British Council

'In his fiftieth year', The Sunday Times announced in late 1952, 'Graham Sutherland enjoys an international reputation such as has not been accorded to an English artist since Constable.' Today, this sounds surprising: that year’s Biennale caught him as his career peaked, and divided itself between portraits of the powerful, and what Roger Berthoud called 'remarkable distillations of landscape.'

In a collection of his writings, Correspondences, Sutherland wrote that

the closeness of opposites in life has always fascinated me. That is to say the tension between opposites. The precarious balanced moment – the hairsbreadth between – beauty & ugliness – happiness & unhappiness – light & shadow.

This partly explains the early friendship he, a man who died happily married to his first girlfriend – the woman who had converted him to Roman Catholicism – enjoyed with Francis Bacon, a notorious atheist, and a promiscuous homosexual. The opposition extended to technique; where Bacon felt liberated by a rakehell youth and a lack of art-school training, Sutherland was disciplined by his training in engineering at a Derby railway works, and in etching at Goldsmith’s College.

There are two schools of thought on who copied who; William Boyd sees Biennale works like Gorse on a Sea Wall (1939) or Green Tree Form (1940) – 'twisted, tortured, organic form[s] set more or less centrally against bold opaque panels of colour' – as proof Sutherland was the influence rather than influenced. History tends see things the other way round, and as William Feaver points out, Bacon’s jibe 'such a petty pilferer […] she never had the nerve for grand larceny' ended up being the last word on the subject. By the 1960s, probably because of the confidence of his theft, Bacon looked like the original. Both figurative painters had been working at justifying their place of after photography.

In the 1930s, Sutherland was making a decent living from Samuel Palmer-ish, Romantic engravings of the English countryside, before 'providence in the form of the American crash' cut off his market, and he turned to painting. The earliest of the Biennale works, Red Tree (1936), was shown at the International Surrealist Exhibition the year it was finished. He hated his painting being called Surrealist, but liked the movement’s 'idea that there was worthy subject matter for painting in objects the painter would never have looked at before' – Red Tree was 'inspired by a piece of flotsam I saw washed up somewhere'. Surrealism taught Sutherland he could find forms in nature, and 'invent' from them.

His work process was a version of Wordsworth’s description of poetry: 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'. T. S. Eliot had influentially dismissed this old idea in 1919, but Sutherland was a 'neo-romantic', according to Berthoud. He would walk in the Pembrokeshire countryside until 'one juxtaposition of forms' leapt out at him with particular meaning, and then, he reflected.

The difficulty is to preserve the feelings of the first encounter – to realize that one must retain the freshness of instinct – to realize perhaps that what one has seen in a 'moment' – somehow by thinking and feeling, studying and restudying might become a work of art.

Therefore, in the studio one remembers: one’s encounters become redefined, paraphrased and changed into something new and different from that of the first encounter – yet the same.

This use of 'experience as well as observation' produced Biennale works like Green Tree Form; bits of landscape not abstracted, but changed by memory and emotion, the way photographed humans are changed in Bacon.

Work as an official War Artist sent him to Wales, London, Cornwall and Normandy – his first trip abroad – as 'a sort of journalist. I had to work quickly, and evolved new methods which enabled me to fulfil my contract, which was to deliver paintings every three months.' He never saw active service, but was once arrested for snooping around East End dockyards with a notebook, and, shortly before a 1944 commission to paint a crucifixion for St Matthew's Church in Northampton, sent a black-bound 'funeral book'. Compiled by the American military, it contained 'the most terrible photographs of Belsen, Auschwitz and Buchenwald'.

In them many of the tortured bodies looked like figures deposed from crosses. The whole idea of the depiction of Christ crucified became much more real to me after having seen this book and it seemed to be possible to do this subject again. In any case the continuing beastliness and cruelty of mankind, amounting at times to madness, seems eternal and classic.

Bacon’s response had been to lock Popes in the glass cages of Nuremburg war criminals; as a Catholic, Sutherland carried their guilt into his vision of nature, long after his retirement as War Artist. From the 1944 studies for Christ’s crown of thorns, he developed the trademark 'spikiness' of Biennale works like Thorn Tree (1945): religion underpinned even his 'distillations of landscape'.

That year, the Pavilion also presented a nine-man 'New Aspects of British Sculpture’, and Lilian Somerville, the Pavilion’s Commissioner, noted, 'even if the younger sculptors had not been influenced by Graham', 'they looked as if they had a good deal in common. Graham was all thorns and bristly things, and they were rather spiky too.' As what Herbert Read called the 'Geometry of Fear’, this 'spikiness' became the defining feature of a decade’s worth of British sculpture; but, like Bacon, it was more afraid of other humans and their Bomb than of God.

Although not Abstract, Sutherland’s 'distillations' or 'paraphrases' could be fairly obscure. 'In portrait painting' – unlike the obscured Thorn Heads (1946) – he explained that 'since the human head is obscure enough – I do not feel, at least for the moment, like making it more so.'

Bryan Roberston thought 'Sutherland’s 'practical driving edge' was behind his urge to tackle portraiture. Beginning with Somerset Maugham (1949), 'he wanted to do a job of work, portraiture was in decline and the issue was a challenge' – a challenge like Christ in Glory, the huge tapestry for the new Coventry Cathedral he began in 1952. Photography was responsible for the decline, and it also made his job more difficult when he started:

'people today – superficially at least – are much more aware of what they and others look like: or what they think they look like or ought to look like. I think it is true that only those totally without physical vanity, educated in painting, or with exceptionally good manners, can disguise their feelings of shock or even revulsion when they are confronted for the first time with a reasonably truthful painted image of themselves: there is a quilted atmosphere of silence as when it snows.'

With the help of the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook – whose 1952 Sutherland portrait hung alongside Maugham’s at Venice – he brought portraiture back into public discussion. Two years later, he was commissioned to paint Winston Churchill as an 84th birthday present from the state. Despite being a painter himself, and initially asking if he could paint Sutherland’s wife, Kathleen, Churchill could not disguise his 'shock or even revulsion', and either he or Mrs. Churchill destroyed the finished product. The Manchester Guardian’s Stephen Bone wrote

like a snapshot, this painting seems to record one fleeting moment; it is true that the snapshot almost always records some moment of no importance whatsoever, whereas this painting records a highly interesting and characteristic one, but the great portraits of the world seem less bound by a single glimpse, and, perhaps by being a little less true to the passing moment, become a little truer to the continuing man.

As a direct result, our abiding memories of him remain bowler-hatted, defiantly V-signing, and photographic. It made Bacon dismiss Sutherland’s portraits as 'coloured snaps', and Feaver call them 'Bacons gone wrong'. Looked at in this way, Churchill’s legs and chair fade out towards the bottom like the robes and thrones of the Screaming Popes, and the oak-panelling looks like Bacon’s tribunal cages hammered into a cross-shaped reminder of Sutherland’s religion. As a 1954 Times article pointed out, he had had 'the hardest of all his tasks: that of producing a first-hand account of the world’s most familiar face.'

Sutherland continued to be honoured after this, with the Order of Merit in 1960 – before Henry Moore –, an Oxford honorary degree, and, in 1974, he was the first artist to receive the Shakespeare Prize in Hamburg. A number of attempts have been made to revive Sutherland's reputation in Britain, in literature by William Boyd and Martin Hammer, and in exhibitions by the Dulwich Picture Gallery's 2005 retrospective. In Germany, and in Italy, the reputation established by the Biennale continues to this day.

Tom Overton, 2009.

Sources

Julian Andrews, ed., Graham Sutherland, Correspondences: Selected Writings on Art (Haverfordwest: The Graham and Kathleen Sutherland Foundation, 1982).

Roger Berthoud, Graham Sutherland: A Biography (London: Faber, 1982).

Roger Berthoud, 'Sutherland, Graham Vivian (1903–1980)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008), <http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk:80/view/article/31737>, accessed 5th December 2008.

Stephen Bone, 'Sutherland's Churchill', The Manchester Guardian, 4th December 1954.

William Boyd, 'The Primacy of the Line', in Graham Sutherland (London: Bernard Jacobson Gallery, 1993).

Kenneth Clark, 'Graham Sutherland', in The British Pavilion: Exhibition of works by Sutherland, Wadsworth et. al. [exh. cat.] (London: British Council, 1952).

William Feaver, 'Bacon and Sutherland: Not a matching pair' [Book Review], The Spectator, 21st May 2005.

John Hayes, Portraits by Graham Sutherland (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1977).

The Sunday Times, 5th December 1954; 23rd November 1952; 24th May 1953.