should be regarded as serious art; with the composer Harrison Birtwistle, who describes the last years of their friendship as ‘a sort of intellectual love-affair’; and with the former England cricket captain and professional psychoanalyst Michael Brearley.