About Modern Art

He makes us want to go and look for ourselves - not to see or feel as he sees or feels, but to return us to the richness of our own experience, our acts of looking, thinking and feeling. As much as anything else, he describes being there - which is, perhaps, Sylvester's greatest service to art of our time.

Adrian Serle, Guardian

Even at his funniest, he goes at the words with Flaubertian effort, and that effort becomes the conduit for accurate introspection. He is always clear, often racy, yet there is always the feeling that the words are wrung out of him...Responsiveness and its discussion becomes exemplary and life-enhancing in a wonderful shadowing of the way art itself is supposed to be.

Andrew Forge, Modern Painters

Everybody interested in the subject...will want this book

Martin Gayford, Sunday Telegraph

Sylvester is not only the foremost writer on art: he is also a marvellous prose stylist and an outstanding mind. Original, erudite, witty and moving

Cressida Connolly, Spectator

David Sylvester is in many ways the most distinguished critical writer Britain has produced since Roger Fry

Patrick Reyntiens, Tablet

Sylvester lists the qualities that make a painter great: "fearlessness; a profound originality, a total absorption in what obsesses him, and above all, a certain authority and gravity". All these apply in equal measure to himself, compounded with vast scholarship, wit and modesty

Elspeth Barker, Sunday Times

Sylvester's real achievement-consists of an almost unrivalled power to gaze, and to find language to express the rewards of intensive contemplation

Frank Kermode, London Review of Books