Sylvette David (also known as Lydia Corbett) was born in Paris in 1934. She was brought up on the Île du Levant, a small Mediterranean island near the French riviera. Sylvette David learnt to draw at home with her mother Honor David-Gell who had studied at the Académie Julian. Sylvette’s father Emmanuel David was a Paris art dealer. They separated when she was very young, and she and her brother were brought up by Honor, who left Paris for the South of France.
Between the wars the coast from Collioure to Saint-Tropez had already embodied a classical Arcady for painters. Picasso in his studio at the château Grimaldi had created art throughout the summer of 1946 culminating in painting La Joie de Vivre. Sylvette David has assimilated her own experience of the light of the Côte d’Azur, into her own paintings. -Lucien Berman
The Art of Sylvette David
Sylvette David’s art something new is brought into the world. Her art attests to being and becoming, the act of creation, from grief and wartime, the embrace of pain and with it the wisdom that comes from old age.
Now in her ninetieth year, the themes of the painter are still tidal; still ebb and flow between a familiaris (familiar spirit) and a habitat, which is accessed through a sunlit absence, an opening or path. The privileged point of access to a beach in childhood, or an opening of light and colour in painting share a communality of approach; in art and in childhood, a sense of place, as experienced on the island where all journeys were journeys out, and in their immediacies were the beginnings of all further knowledge. Sylvette was at one with the landscape, on an island paradise, where it was natural to be naked. Sylvette, (also known as Lydia Corbett), still experiences space from the perspective of childhood in her paintings. She paints what she feels with the phenomenological sense of space, how lived places co-existed and were embodied in her first circumambient island. As a child, Sylvette’s first desire to look, was either to the sea, or to a fragment of a shell. The ephemera of childhood were joyous but the tide wrack leaves no places for dwelling. And a sense of the unhomely, literally (unheimlich) is a theme in all her paintings of places. There is no parity between the sea and the land, just difference and distance. What begins as an adventure as a child, becomes an altered sense of consciousness a dream of being, or dérive in the art of her old age.
It seems that whilst innocence might be an aspect of the subject, Sylvette David’s paintings attest to her wisdom as an artist – an art that emanates from an intense emotional intelligence. In Sylvette David’s oil paintings, acrylics, and her watercolours, there is a gentleness that reveals; and her paintings are a combination of fragility and strength. They are primed for life. There is a deep seriousness in the work of Sylvette David. It is engendered from the sincerity that she brings to her art.
– Lucien Berman
Memories of Picasso and the inner life of objects:
The watercolours and oils of the past thirty years attest to a return to source – memories of Picasso, of the strange inner life of objects. Sylvette David recaptures Sylvette as a girl, the motifs of her art through a process of assimilation and reduction – a vase of flowers, an old kettle, a church, the horses, the hammocks, the dappled sunshine of Camaret in Provence and the Mediterranean Sea. In her luminous paths of painting and drawing, in the watercolours which reference English landscapes, her work is reminiscent of the visionary painters, in the tradition of William Blake and Stanley Spenser. For the oils, and other works on board, or canvas, if her paintings, at first glance, sometimes recall an assimilated presence of Piero della Francesca or Byzantium, or glimpses of Klimt, or Chagall, Marino Marini, it remains distinctly her own work and part of a live tradition in allegorical figures and motifs.
I have come to realise that in a way, as a point d’appui, Sylvette David’s recent oil paintings, in their verve, and colourful brightness, are also informed by Henri Matisse of the earlier Nice years, as much as by Picasso. The nymphs and fauns of Matisse’s paintings enter mythic time. Matisse’s paintings Luxe, Calme, Volupté (1904-5) and Le Bonheur de Vivre belong to the landscapes of the South of France. Sylvette David’s childhood was visually part of this classical pastoral. There are traces of her childhood in her painterly and aesthetic sensibilities, her brushstrokes have been shaped by the memory of light, and the way it travels though the water. This dipping into the water is a motif re-enacted in her aquarelle. She was happiest at the shore-line on the rocks, surveying the Mediterranean. This manifests in the spontaneity of the washes and mixes and the subtle plays of luminescence and the surface energies of her watercolours.
In Sylvette David’s Late oil paintings, provisional sketches in ink, and charcoal outlines are sketched in, then light and shade, and colour becomes form. This is an oscillation; between light and form, and form and memory. Sylvette David’s Late oil paintings are studies in immanence. What is striking is the range of Sylvette David’s works and their emotional and expressive depth. One could look at David’s work as atonal in its motifs, pushing the perception of the work down to the micrological level of motif and the transition. In relation to: whether Modernism is progressive; and art and freedom – Sylvette David’s reinvention of perception and representation of her own inner vision, is its own contribution to democratic value and emancipation. Her art, from the subtle to the expressionistic works on board and canvas, remain a force of protest, of the humane against the pressure of domineering institutions. Ultimately art which is modernist in its sources and leanings, is an appeal to shared human values, and is an act of faith in human intervention.
– Lucien Berman
Sylvette David and Pablo Picasso:
A year before Picasso had spoken to Sylvette, Picasso had watched her as silhouette and sometimes on the balcony, with a male figure through a window in an old pottery across from his studio in Vallauris. He was fascinated by her before they even met. Picasso internalised her as his muse, in drawings, and a series of lithographs of the artist and the model. Françoise Gilot became aware Picasso’s preoccupation with Sylvette in the spring of 1953. It would be a further year before Picasso asked Sylvette to model for him, the spring of 1954. The meeting would alter Sylvette’s life.
Sylvette David, for Picasso, was his last, unobtainable love. Sylvette David is a visionary artist, is no less visionary for her failing eyesight, as her subject is focussed on inner vision, inner presence.
The relationship between Picasso and Sylvette David is still alive in their work. Our understanding of Picasso’s great portraits of Sylvette, is enlivened and enriched by this exchange with the muse turned artist. This dialogue continues through time and art, where the restlessness of modernism is the abiding presence behind almost all her art of the last decade.
The recent Sylvette self-portraits, which refer back to 1954 and time spent with Picasso in Vallauris. These self-portraits are not a borrowing of his motifs. Sylvette being his muse, also shared, for a period of time, his artistic life. The recent self-portraits recall an earlier self that is still part of her life. They are a compliment to Picasso’s paintings made of Sylvette and continue a dialogue with Picasso. Sylvette David is revisiting the studio both for herself but as an act of completion.In Sylvette David’s artistic practise, beauty is an act of time, not a sensibility. Her self-portraits recalling her young self, have a gaze that is always elsewhere. The focus is elided to moments of being – as a mirror of consciousness. The self-portraits show and hide the self in perpetuity which both embraces her past. I believe her when she told me – that she paints her pain, it becomes a source of protection.
– Lucien Berman
Sylvette David as a visionary painter:
In the Western tradition of twentieth century figurative art, there are characteristics and attitudes that link scattered moments of time; the empirical stance, or observation. In the English tradition, there is the imaginative approach on one hand, and, the inclination towards the visionary. Sylvette David’s paintings reflect a tentative, resurgent anguish in the need to discover the essential connection between the human and the divine.
Whilst Sylvette David is a visionary painter, the starting point in Sylvette David’s work is often the attempt to find a still place from which to perceive. Her sense of place is balanced by an inner focus and serenity in the watercolours, and in her oils, and acrylics she returns to moments of being, and each time she returns there is an encounter with love, or loss, with a sense of happiness which was domesticity enlivened by friendship – or passion – for others, for beauty, for Picasso, and the other artists she met in her youth, or for her love of painting itself. Her painting has become a timeless aspect of her life. This gives her work an enduring quality.
Kandinsky sought to create art endowed with ‘inner sound’ his late work was alive to the sacred in motion. Matisse sought an equilibrium of colour and light which tended to the sacred. Many artists have had a covenant with the spiritual which culminates in trying to take back the forms and meanings that have been overlooked in the material world. Whilst ‘spiritual’ remains, for some, an old-fashioned word from a world of greater certainties, the underlying concern of Sylvette David’s art is about transcendence and revelation from within. Her work is not governed by a metaphysical grand plan, however individual paintings do embody both moments of vision and offer a sense of permanence, often out of the ephemeral. Her works will us to an abiding stillness, they seem to slow us down in our materialist world. They let us rediscover something elusive in ourselves, without a trace of insistence, an awareness which is otherwise lost.
Sylvette David’s oil paintings, acrylics and her watercolours, a subject emanates its auric presence and a property of stillness. Even work which appears at first glance to be of a reduced subject and simple often has within, unexpected detail, or expression, which creates a meditative balance. A dove for Sylvette David is all birds; a leaf is a whole forest, even when her works set out as abstractions; it is always in the direction of the world. The simplicity is not a poverty of spirit, it is about transformation.
For Sylvette David, there is no difference in her artistic work between painting and spiritual experience. Both exist– through acts of faith – whereby that which is human and ephemeral, is returned to some sense of the eternal. The works have an emotional scale and perspective but they are vignettes of otherness, and embody inner life, whether through small or grand design or through symbolism. The simplicity is itself beguiling, as it serves as a catalyst to enable us to look more closely at this fierce and beautiful world. Sylvette David’s art attests to the abiding questions about the nature and the process of painting, her preoccupations with the sensual side of life allows even the simplest of objects to become apprehended as art. Even in her most meditative works, there is an intense sense of joie de vivre in her paintings, which somehow manages to affect a transfiguration in the viewer. Her work is life-enriching, which in this troubled world, is a considerable achievement.
– Lucien Berman
