Graham Vivian Sutherland

Born London, 24 Aug 1903; died London, 17 Feb 1980.

English painter and printmaker. He studied at Goldsmith’s College of Art in London (1921–6) and began his career as a printmaker, producing small, poetic, densely worked etchings of rural England, thatched cottages and fields with stooks of corn (e.g. Pecken Wood, 1925; London, Tate), influenced by the early etchings of Samuel Palmer. Although he gave up etching soon after the collapse of the market for this work in 1930 and turned to painting, he did not begin to find his way as a painter until 1934, when he made his first visit to Pembrokeshire (now Dyfed), Wales. During the difficult transitional period he supported himself partly by designing posters, china, glass and other forms of applied art.

The bareness of the landscape of west Pembrokeshire around St David’s, which was a revelation to him and a source of repeated inspiration, made the production of finished works of art en plein air difficult, and Sutherland began to make drawings and watercolours in a sketchbook, which he could work up in his studio into paintings such as Entrance to Lane (1939; London, Tate). He became fascinated by objets trouvés such as root forms and fragments of thorn bushes that demonstrated the principles of organic growth: in Green Tree Form: Interior of Woods (1940; London, Tate) and related works he isolated them from their surroundings and presented them close up, sometimes in violent foreshortening, so that they became mysterious and threatening ‘presences’. Not only did the objects take on a metamorphic character, with suggestions of animal or human forms, but their dramatic impact was enhanced by rich, emotive colour.

From 1940 to 1945 Sutherland was employed as an Official War Artist to make depictions, mainly drawings, of bomb damage in South Wales and London, blast furnaces, tin mining in Cornwall, limestone quarrying, opencast coal mining and finally, after the liberation of France, views of the bomb damage done by the RAF to railway marshalling yards and flying bomb depots. His pictures of air-raid devastation in London, showing dramatically lit shattered buildings under an oppressive black sky, such as Devastation—City—Fallen Lift Shaft (chalk and gouache, 1941; London, Imp. War Mus.), are among the most vivid and memorable records of the Blitz. In 1946 Sutherland painted a large Crucifixion for the church of St Matthew, Northampton, inspired partly by the Crucifixions of Grünewald and partly by photographs of the victims of the German death camps. It was both his first life-size representation of the human figure and the first of several paintings on religious themes, and it was preceded by a series of studies of thorn trees and thorn heads suggested by the image of the crown of thorns (e.g. Thorn Trees, 1946; Buffalo, NY, Albright–Knox A.G.).

Sutherland visited the south of France for the first time in 1947 and from then on spent part of each year there, in 1955 buying a house at Menton which became his principal home. This led to a preoccupation with Mediterranean motifs such as vine pergolas and palm palisades, for instance in Large Vine Pergola (1948; Ottawa, N.G.), and the use of more brilliant colours, including pinks, yellows and pale blues, to capture the intense glow of the southern light. From 1949 to 1957 he worked on a series of ‘standing forms’ in which shapes developed from fragments of roots, and trees were placed upright, sometimes two or three in a row, against a background such as a hedge; each form was intended to evoke the presence of a human figure. A major early example of this series is Standing Form against Hedge (1950; AC Eng). His portrait of Somerset Maugham (1949; London, Tate), painted as an experiment, received immediate acclaim and led to a highly successful parallel career as a portrait painter. His commissions for portraits included those of Sir Winston Churchill (1954; destr.), Princess Gourielli (Helena Rubinstein) (1957; Fredericton, NB, Beaverbrook A.G.) and Konrad Adenauer (1963; Ria Reiners-Adenauer priv. col., see Berthoud, pl. 60). The portraits were painted from drawings and occasionally oil sketches made directly from the sitters and, although often unconventional in presentation (Churchill’s portrait was intensely disliked by the sitter and was destroyed by Lady Churchill), were striking likenesses without the degree of paraphrase of his works from nature.

Much of Sutherland’s time from c. 1955 until the end of 1961 was spent designing a huge tapestry of Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph (21.94×11.58 m; see Tapestry, colour pl. IV, fig.) for the new Coventry Cathedral designed by Basil Spence. The tapestry shows the hieratic seated figure of Christ surrounded by a mandorla and by the emblems of the Evangelists and was based mainly on Byzantine prototypes; it was woven from his cartoon, with the aid of photographic blow-ups, by Pinton Frères of Felletin, near Aubusson. Sutherland’s paintings of the late 1950s and the early 1960s showed a move towards a more traditional approach to nature and included a series of paintings of birds and animals—cicadas, monkeys, rams, herons, toads, bats and so on, for instance Dark Entrance (1959; Washington, DC, Phillips Col.). This theme was brought to a conclusion in the suite of colour lithographs A Bestiary and some Correspondences (1967–8). There were also such subjects as fountains, mysterious shadowy paths, fusions of plant and machine forms, and two large paintings of a vast, hangar-like interior in Venice.

In 1967 Sutherland returned to Pembrokeshire for the first time for over 20 years and found to his surprise that the landscape there had just as much fascination for him as ever. As a result, almost all his nature paintings from then on were based once again on Pembrokeshire themes, such as the extraordinary twisted oaks along the banks of the River Cleddau at Picton; sometimes motifs taken from two or more areas miles apart were combined in the same work. Many of these paintings were much larger than the early Pembrokeshire works and simpler and almost geometrical in composition, with the forms in a state of harmonious balance and with a play of light and shade. As a token of gratitude to Pembrokeshire and the people of Wales for what they had given him, he founded a museum of his own work at Picton Castle, which was opened in 1976. His last works included two series of aquatints, The Bees (1976–7; see 1977 Marlborough exh. cat.), with studies of the life cycle of bees, and Apollinaire: Le Bestiaire ou cortège d’Orphée (1978–9), with small images on themes of animals and mythology, in which he was exploring new subjects and opening up new possibilities.

Ronald Alley. "Sutherland, Graham." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T082470 (accessed May 2, 2012).